Topic: News

A Dutch company's cunning plan to deliver DVD movies to customers' TV sets digitally without having to pay additional performance rights has already run into trouble. Dvdstream's partner Homelink - the Danish manufacturer of the Palmbutler 600 set-top box - has gone into receivership and may not be able to deliver the hardware on time.

The games industry is poised to launch an aggressive anti-DVD copy software drive, with some of the biggest names in the sector targeting programs which, it has been claimed, are widely used to copy DVD-based game discs.

Apple's pioneering online music service iTunes has launched in the UK, Germany and France, offering more than 700,000 songs for 79p or 0.99 euros each.

Flash has contacted us because he has been in correspondence with Ritek about some of the shoddy DVD-Rs which have thankfully washed up less and less on the European market. An update to that article can be found here.

The DVD Forum has given is official thumbs-up to DualDisc, a DVD/CD hybrid format. The approval paves the way for a more rapid adoption of the DVD Audio format. DualDisc essentially sticks a CD onto the back of a DVD or DVD Audio disc. The idea is that punters will be able to, say, play higher quality DVD Audio content at home and use the same disc to play the same music in their car's CD player.

Researchers have observed a new type of liquid crystal - long theorised, but not observed until now - that promises faster and cheaper liquid crystal displays.

Video Island, a UK online DVD rental service, has raised £6m in a funding round to expand it's business. The firm, which launched in September 2003, said it would use the money to expand its business in the UK, its sole market.

RealNetworks has finally got its hands on a movie service to show-piece its own video player alongside its market leading Rhapsody online music service. It has done it in a deal with Starz Encore, the cable TV film supplier, which was cut two years ago, but which is finally going ahead after what appear to be legal delays.

A new site called Peerflix.com seeks to blend two trends: online DVD rental sites like Netflix and music-file-sharing services like Kazaa.

The DVD Forum has approved the first version of its next-generation High Definition DVD (HD-DVD) specification. The organisation, which controls the DVD format, has also approved the mandatory use of the Apple-favoured AAC for audio tracks stored in the DVD-ROM partition of future DVD Audio discs.

Ritek will begin volume production of DVD+R DL (single-sided double-layer) discs later this month, said CEO Gordon Yeh at the company's 2004 shareholders meeting.

Digital radio broadcasts that bring CD-quality sound to the airwaves could lead to unfettered song copying if protections are not put in place, a recording-industry trade have warned.

One in three hard drives returned to Seagate for repair is "actually in perfect working order", says Guy Weavers, director of EMEA field applications engineering at Seagate. So customers are wrongly blaming the drive when their PC breaks down. This means that they lose data, time and maybe money, by sending it back to the Seagate factory. Time and money is lost down the line by Seagate resellers too.

The DVD Forum is meeting in Seattle this week with one of its goals being the approval of the first commercial version of the HD-DVD blue-laser based disc format aimed at high-definition television and movies.

BenQ will become the first Taiwan company to deliver 16x DVD burners this week, according to the company which expects to ship 40,000-50,000 16x DVD burners this month, accounting for 30% of its optical disc drive sales. 16x DVD burners will start moving toward the DVD drive mainstream beginning next month, replacing 8x models, the company indicated.

A new website has been launched which aims to calrify the murky area of the European Union legislation as regards copyright and how that legislation is implemented amongst the European member states.

Detectives think they've broken one of the biggest DVD counterfeiting rings in the country with the latest raid in the North East . Three people were arrested as they left a car boot sale at Seaham in County Durham at the weekend. They had five thousand pounds in cash on them. The police say more people will be arrested soon.

Press Release: Sony is taking the wraps off of a new Dual RW DVD burner that can write to DVD+R discs at speeds up to 12X on certified 8X DVD+R media, allowing for a full write-once disc to be recorded in approximately six minutes.

The DVD+RW Alliance has held a technological symposium in Taipei aimed at explaining its patent licensing and product certification process for 16x DVD+R, 8x DVD+RW and 8x DVD DL (single-sided double-layer) drives/burners and discs, as well as introducing its anti-piracy technology, Vidi.

Apple may be sceptical of the demand for an iPod that can play video as well as music, but many of Taiwan's hardware developers appear to disagree. While Computex wasn't awash with portable video players this year, there were plenty on display from manufacturers keenly seeking deals with vendors to sell them under their own name ready for 2005.