Topic: News

Toshiba have presented recording and readout results of their proposed HD DVD-R DL, the company's new double layer HD DVD-R disc with a capacity of 30 GB, at the ISOM/ODS '05 event.

Press Release: Nero have announced the release of Nero Digital Pro - the audio and video compression solution that will be bundled with Nero’s other top five applications.

Toshiba has invested in Optware, the company developing a holographic optical disc claimed to offer significantly greater storage capacity than next-generation formats like Toshiba's own, HD DVD.

This year, 80 million DVD burners and 10 million DVD recorders will be sold, and each customer will use 40-50 DVD discs a year on average, resulting in an estimated global demand of 3.5-4.5 billion DVD discs in 2005, according to Ritek company spokesman Eric Ai.

The new content security scheme for high definition content stored on either HD-DVD and Blu-Ray media will be far more encrypted than with curent DVDs.

The new firmware for the Pioneer DVR-109/109BK and DVR-A09XLA/B/C is v1.57. The changelog shows increased quality and compatibility updates and also adds multi-border recording for DVD-R DL.

Plextor unveiled a $99 (£56) box that could replace TiVo. The ConvertX PX-TV100U (What a lovely name!) connects to your cable or satellite dish or antenna and to your computer's USB 2.0 port. The TV tuner in the ConvertX turns your computer into a television, and the built-in programming guide lets you find TV shows up to three days in advance and record them to your hard drive.

Vinyl records, left for dead when music fans switched to newer formats, are enjoying a revival as music fans dust off their turntables.

Philips does not currently plan to lower its DVD+R/+RW disc royalty charge of US$0.06. according to James Li, general manager of Philips Intellectual Property & Standards in Taiwan. Further, neither Ricoh nor the DVD+RW Alliance has the right to negotiate prices on its behalf.

Microsoft have announced that it will offer two new wireless keyboards designed for PCs that will run the home entertainment version of Windows.

Press Release: Plextor today announces two new 16x external DVD rewriters - the PX-716UFL and PX-740UF. In a departure from its usual silver and mirrored finish, Plextor has for the first time designed them both in a stylish matt black chassis. In addition, the PX-716UFL is the company's first external slot loading drive.

The PlayStation 3 was originally intended to act as a home network router, according to Sony Computer Entertainment boss Ken Kutaragi, who has revealed that the functionality has been dropped because it would have been too expensive.

BBC Three is to premiere comedy series The Mighty Boosh on the internet before it is broadcast on television.

Sharp has developed a two-layer optical disc which could boost the capacity of the next-generation Blu-ray format. The 100GB disc uses what the Japanese giant calls a "super-resolution functional film". Sharp came up with such a film for single-layer media last year, but this week's announcement centres on an extension of the technology that provides a sufficient level of transparency to enable multi-layer discs.

Like the increasingly accepted DualDisc, DVDplus offers an audio CD on one side of a disc and DVD content on the other. However, DVDplus provides full-length DVD content, whereas DualDisc typically offers about 30 minutes.

The DVD+RW Alliance recently held talks with Taiwan-based manufacturers of blank optical discs about adjusting royalty charges for DVD+R and DVD+RW discs from US$0.06 to US$0.04, according to the makers.

ratDVD v0.7.1235 has been released with several changes made from the previous release. The software takes a full featured DVD movie and puts it into a highly compressed .ratDVD container format file - while preserving all the features of the original DVD. New features include direct burning, an ISO creation menu (both require Nero), multi-language support, codec quality/speed optimizations, shut down after convert and many bug fixes.

OEM quotations for 16x DVD burners have dropped to about US$40 (£23) due to intense competition for orders from leading vendors such as Pioneer, NEC, Lite-On IT, BenQ, HLDS (Hitachi-LG Data Storage) and TSST (Toshiba-Samsung Storage Technology), according to Taiwan-based makers of optical disc drives (ODDs).

SolidBurn is a new self-learning feature that will ensure optimal writing conditions for any recordable DVD media. This advanced writer feature executes a series of tests on an 'unknown' DVD media to determine the optimal writing strategy.

Norwegian developer Jon Lech Johansen has issued a patch for Google's Video Viewer - and taken a sideswipe at the press for sensationalizing the event.