Topic: News

BenQ plans to offer blue-laser format DVD-ROMs drives based on the Blu-ray platform in the first or second quarter of 2006, according to associate vice president Alpha Tsai for the company's Storage Business Unit.

Sony have introduced its tenth generation of DVD burners. The internal DRU-810A and external DRX-810UL models support the industry's fastest 8X DVD+R Double Layer (DL) recording speed, and can burn up to 8.5GB of video, data, music or images on compatible media in about fifteen minutes.

A programmer called Mattan Gillon has succeeded in porting the open source x86 emulator Bochs to the Sony PSP, enabling it to run Windows 95 and Linux.

CMC Magnetics and Ritek are enjoying considerable profits from production of 8cm DVD discs for use in DVD camcorders, as few producers are able to make such discs and global demand is quickly growing, according to the two companies.

The European Union's anti-dumping investigation into DVD-R and CD-R discs produced in mainland China will produce an unfair ruling for mainland Chinese companies, Chen Huiqing, an official with the Legal Affairs Department of the China Chamber of Commerce for Import and Export of Machinery and Electronic Products (CCCME) has said.

It woul;d seem that whatever the worries about the price of the Xbox 360 console itself, the price of the launch titles might not be nearly as bad as the £45 we had been expecting.

The men behind Britain's biggest DVD piracy ring have been ordered to pay back £1.5 million of their fortune. Mastermind Sidney Austin, 48, and Dino Simm, 31, made up to £4 million selling pirate copies of films in offices, pubs and clubs across London's East End.

With Pioneer and NEC soon expected to release OEM orders for 16x DVD burners, the intense competition among Taiwan and South Korean makers is likely to cause OEM prices to drop from US$45-50 currently to as low as US$35 in the fourth quarter of this year, according to industry experts.

The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) has announced that it has selected the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) as its protection scheme for next generation DVD media. By choosing AACS, the BDA matches the rival HD-DVD (backed by the DVD Forum), which has chosen the same system.

CMC Magnetics and Ritek, the top two producers of optical discs in Taiwan, will cooperate with an investigation by the European Commission (EC) into the suspected dumping of blank optical discs into the European Union (EU), according to the two companies.

The recent decision by 20th Century Fox to use Sony's Blu-ray next-generation DVD format, rather than Toshiba's rival HD DVD, is likely to spark a lengthy format war, industry experts have warned.

Pioneer has started shipping their new DVD burner, the sexily titled DVR-110D. It features 16x DVD, 8x DL and 40x CD burning (amongst others).

The European Commission is investigating whether three Asian countries are selling recordable DVDs in Europe at below cost, a practice known as dumping.

A website has started a petition for SuperDrives in various Macs -- PowerBooks, Mac minis and iMac G5s in particular -- that fail to write DVD media at the advertised rate, instead writing at a maximum 2X speed though a faster speed may be indicated by software displays.

A new European Union directive actually goes further than it's U.S. counterpart, in that it makes indirect copyright infringement a crime. The proposal would also set the maximum criminal penalty for piracy by a "criminal organization" to four years in prison and a 300,000-euro fine. Additionally, it seeks to address disparities in anti-piracy criminal penalties across Europe by obliging different EU member countries to draft uniform maximum prison sentences into their sentencing guidelines.

Leading manufacturers of optical discs in Taiwan are leaning ever so slightly toward support of HD DVD, as opposed to Blu-ray Disc, as the standard for next-generation DVD format. This is because makers will incur much lower costs if they adopt their production equipment to the HD DVD platform, according to local industry experts.

A married couple arrested for music, film and game piracy have received jail terms of between six and 21 months.

Press Release: Sonic Solutions announced a powerful new addition to its industry-leading line of AuthorScript download and burn solutions for the growing online music and audio content market.

Scotland'S biggest pirate DVD and CD racket was sunk in a series of co-ordinated raids yesterday. Computer gear capable of churning out millions of pounds worth of counterfeit discs was seized.

According to a study, broadband internet surfers in North America watch two fewer hours of television per week than do those without Internet access, while those using a dial-up connection watch 1.5 fewer hours of TV.