Topic: News

Sony has launched arange of new DVD recorders in North America, including a hard disk drive model with HDMI, a dual deck DVD recorder and VCR, and DVD recorder with slim-line styling.

The DVD Forum organized on Monday, 27th June, its "HD-DVD JAPAN 2005" conference, in the Akihabara Convention Hall, Tokyo, Japan. Attendees had the chance to see the latest updates in the HD-DVD format industry, the HD-DVD Video format details and the developments in hardware and software.

Maxell Corporation of America is now shipping double-layer DVD+R media. This latest recordable media increases per-disc capacity on a single side to 8.5 gigabytes, supporting high-capacity backup applications. One double-layer DVD+R will hold up to four hours of DVD-quality video.

The HD-DVD Promotion Group announced that several manufacturers in the disc replication and equipment industry simultaneously confirmed the manufacturability of HD-DVD discs at high volumes.

Yesterday we speculated that HD-DVD might find its way into the Xbox 360 - today Bill Gates has confirmed that we might have been correct.

Sun Microsystems' Java technology will be built into Blu-ray DVD players, according to company officials, a development that advances the technology in the consumer electronics market for which Sun originally developed the software.

Overturning an earlier decision, an Australian federal court has ruled that two Swiftel sysadmins can be sued by the music industry for alleged music piracy.

A unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that Internet file-trading networks like Grokster and Morpheus can be held liable when their users copy music, movies and other protected works without permission.

One in three music discs sold worldwide is an illegal copy, creating a €3.8bn (£2.5bn) music pirate market.

Outside of Japan, DVD-RAM is generally ignored by the DVD enthusiast community. However, projections from Semico Research are showing a bright future for the DVD-RAM format which now finally starting to gain some popularity in western markets which have been slow for the format thus far.

The DVD+RW Alliance recently stated that in view of Taiwan’s major role in the global optical disc industry, it has decided to shift some of its bimonthly round robin tests from Japan to Taiwan.

Hope springs eternal, and the new Toshiba president, Atsutoshi Nishida who only took office on Friday, has vowed to unify the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats.

DVD Fab Decrypter and DVDFab Platinum / Express / Gold were updated to version 2.9.1.0 introduce a new option do enable DMA, which supposedly speeds up copying process.

Sighting convenience, quality, lack of viruses and prosecution as justification, many netizens have given up on illegal fileswapping and have chosen a legal route to obtain their music downloads.

OES (Opto-Electronics & Systems Laboratories), the unit of Taiwan’s government-sponsored Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) that developed the forward versatile disc (FVD), have stated that it has received orders for a total of 20,000 FVD players from several Taiwan-based consumer electronics (CE) vendors, with delivery set for the second half of this year.

The approximate 300,000 people who've picked up a copy of the Backstreet Boys' "Never Gone" might not know it, but they're part of a growing skirmish between the record labels and digital music master Apple Computer.

The two, rival blue-laser optical storage formats, Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD, will not be coming together, Sony Computer Entertainment president Ken Kutaragi admitted yesterday.

Global DVD player revenues will fall for the first time ever this year, according to research from the Strategy Analytics Connected Home service.

Occasionally, some software crops up on the Interweb and you're amazed. Take RatDVD. It stands for "Real Advanced Technology" and came to birth somewhere between Russia and Denmark, the fruit of a team lead by Peter Jensen.

Microsoft has sued four online retailers in California and Virginia for selling pirated software, the world's largest software maker has said.