Topic: News

New York may be known as show biz central, but now it's earned a much less appealing distinction: DVD piracy capital of the world. Some 50% of those bootlegged discs sold by peddlers on street corners in cities across the globe originate in NY, according to figures to be released tomorrow by the Motion Picture Association of America.

A Chicago man who bought Microsoft Corp.'s new Xbox 360 has sued the world's largest software maker, saying the new video game console has a design flaw that causes it to overheat and freeze up.

Sony BMG released a new downloadable edition of its XCP content protection removal tool.

In the ongoing battle between still-unreleased next-generation DVD formats, Fox Filmed Entertainment has already chosen sides. The studio says it sees Sony's Blu-ray as the clear winner due to PlayStation 3 support, and, unlike other studios, will not produce movies in HD DVD.

The Japanese company RockRidgeSound has started shipping a device which allows you to record DVDs and TV shows straight on to PSP (and other) memory cards. The "VRX-02" media recorder is an MPEG-4 video recorder which can record movies directly to Memory Cards, without using a PC. The device is expected to retail in Japan for approximately 17,800 Yen (£85).

An American disc manufacturer come up with a novel way to prevent scratching and produce what they modestly title 'The World's Safest Optical Disc', a disc which actually prevents scratches from occuring in the first place, rather than just adding coatings to resist scratches.

DVD meister Flash has made some important updates to his article on DVDInfoPro - the tool he uses to analyse DVD disc performance. DVDInfoPro 4.50 now incldes "Quality Rating", DVDInfoPro Toolbar and IBG ImgBurn capabilities. Impressed? Want more info? Then go to his updated review.

Crackers have already discovered a method of illegally adding MP3 storage capacity to Microsoft's super soaraway Xbox 360.

Press Release: The new edition of the popular software lets users manage their digital photo collection while providing them with a personalized website to share their memories online.

Skype - which is being acquired eBay for $2.6bn - is to offer video calls as part of the latest version of its internet telephony software.

Maxell plans to ship its first holographic storage system late next year based on 300GB holographic versatile disc media with a data transfer rate of 20MBps.

Japanese Plextor said today it plans to release another DVD burner, capable of recording on DVD+R DL media at 10x, and DVD±R at 16x. The PX-755 series will come with ATAPI and S-ATA interfaces, and is expected in the market mid January.

A Dutch company has launched a mediacenter under the name of Lamabox, which takes all its content from P2P networks such as Edonkey, Bittorrent, Fasttrack (Kazaa), Gnutella and Overnet.

Production costs for HDD (hard disk drive) DVD recorders remain high and are unlikely to drop due to few back-end LSI (large scale integration) ICs and no locally produced HDDs for leading Taiwanese makers.

Family Media Guide has released their list of the ten most violent video games of 2005. Their rating system is based on four color-coded levels in three areas, profanity, sex and violence.

DVD players based on FVD (forward versatile disc), a red-laser high-definition DVD standard developed by Taiwan, were brought into volume production by OEM maker Idar Electronics in November of this year, according to Der-ray Huang, deputy director of the Opto-Electronics & Systems Laboratories (OES), the government-sponsored agency that helped develop FVD.

Macrovision's anti-ripping technology RipGuard, which has been implemented by DreamWorks Animation on their recently released DVD of "Madagascar", effectively works against only some popular DVD rippers, but can be successfully over-ridden by some others according to a research firm.

Speculation abounds that only 300,000 Xbox 360s will be making their way to Europe for the launch of the console on 2 December.

Pioneer has released a new firmware for its latest DVR-110 and DVR110D series of DVD burners.

InPhase Technologies, based in Colorado, has developed a commercially viable version of a holographic disc which can hold 300 gigabytes of data and can be used to read and write data 10 times faster than a normal DVD.