Ritek, the second-largest producer of optical discs in Taiwan, will invest up to US$137 million to establish a subsidiary manufacturer of CD-R discs, with a monthly production capacity of 20 million discs in Vietnam, the company’s board of directors have decided.

The body that represents the US movie industry has released its latest tool in its campaign to clamp down on movie file-sharing, aimed at parents. The Movie Association for America's (MPAA) free Parent File Scan software lets parents check their children's computers for peer-to-peer programs.

Sony is to make a second attempt to challenge Apple's lead in the digital music download market and the Mac maker's almost-ubiquitous iPod courtesy of the PlayStation Portable.

Our resident DVD technician Flash has his favourite DVD burning programme but finds it is getting a bit outdated with lack of support for all the latest 16 speed drives he is using. He will not give it up and has come up with solutions to make Record Now Max 4.5 work with all his 16x speed drives. Read how he has achieved it in his review Record Now Max 4.5 working with the new DVD Burners.

DVD-Recordable would like to welcome a new member to the team. Respected financial whiz kid MinTteD will be providing in-depth market intelligence for investors from the frontline of DVD and other emerging technologies. So if you are interested in playing in the stock market and would like some ideas on companies which may or may not do well have a look at MinTeD’s new column here for the latest views on what’s hot and what’s not in the stock market. He’s already posted in his first Market Analysis.

Our friends at disQworld have been putting the Datawrite through its paces and their report seems to be very favourable. Have a look <a href=http://www.dvd-recordable.org/Reviews+index-req-showcontent-id-135.phtml>here for the full review.

Worldtech, the exclusive Taiwan sales agent for Hewlett-Packard (HP) LightScribe 16x DVD Dual DL (single-sided double-layer) burners, aims to sell 100,000 burners, accounting for 20% of the DVD-burner market, according to company president Susan Liu.

Storage spending is on the up across Europe, but there may not be so much joy in it for the makers of big storage boxes, according to an IDC survey. The market research company predicts that much of the spend will be on high-capacity, low-cost arrays.

ECMA has created Technical Committee 44 (TC44) to develop a standardization strategy for Holographic Information Storage (HIS) systems, initially based upon the Collinear Technologies of Optware Corporation, a leading developer of Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD) storage products. TC44 was set up at the request of Optware Corporation and several of its partners, including CMC Magnetics, Fuji, Pulstec, Strategic Media Technology and Toagosei.

Aiming to crack down on counterfeit software, Microsoft plans later this year to require customers to verify that their copy of Windows is genuine before downloading security patches and other add-ons to the operating system.

Cable and satellite television providers will step up deployment of multiroom DVR (DVD Recorder) solutions starting in 2005 such that the number of units will exceed 25 million in 2009, according to research company Parks Associates.

Hewlett-Packard (HP) have launched two LightScribe 16x DVD Dual DL (single-sided double-layer) burner models, the Pavilion W1268tw and the Pavilion W1266tw.

Samsung Electronics announced that it has begun mass producing 256Mb XDR (eXtreme Data Rate) DRAM, a next-generation memory for multimedia applications. The new memory targets applications that require the ability to process high-quality video, such as the latest game consoles, digital TVs, servers and workstations.

The net search giant Google has launched a search service that lets people look for TV programmes. The service, Google Video beta, searches closed caption information that comes with programmes. It only searches US channel content currently.

Lite-on today announced what it claims is the fastest DVD rewriter yet. The SOHW-1673S internal drive provides 8x DVD+RW and 6x DVD-RW rewriting speeds, the company said. The drive also handled DVD-R and DVD+R at 16x, and dual-layer DVD+R at 4x, Lite-on added.

Sonopress LLC, a world leader in media services and turnkey production operations, announced that is has been named a contributing member of the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA)

The US Government has again asked Pakistan’s economic minister Ashraf Hayat, to take effective action against eight illegal CD and DVD plants run by some influential businessmen in Karachi, which are involved in infringement of intellectual property rights.

Sony announced it has launched Sound Forge 8 Professional Audio Editing Software, the latest version of its award-winning professional digital audio editing product.

A virtual keyboard which uses a 3D camera and a laser to project light onto a desktop has finally hit the shops.

Whether we speak of SDMI (Secure Digital Music Initiative), CSS (Content Scrambling System) or SunnComm's MediaMax, the history of copy-protection technology is filled with a series of embarrassing setbacks. So much to the point when a typical file-trader is presented with the news that Macrovision has implemented a new copy-protection technology, the event is usually met with cynicism.