Topic: News

Philips have won a top design award for their innovative 'DVD 580M' DVD player. Moving away from the conventional stackable box formats, the Philips DVD 580M introduces alternative ways of positioning the players. This DVD player has an 'easy-to-use' interface which makes operation of the player straightforward.

Broadly available addition to ALL-IN-WONDER(R) family enables viewing, pausing and recording of favorite TV programs. ATI Technologies Inc. today announced the North American availability of ALL-IN-WONDER(R) 9000 PRO, a cost-effective multimedia video card that combines great game graphics with intelligent TV-on-the-PC PVR (personal video recording) functionality.

Publishing and graphics software giant Adobe Systems plans to enter the market for high-end DVD authoring software. The company plans to announce Monday the upcoming release of Encore DVD, a collection of tools for organizing video and other content on a DVD, creating interactive menus and burning the final product to a disc.

Thanks to our regular contributor Flash we have a review of the latest Firmware Hack for Pioneer A05.

Cirrus Logic Inc. has licensed the DivX video codec from DivX Networks (San Diego, California) for both its high end and single-board DVD processor families. The deal would usher in the first sub-$149 DVD players that support DivX-enabled content by late 2003.

If, in these days of motor cars and morbidly obese children, even the thought of a walk from Asda to Blockbuster is enough to bring you out in a cold sweat, then BT could be about to deliver the service you’ve been waiting for – DVD internet kiosks.

Sonic Solutions announced today that its MyDVD 4 DVD recording software for Windows XP Media Center Edition and RecordNow CD and DVD data mastering application are now shipping with the ViewSonic NextVision M2000 Digital Media Center, ViewSonic's first entertainment product with digital video recording. Sonic MyDVD is the first application to add DVD recording to the Media Center Edition entertainment experience, allowing users to easily select and burn their personal digital entertainment, such as photo slideshows, music, videos and TV recordings, to CD and DVD and play them back on any standard PC-based or set-top DVD player. The recorded DVDs also support the OpenDVD format, which gives users the added benefit to re-edit content at any time using MyDVD or other OpenDVD-enabled applications.

Digital Versatile Disk (DVD) players have become the UK's fastest growing consumer entertainment product ever. The player has sold almost three million in its first three years, according to a Warner Home Video report published earlier this week.

Plasmon, a leading provider of a wide range of automated data storage solutions, demonstrated this year at CeBIT a working prototype of its new 30GB, Ultra Density Optical (UDO) drives and media. UDO is about to become the next generation standard on 5.25-inch optical drive technology, replacing the existing magneto-optical (MO) base of drives and discs of the same diameter. The new technology uses the much vaunted blue-violet laser in its optical disk drive. It supports the new UDO disks and it is developed for professional data storage markets, covering archiving, document imaging, call centers, email archiving, GIS, medical, telecom, banking, insurance, legal and government. The new drive delivers the performance of the older 5.25” MO drives, the longevity of 12-inch True WORM (Write Once Read Many) and the cost effectiveness of a DVD solution.

Quanta Storage, a Taiwan-based OEM/ODM manufacturer focusing on notebook-use slim-type optical storage drives, plans to launch desktop-use half-height DVD+RW drives in July or August.

Just a quick reminder about our monthly newsletter. Anyone who joins before the 30th of April will be entered into a prize draw to win a Pioneer A05 and 200 4 speed Datawrite DVD Discs. Details of how to join our mailing list are on the left hand side of this page. This competition has been sponsored by Datawrite. The new brand from Datasafe Media.

Japanese firm Mitsumi has long been one of the best known providers of optical drives. Now the company is moving into DVD writers. The snappily named DW7801TE is a DVD+R/RW drive. The commoditisation of the DVD writer market is certainly continuing apace. Mitsumi is a nice addition to the collection of firms producing writers and its new drive seems to be a good one. It's a 4x DVD+R, 2.4x DVD+RW, 16x CD-R and 10x CD-RW. It also features a 2MB cache, hopefully stopping any chances of buffer underruns. The drive will sell for 'under 300 euros' (around £200).

Edutain Distribution/Alien Technologies, a leading provider of solutions that open the Digital World, have announced the release of the ultimate solution for video professionals demanding true real-time performance and quality: the Dazzle Real-Time Video Producer. Real-Time Video Producer is the first product from the new Dazzle Professional Series. This revolutionary video editing solution delivers real-time performance through an innovative software architecture, which enables it to offer unmatched scalability, flexibility, portability and ease of use for professional videographers.

Elaborate Bytes show some light on their CloneDVD project, which has been a work in progress for quite some time already.

A shortage of pick-up heads (PUH) and other key components may delay volume shipments of DVD±RW optical storage drives by one to two quarters, according to Taiwan’s optical storage drive makers. These Taiwan-based optical storage drive makers, including AOpen, Asustek, BenQ, Lite-On IT and Ultima Electronics (Artec), had originally planned to start volume shipments of DVD±RW drives in the second quarter.

A hybrid dual-layer version of DVD-Audio (DVD-A) that can play on both CD and DVD hardware is expected to hit the market in the next six months. The move should help spur consumer adoption of the burgeoning format. The hybrid discs would operate in essentially the same way as dual-layer discs from rival format Super Audio CD (SACD), according to those familiar with the situation. SACDs are forward- and backward-compatible, allowing for playback of the format's high-resolution audio and enhanced features on both dedicated devices and standard CD players.

Tokyo -- The Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) of Taiwan last week detailed two optical-disk formats, developed with Taiwanese suppliers, that it has submitted to the DVD Forum for consideration as industry standards for high-definition DVD recording disks based on blue lasers.

The week ending 16 March 2003 was the first ever in which DVD rental revenues exceeded VHS rental rentals in the US according to trade organisation Video Software Dealers Association (VSDA).

Sonic Solutions announced today that Plextor(R) Co., a leading developer and manufacturer of high-performance CD-related equipment and software, has selected MyDVD(R) to bring DVD and Video CD creation capabilities to the PX-504A, its first-ever DVD recordable DVD+R/RW drive.

Drivers from nVidia 41.09 and onwards include "stringent checks" to comply with Macrovision requirements, the company has said. That could mean if you have a TV encoder that does not support Macrovision, you may well get an error message depending on what DVD software player you are using, the company has said.