Topic: News

Microsoft has said it has "no plans" to add HD DVD optical disc technology to its Xbox 360 console.

The Japan Recording-Media Industries Association (JRIA) predicts that 2006 global demand for blank DVD discs (+R, -R, +RW, and -RW) will grow 41% to 5.541 billion discs in 2006.

Microsoft released the v1.11 of its malicious software removal tool, which removes Sony BMG's copy protection sceme found on some of the company's music CDs.

Toshiba today blamed the brains behind the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) for any delay it may experience shipping HD DVD drives and players into the Japanese market this year.

TDK has begun sampling recordable and rewriteable Blu-ray Discs that don't need to be kept in cartridges, the company said today.

TCL, a large 3C manufacturer in China, has decided to give up its original planned expansion of production capacity for DVD+R/-R discs from an initial six production lines to a total of 100 lines, according to suppliers of polycarbonate (PC) in Taiwan.

A coding group named Pi claims that it has managed to decode the DVD file system used by the popular Xbox 360 gaming console.

Taiwanese manufacturers of DVD players have seen increasing OEM/ODM orders but are not necessarily willing to take these orders because the heavy burden of royalty fees makes such production profitless, according to industry sources.

DivX released DivX 6 for Mac, the company's digital media software suite that lets Mac users create and play compressed DivX videos.

A Microsoft investigation into the sale of counterfeit software on eBay has led to the closure of an online operation responsible for the sale of over £3 million worth of fake Microsoft software.

Resident DVD supremo Flash has an ongoing campaign to find the best discs in the 16x market. In this review he analyses 2 very popular mid-range discs from RiDisc - their Silver and White Printable DVD-R. If you are still looking to fill those Christmas stockings then these discs score highly for being good value for money. You can find the review here.

The developer of a song-lyric search utility has been forced to kill the application after being threatened with legal action by UK music publishing giant Warner/Chappell.

A reader from Extremetech went beyond his call of duty and dug to find out why Intel processors 'suck' so much in games when compared to AMD - a widely held view. He went into reverse engineering Battlefield 2 and much more.

As shortages abound, suppliers of microsoft's super-soaraway Xbox 360 are making cash on the side by taking pre-ordered products off the shelves and flogging them at inflated prices on ebay.

For those of you with money to burn we have a wee Christmas tip for you - Meridian Audio, based in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, manufactures what it believes is the world's most expensive DVD playback machine.

Panasonic has modified its existing pilot production line for single-layer Blu-ray Discs, called BD-ROM, so that it is able to replicate dual-layer BD-ROM discs with 50 gigabytes (GB) of storage capacity.

Movie sales on DVD are likely nearing their peak worldwide as more people look to computer downloads and video-on-demand to watch their favorite programming, according to a report.

The term 'podcast' has been declared Word of the Year by the New Oxford American Dictionary. The term is defined as "a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the internet for downloading to a personal audio player".

Press Release: Sony's forthcoming VRD-MC1 DVD recorder allows burning your home videos and photos directly onto DVD media, without the need for a computer.

Resident DVD master Flash has an ongoing campaign to find the best discs in the 16x market. In this review he compares two very popular mid-range discs from Datawrite - their Classic Yellow and their General Purpose Grey. Both discs score highly for being good value for money. You can find the review here.