Topic: News

Judging by the offerings made at the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, people looking to invest in the next generation of optical media gadgetry are likely to have a back-to-the-future style experience. Many of the boxes on show look very much like 1980's VCRs. And we have the pictures to prove it.

Another set of goodies unveiled at this year's CES were some notebooks from Toshiba and HP, set to be released later this year, that both supported HD-DVD or BluRay in some fashion.

HP has ended its two-year policy of distributing Apple Computer's iTunes software with its new PCs and is switching to RealNetworks' Rhapsody music service.

The EU plans to impose a 14 per cent import duty on imports of larger LCD screens, leading pundits to forecast a huge hike in sticker prices.

The battle over the next generation of DVD formats has got well and truly under way with the announcement from Toshiba that the company will be launching HD-DVD players as early as March this year.

You all know that real consumer tech comes from porn, and this year was no exception. What would the hottest gadget this non-denominational winter and year end celebration, the iPod video, be without porn?

Lite-On IT plans to raise the speed of the RAM (random access memory) format for Super Multi DVD burners from the current 5x to 16x with production to begin in the third quarter of this year at the earliest, according to the company.

Sony has been repremanded by the US courts for loading spyware onto thousands of it's CD buying customers computers.

Ritek and CMC Magnetics, the top two makers of optical discs in Taiwan, exhibited Blu-ray Disc (BD) and HD-DVD discs at the recent 2006 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in the US, with each company planning to start volume production of the discs next quarter at the earliest, according to the two companies.

The Blu-ray Disc Association announced today that the format specification is complete and that licensing is ready to begin for BD-ROM, BD-RE and BD-R.

The Japanese maker of the Panasonic brand said it had developed the world's largest plasma-panel television set with a 103-inch (2.6 meter) screen.

There is a lot happening with devices that combine satellite radio and portable music players at this year's CES.

Microsoft has decided that its new operating system, Vista, will not support the first generation of DVD drives.

A man arrested on charges of running an international counterfeit DVD ring has pleaded guilty in a Mississippi federal court, the culmination of a two-year joint undercover US-Chinese investigation.

The new CD, "X&Y," from bland pop behemoths Coldplay comes with so many restrictions on its usage as to be, in one irate fan's words, "virtually unplayable."

Immigration, social security and trading standards officers have joined forces for a crackdown on traders who sell counterfeit goods in British markets.

Resident DVD meister Flash has been putting the new Labelflash burning drive from NEC through it's paces. You can see what Flash thinks and some images of the results of his experiments in the review here.

A group of Swedish file sharers have got together to form their own political party. The Pirate Party (Piratpartiet) said that it is tired of being deemed as criminals and terrorists by the system for sharing a few measly files for no financial gain or loss to anyone.

A company that makes video gear for the military, eMagin, has developed a wearable headset system that plugs into a video iPod giving it a decent sized screen with a higher resolution.

Google looks set to unveil its own low-price personal computer or other device that connects to the Internet. The machine would run an operating system created by Google, not Microsoft's Windows, which is one reason it would be so cheap — perhaps as little as a couple of hundred dollars.