Many of Taiwan's optical disc drive manufacturers, in light of increasing OEM orders for DVD burners, plan to gradually decrease OEM production of combo drive models.

A little light hearted note to take us into Christmas: a website has published an informative guide to buying digital media products for teenagers, aimed at clueless parents. This is more complicated than it seems in our broadband connected world.

Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun reports that Sony's recently launched PSX - essentially a PlayStation 2 with additional hard drive and DVD recording features - has proved an instant success.

Norway's most famous computer whiz has recieved an early Christmas present. An appeals court in Oslo upheld Jon Lech Johansen's earlier acquittal on all counts of alleged copyright violations.

The main Taiwanese producers of optical disc drives anticipate a further drop in the OEM price of 8x DVD Dual burners in the first quarter of 2004 due to increased supply from Japanese and South Korean competitors.

TEAC Europe have launched a new 8x DVD writer named DV-W58G. The new drive supports 8x/4x DVD+R/RW, 4x/2x DVD-R/RW and 40x/24x CD-R/RW and is currently listed for about €180 (£126).

'Finding Nemo' was released on video and DVD in the US on November 4. But it won't be available in the UK until March 18, next year. And that, says Blockbuster president and ceo Nigel Travis, creates opportunities for piracy.

NEC has demonstrated for the first time a prototype optical disc drive that uses a single optical head to read DVDs and discs recorded in a blue-laser format that is awaiting final approval as the next-generation DVD standard.

Global demand next year could reach 11 billion to 12 billion units for CD-R discs and 1.5 billion units for DVD-R/+R discs, Ritek CEO Gordon Yeh predicted yesterday. Ritek is the world's largest optical storage disc maker.

Sony, one of the world’s top three manufacturers of DVD burners, will phase out production of DVD burners beginning with 8x models and instead seek OEM production in Taiwan, according to Taiwanese makers of optical disc drives.

Microsoft's career page contains a very interesting job advertisement. The ad says that the Xbox Team "is looking for a strong PM/Engineer to manage the design and development of the Xbox Game Disc for the next generation Xbox console."

Ahead Software have released the latest Nero Vision Express packagewhich contains the widely-anticipated Recode v2 program. Recode is designed to fit large films on a single 4.7gb DVD by removing unwanted material (e.g. foreign language sound tracks or bonus material) from the DVD (9 GB). Then the film is converted, but this time with an optimized bit rate so that it fits on a normal blank (4.8 GB).

MediaTek, a major Taiwan-based optical storage chip design firm, today introduced its third-generation integrated DVD player chip, which it claims to be the world's first RF-integrated DVD system-on-chip (SoC) solution supporting the DivX Pro MPEG-4 video format.

Prodisc, one of the top three producers of optical storage media in Taiwan, on December 12 opened a factory for blank CD-R discs in a bonded industrial zone located in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province (China), according to the company.

Managing director of Sony Computer Entertainment in Australia, Michael Ephraim, has promised that the functionality of the forthcoming PSX console will be significantly improved before it hits markets outside of Japan in late 2004.

Four of Taiwan's leading optical disc manufacturers - CMC, Ritek, Lead Data and GigaStorage - achieved record revenues in November. A fifth company - Prodisc - enjoyed its second-highest monthly revenues.

Contract manufacturing prices for DVD recorders in Taiwan are likely to fall 20-30% in 2004 from the current average to below US$250 (£143), according to sources at Taiwanese manufacturers.

Recode is a new feature from Nero that enables users to fit a whole film on a normal DVD blank (4.7GB) without suffering terrible compression rates. Recode does this by removing unwanted material (e.g. foreign language sound tracks or bonus material) from the DVD (9 GB). Then the film is converted, but this time with an optimized bit rate so that it fits on a normal blank (4.8 GB).

Teac's new drive, the DV-W58E, is a DVD+R recorder which supports 8x recording for DVD+R media and 4x recording for DVD+RW media. The drive can of course also record CD-R and CD-RW media and does so at speeds of up to 32x for CD-R and 16x for CD-RW media.

The owner of Kazaa has taken legal action against a hacked version of the file-swapping software, threatening DMCA action against anyone hosting the download.