Topic: News

Computer makers are increasingly looking to hard-core gamers to make up for a lackluster PC market. Gateway is the latest to try to take advantage of the trend. The company plans to release this week customized versions of its midrange and high-end desktops, which it aims specifically at gamers.

The printable online coupon (voucher) is getting more and more attention from studios looking to beef up DVD sales. "Daredevil" is the latest example -- and is also the first time Fox has embraced the fairly new technology. Within the studio's monthly e-mail newsletter, which goes out to 1 million subscribers, 20th Century Fox featured a $5-off coupon for the Ben Affleck superhero film. The e-mail went out the weekend before the DVD's street date.

Movie bosses have formed a task force to tackle a £400 million film piracy racket in the UK. Piracy increased by more than 80% in the past year, according to figures from the Federation Against Copyright Theft.

Miraizon, a San Jose- based multimedia software company, announced today the immediate availability of Cinematize 1.0 for Mac OS X. Cinematize is the first and only commercial DVD extraction tool that handles complex DVDs with multiple angles and sound tracks. With Cinematize 1.0, users can extract a clip or segment of content from any DVD and save it in a format compatible with standard movie and audio editing applications.

Taiwanese suppliers have confirmed that flexible printed circuits used in recordable DVD drives are in short supply. But they were not willing to confirm rumors of rising prices. As flexible printed circuits are an important component in recordable DVD drives, the shortage has reportedly affected shipments by Taiwanese recordable DVD drive manufacturers.

321 Studios have release a minor version change to their popular DVD X Copy Xpress. Version 3.02 has a bug fix to a drive speed error caused at the beginning of a burning session. The fix is also replicated in the bundled Xpress version in the Gold package.

Thanks to disQworld we have been given permission to use a review by red321 on that forum. The review details a number of facts and issues surrounding the popular Sony drives, including useful info on firmware and different media format capabilities. Click for Sony Drives Overview.

If you watch movies on a laptop or on an LCD monitor, you may like to check out CyberLink PowerDVD 5 Deluxe ($69 ~ £41). The newest version introduces a technology called CyberLink Eagle Vision (CLEV) that will make you wonder how you ever watched movies on LCDs before. Even CRTs benefit to some degree.

A plea agreement has been reached in the case of the college student who leaked details of DirectTV's anti-piracy technology, while elsewhere DirecTV lawyers move against a message board poster for giving hacking advice to satellite pirates.

More than a million pounds' worth of mobile phones and games consoles were nicked from a lorry parked outside a Carphone Warehouse store near Birmingham earlier this week.

The Motion Picture Association and the Malaysian government have raided operators of five Web sites suspected of selling illegal DVDs, in the film industry's latest attack on Internet piracy.

Western Europeans are being offered a new ITunes-like digital music store that is accessed through Microsoft's Windows Media Player 9 Series software. The pay-per-song service launched Thursday in the U.K. and is being branded by both the MSN Music Club and the Tiscali Music Club. The store draws from On Demand Distribution's music catalog of more than 200,000 tracks from the five major labels and a handful of independents.

In a move that may speed the death of floppy disk drives, M-Systems on Tuesday said its USB flash memory storage device can now start a PC's boot-up process.

Press Release: InterVideo have announced that its family of WinDVD video editing and Digital Video Recorder (DVR) software have been enhanced with a new Dolby Digital Consumer Encoder (DDCE). With the new two-channel Dolby Digital audio encoder you can now create DVDs with high-quality Dolby sound for a more in-depth listening experience.

Digital song-tracking company Audible Magic is striking a deal with Universal Music Group for song information, getting another leg up in its quest to be able to identify--and potentially block--music as it is transferred online. The new arrangement, expected to be announced Tuesday, will see Universal give Audible Magic a "fingerprint," or digital identification tool, for each song it releases, before albums are shipped to retailers. The company uses those fingerprints to identify copyrighted songs online or in other venues such as CD-manufacturing plants to help guard against unauthorized copying.

Press Release: 321 Studios, the software house behind the popular DVD X Copy, have announced the release of its latest breakthrough in asset protection technology: DVD X Rescue and CD X Rescue. These two new products recover and restore data from unreadable, scratched, corrupt or defective DVDs or CDs (CD-R and CD RW.) Utilizing a DVD or CD burner, DVD X Rescue and CD X Rescue create brand new, perfectly playable DVDs or CDs from the damaged original.

In a bid to show it is living up to its WTO obligations, China has pulverized 42 million smuggled and pirated CDs and DVDs.

Hewlett-Packard have introduced the DVD Movie Writer dc3000 as one of it's 158 new products. When connected to a computer and VCR, the device transfers content from VHS or other tapes to DVDs.

Our regular contributor Flash has contacted us very excited. The reason? He's been helping to beta test a new software which he rates very highly. DVDInfoPro is a tool which combines the functionality of other DVD info tools like ADVDinfo, CDSpeed and DiscInfo into one neatly designed package. DVDInfopro gives full details of the functionalities and speeds of all types of DVD and CD drives and full information for inserted DVD media. You can find this fine piece of software with screenshots and the latest downloads here. Nb: the software is updated regularly.

HP plans to introduce a number of specialized PCs in the coming weeks, including a desktop machine aimed specifically at gamers. The new PCs will serve as a follow-on to the collection of scanners, cameras and printers that HP introduced on Monday as part of a strategy aimed at convincing consumers to stick with HP for all of their tech purchases.