Topic: News

Swedish Bittorrent outfit, ThePirateBay.org has admitted that its shutdown yesterday was faked. Users who showed up at the site were confronted with a copyright violation notice and some thought that the site had fallen to the Swedish copyright organization responsible for maintaining intellectual property rights Antipiratbyran.

China makes 90 percent of the DVD machines sold worldwide now, and the country produced 92 million players and recorders last year - an 8 percent increase from 2003, the media firm Gobal Sources said Friday in a new industry report.

OEM prices for 16x DVD burners is expected to fall from US$45-50 (£25-£28) currently to US$40 (£22) next quarter or in the fourth quarter of this year, further forcing second-tier makers out of the market, according to associate vice president Alpha Tasi of BenQ's storage business unit.

Samsung recently produced their 100-millionth large TFT-LCD panel. This feat was been achieved in only 10 years, after the company launched an ambitious bid in the TFT-LCD market,

Nero, probably the biggest name in media burning software, have announced today that Samsung will be the first to bundle NeroLINUX with a DVD/CD burner, its TS-H552U WriteMaster. The bundle will be available as a retail kit.

The PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 aren't going to be the only consumer electronics kit with removable hard drives, at least not if Taiwanese developer Argosy Research has anything to say in the matter. At Computex 2005 in Taipei this week, it showed off an hard disk-based media player that can spit out its HDD ready for connection to a PC.

The Phantom PVR from Blue Delta initiates recording on your DVD/HDD recorder in response to triggers from a Sky DigiBox, such as autoview.

At Computex in Taipei this week, BenQ is demonstrating one of the few working Blu-ray Disc optical drive prototypes.

Sony says that it is testing CDs featuring technology from UK anti-piracy outfit First4Internet, that will allow punters to only make a limited number of copies.

InterVideo will demonstrate new capabilities in its embedded Linux multimedia boot environment for Windows laptops and PCs at Computex in Taipei this week. The company says InstantOn now supports DVD burning on select notebooks, as well as DVB-T (digital video broadcasting-terrestrial), a standard popular in Europe.

Press Release: TEAC, a premier manufacturer of DVD-Recorders, CD-RW, CD-RW/DVD-ROM Combo Drives, DVD-ROM, CD-ROM, Internal and USB Floppy Drives, External Hard Drives and USB Flash Drives announces the launch of its full line of 1x1, 1x3, and 1x7 16X DVD-R Duplicators.

Los Angeles is installing a network of surveillance cameras intended to catch street hawkers selling counterfeit goods, especially pirated copies of Hollywood movies on DVD.

Blockbuster is considering building an in-store movie download system as it seeks to fight off online film rental services.

Ricoh yesterday signed an OEM and technology transfer deal with Ritek for the production of DVD+R/-R dual-layer (DL) discs, the companies said.

Students from the university of Aarhus, Danmark and St. Petersburg State Electrotechnical University "LETI", Russia yesterday released a new Compression format specifically geared towards the compression of complete DVDs without loss of any features or noticeable quality called ratDVD.

Toshiba president Tadashi Okamura predicts that producers of the next generation of optical discs will eventually use one format because the market will not allow two formats to co-exist.

In response to rumors in the optical disc drive (ODD) manufacturing industry that Pioneer would start placing OEM orders for DVD burners next quarter, Pioneer High Fidelity Taiwan, Pioneer's Taiwan subsidiary, said the rumors were unfounded and that Pioneer has the needed factories to make pick-up heads and DVD burners in China and currently has no plans to seek OEM production.

Press release: Nero now support Layer-Jump Recording (LJR) of dual-layer DVD-R media, thus permitting multi-session burning, improved read compatibility and a memory capacity of up to 8.5 GB. OEM customers can immediately benefit from this new technology by downloading an update online through the Nero website available mid-June.

For those seeking that little bit extra, Prodisc have developed a 4.9GB DVD-R disc - 0.2GB bigger than the standard single-layer media. Unfortunately the technology means that the disc is less compatible with existing drives.

Manufacturers of optical discs in Taiwan have generally enjoyed increases in gross margins arising from a drop in international prices of polycarbonate (PC) from US$3.5 per kilogram (kg) to US$3.2-3.3, according to the makers.