Topic: News

Revenge of the DVD Players Weekend - story 1. A Philadelphia judge has sentenced a chronic shoplifter to 22 years in prison yesterday for stealing a portable DVD player from a department store.

Revenge of the DVD Players Weekend - story 2. A Newark man was taken to Licking Memorial Hospital (no, seriously) after receiving a shock from the DVD player he was attempting to fix.

The US government may have removed Pakistan from its global pirates watch list but optical disc piracy is thriving in the country, ushering in a new age of technology-driven entertainment.

The Chinese-language Commercial Times said Acer plans to launch notebooks with built-in HD DVDs next quarter, with the series to be aimed at the high-end segment.

Amazon may be set to make an interesting entry into the DVD download market by offerinf a service that would be better called 'iTunes for video' than most of the other online film services that have been launched so far, because it will allow burning of the films onto DVDs as iTunes allows with CDs.

Resident DVD shining light Flash has posted in his latest review comparing the last two DVD drives from Pioneer. The reason being that there have been rumours that the new model has been "produced quickly because of serious burning problems with the DVR-110As". Find out if the rumours are true in Flash's Pioneer DVR-111 vs DVR-110 review.

Ciba Specialty Chemicals has filed a patent infringement suit in Germany and the Netherlands against RiTEK and its european subsidiaries Conrexx Technology B.V. (also known as Traxdata), RME Manufacturing GmbH, RiTEK Media Europe, and PrimeDisc Technologies GmbH.

Sony will today begin taking pre-orders for its upcoming Blu-ray Disc player after yesterday naming the dates on which it will ship the machine and Vaio PCs that incorporate the next-generation optical disc technology. The BDP-S1 will ship in the US in July - two months after the first BD movies are set to hit US stores.

LG Electronics has announced it plans to launch a next-generation DVD player that will bridge the yawning gap between two competing formats by playing both HD DVD and Blu-ray.

Heavy DRM not only slows down an MP3 player but also sucks the very life out of them. Tests made of various players have found a 25% discepancy when it comes to playing non-DRM protected music as against the same music in it's free state.

The big developments on show at CeBit seem to be happening at the extremes of the hi-tech world and revolve around putting moving pictures on either very small screens or very large screens.

A flaw in the Xbox 360 DVD firmware could allow the forces of darkness in the hacking world to install custom firmware in the machine.

Even though Microsoft officially supports HD DVD the company isn't sure that Vista will include native support for the next-gen DVD format.

Sony will delay the release of its new PlayStation 3 video game console until early November, the president of its game unit has confrmed.

TEAC have confirmed that it and electronics maker Pioneer had agreed to co-develop recordable DVD drives for laptop computers, in the latest move by Japanese electronics makers to counter the tough price competition in the industry.

In an effort to encourage consumers to select the Blu-ray hardware and enjoy the high definition video titles at full resolution, Sony has reportedly decided not to down-convert the resolution of the HD signals coming out from analogue connections.

BenQ today reported an unexpected huge loss of NT$6.02 billion (US$185.2 million) for the fourth quarter of 2005 due to restructuring costs for the takeover of Siemens’ handset division.

The first indication of Apple's plans to sell full-length feature films through the iTunes Music Store surfaced on Tuesday, with a Disney Channel original movie discovered for sale through the service.

Plans are under way to produce a combination or dual format laser player that would play competing HD-DVD and Blu-ray format video-discs. The new hybrid player, known as 'Ultra-Multi', could hit the market later this year or early next year, according to industry sources at the CeBIT computer fair in Germany.

The much-ballyhooed launch this month of the next-generation HD-DVD format promises to be more of a whimper than a bang.