Topic: News

If you thought we had forgotten about our latest DVD film releases page then you should check out our new and improved list for May.

Never wanting to miss news of wars or rumours of wars, a little snippet that appeared on VE3D has proved interesting. According to an alleged employee of Gamestop in the US, console makers are about to drop their prices. The ever more vicious rounds of skirmishing between the top three names is interesting. According to the news piece the Xbox is due to drop to $149 (£93) in the US. Sony will also be pitching its PS2 at that price. Meanwhile, Nintendo will be dropping the Gamecube down to $99 (£62).

The Bush administration have said some countries are failing to provide adequate protection against copyright piracy of U.S. products such as movies and computer programs. The Ukraine has recieved the worst ranking in the area of intellectual property rights, accused of making a large number of pirated versions of compact music and video discs and computer programs. The administration said it would keep in place $75 million in economic penalties imposed in January 2002 because of the piracy problem.

There are plenty of people who think that the MPAA is bad but, as the phrase goes, they ain't seen nuthin' yet. Microsoft had been floating around on the horizon off the California coastline watching Hollywood with interest. Now they have parked a whacking great big battleship just offshore. It has announced its own DVD format and has backing from some insiders in a move to make Media Player the new standard in DVD playback.

Building on its technological strengths and market leadership position in recordable DVD products, Panasonic introduces two DVD recorders as part of a new worldwide “DIGA” DVD recorder line. Model DMR-E60, which features an SD Memory Card slot, a PCMCIA slot and a DV input terminal, is an extremely versatile unit designed for easy interaction with digital still cameras and digital camcorders. The DMR-E60 has a manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) of $599.95 (£375) and will be available at retail in May. The new DMR-E80 DVD/hard disk recorder features 80GB of built-in memory. It provides up to 104 hours of recording time on its hard drive and up to 6 hours on a removable 4.7 GB DVD-RAM disc (both in Extended Play mode.) The DMR-E80 has an MSRP of $699.95 (£435) and will be available at retail in July.

In a new 'educational' tactic, the recording industry plans to send instant messages to those offering music tracks through peer-to-peer services, warning them that they are likely to be breaking the law.

As your old record and cassette collections gather dust, a new listening format revolution is quietly under way that could replace your shiny, new compact discs. Two new disc formats have emerged: super-audio compact disc (SACD) and DVD-Audio. Both promise a superior listening experience over regular CDs, with music remixed in higher-resolution digital audio.

321 Studios has released a new product in their DVD X Copy family called DVD X Copy XPRESS. Unlike it's predecessor, DVD X Copy XPRESS allows backups to be fitted on one DVD-R.

Who would believe a $1,000 (£625) remote control is a revolutionary product just because it runs Windows? Especially when many people spend a similar sum for an entire home theater system, with speakers, a television, a DVD player, and an included wireless remote? The ViewSonic Airpanel V110 Wireless Smart Display with remote-control software called Nevo, from Universal Electronics Inc. (UEI), may just be such a device and could become the third (maybe even second) computer in your home. This remote is a Web-surfing, e-mail–reading computer at heart. And a Smart Display may be cheaper, easier to use, and more flexible than a dedicated device.

Even as the public's love affair with the DVD blossoms, the tech world is hard at work in the lab creating the next generation of high-definition disc.

We may someday call it the shot heard 'round the world'. On February 17th, the Xbox Linux Project wrote an open letter to Microsoft discussing its desire to run somebody else's software on the company's gaming console. Microsoft hasn't been too friendly toward those efforts. Last fall, it shut down a maker of "mod chips" -- circuitry that can be soldered onto the motherboard of the Xbox to make the machine run Linux. The letter politely demanded that Microsoft stop "restricting choice" -- and rid itself of the mod market to boot -- by publishing the code required to run unapproved programs without modifications to the Xbox.

The big DVD manufacturers have managed to extract ¥3 billion from Chinese companies that exported players worldwide, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reports today.

Taiwanese first-tier optical drive disc makers Ritek and CMC Magnetics (CMC) plan to raise prices for blank CD-R discs by around US$0.02 in the third quarter of this year, the companies said.

Epson have introduced the Stylus Photo 900, a new USB-based inkjet printer that has the ability to print directly on CD and DVD media without using adhesive labels. It's the second product in Epson's line to do so, and the first to be offered for less than $200 (£125), according to the company.

Macrovision is the latest of several in the anti-piracy business to license Windows Media Audio technology for copy-protected CDs. Microsoft sank its claws a little deeper into the music business on Wednesday, as copy-protection company Macrovision agreed to license the company's Windows digital rights management technology for CDs.

Intersil have announced that its laser diode design will be used in a new Hitachi-LG Data Storage disk drive, the GSA-4040B, which will support multiple DVD and CD recordable and rewritable formats. The Hitachi-LG drive will be available in June and will support DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD-RAM, CD-R and CD-RW formats.

321 Studios, a US company that sells DVD-copying software, will have its day in court this week, mounting one of the most serious challenges so far to the movie industry's anti-piracy efforts. Hollywood's movie studios will face a key test in their battle to defend their copyrights from digital pirates, when a federal court in California this Friday hears a case filed by the maker of DVD-copying software.

Sony will soon introduce what it claims to be the word's first dual-format home DVD recorder. The RDR-GX7 will be the only home DVD recorder that supports the DVD-RW, DVD+RW and DVD-R recording formats, the company claimed in a statement.

Probably the world's most popular MPEG-4 codec, DivX, has been updated. The new version, DivX v5.04, includes various bug fixes and improvements over the last (v5.03) version. You can download both the Pro and Adware-free versions here.

Hewlett packard have unveiled a new range of PC's that have all-in-one multimedia functaionality: they can mix and burn CDs, DVDs; record your favourite TV shows; and store your digital photos. unfortuneatley they have hit the market a month late and 35 per cent over its intended price.