Topic: News

Sony has released a firmware patch for its highly-popular dual format DVD recorder series. The new firmware, v2.0e, allows your Dual RW drive to record at 4X on 4X compatible DVD+R media. You can download the updater here. Sony also claim that the firmware, "improves reading and writing performance and reliability" and "reduces vibration noise for the discs with unbalance or eccentricity." The Sony website is here.

Pioneer has released a new firmware for the mega-popular DVD-R drive Pioneer DVR-A05 (also known as DVR-105). You can download the firmware here.

Flash has done it again: a new review of the Panasonic DVD Multi-Drive SW-9581-C/SW9571-CYY.

Following the press release from Bulkpaq this morning regarding their 4x DVD-R disc Datasafe Media have sent us a press release outlining two products they plan to release onto the European market.

Our friends at Bulkpaq have sent as a picture of their new 4x DVD-R disc. Click for a picture of the disc. The disc, which is manufactured by Princo using an exclusive dye formulation for Bulkpaq, is reputed to smash the £1.00 price barrier for 4x DVD-R. <a href="http://www.bulkpaq.co.uk/" target=_blank">Bulkpaq also tell us that they will start shipping the disc in volume by the end of the month.

Sony is responding to consumer demand for DVD with an impressive array of new product announcements, including progressive-scan players, SACD-compatible DVD changers, a 400-disc changer, and a "dual compatible" DVD recorder. This last item bridges the gap between the DVD-RW and DVD+RW camps by working with both formats.

Microsoft on Thursday added Creative Technologies to its stable of manufacturers developing Media2Go portable devices that are capable of playing digital video and music. Microsoft made the Creative Media2Go announcement at CeBit 2003 in Hannover, Germany. Creative will join iRiver, Samsung, Sanyo and ViewSonic, which also plan to develop Media2Go devices. But Creative's success in delivering PC audio and video technologies makes the company's support potentially the biggest endorsement to date for Media2Go, say analysts.

Thanks to our regular contributor Flash we have a review of the new Nanya DVD-R discs. Click here for review.

CenDyne Inc. today announced that it will expand its popular line of 4X DVD-R/RW drives with a new external drive with a USB 2.0/FireWire interface. The new DVD recorder connects to USB and FireWire interfaces to allow home and business users to quickly and easily store video and photos on DVD.

US authorities are seeking the extradition of a man accused of leading one of the Internet's oldest piracy groups. The suspected leader of one of the Internet's oldest piracy groups has been indicted and his extradition from Australia is being sought, a US federal attorney said on Wednesday.

Addonics Technologies today announced one of the smallest optical super combo drives, which has all the functions of a DVD Player, DVD Recorder, CD Player and CD Recorder stuffed inside an enclosure that's not much larger than a double stack CD jewel case. The Addonics Pocket DVD-R/RW does it all. The drive supports all current optical media formats and is perfect for corporate, government, professional photographers or mobile users who need a portable DVD/CDRW burner for creating DVD or CD material.

Format and vendor rivalry helps drive revenues to $1Billion this year. According to new research from Strategy Analytics, DVD video recorders are set to become the next hot trend in digital consumer electronics. The findings, released to subscribers to the Broadband Device Strategies service, show that worldwide sales this year will reach 2.7 million units and be worth $1 Billion in retail revenues. By 2005, consumers will spend more on DVD recorders than on play-only DVD players. Falling DVD recorder prices are being driven by competition between different format vendors and by new suppliers in the Far East and China.

We have a glimpse of the future with a review of Sony's new BDZ-S77 Blu-ray Recorder. Available in Japan on April the 10th, and at an RRP of approximately £2,400, it may be a while before you or I get out hands on one.

Notebooks will soon gain more onboard capacity for storing data, thanks to new 80GB hard drives introduced this week. Fujitsu on Monday announced its new MHT line of notebook hard drives that offers manufacturers the ability to boost their notebooks' maximum storage capacity from 60GB to 80GB. A new drive family from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies provides a similar boost.

Ahead Software is about to drop the bomb at CeBIT. They will be expanding their product line even more to the DVD and video compression field. New Nero products include an M-PEG4 digital compression codec, a new DVD player software package and updates to there range of media manipulation suites.

Thanks to our regular contributor Flash we have a review of the most popular DVD-Rom Readers. Click here for the review.

The DVD Burner II is less than half the price of its predecessor, and offers a lot more features, but Panasonic faces an uphill battle to establish DVD-RAM in Europe. Panasonic has launched the first sub-£200 DVD-RAM drive as part of a major push for DVD-RAM acceptance in Europe, but analysts say it has little chance of breaking the hold of a rival DVD format camp.

Versatile recording device combines DVD+R/W and CD-R/W for creating video, audio and data discs. Micro Solutions has started shipping its new Hi-Speed USB 2.0 DVD+RW backpack drive. The new external backpack DVD+RW gives computer users an easy-to-use, portable, removable storage device for creating, storing and sharing their own collections of home videos, photographs and music as well as backing up data. With a DVD+R recording speed of 4x when using 4x media, the drive is among the fastest on the market.

Japanese electronics giant Matsushita (better known by its consumer brand names, such as Panasonic) announced this week world's first video solution using the WLAN technology, compatible with IEEE802.11a and IEEE802.11e standards.

The signal processor that uses 5GHz frequency for wireless operations, transfers standard MPEG-TS stream (the MPEG stream wrapper used for digital TV, etc transfers). By installing the signal processor into, for example, a (digital-only, no analog input) DVD recorder and digiTV receiver box, could allow wireless operation between these devices, so that the digibox decrypts the broadcast and sends it to the DVD recorder which then unwraps the stream into regular MPEG-2 stream and records it to a blank DVD-R disc. And the DVD recorder could play later the stream through WLAN link to a MPEG-TS capable TV wirelessly.

This will allow you to flash *ANY* DVR-104 drive to 1.20 RPC-1, while turning your drive into a "true" Pioneer DVR-104. Click here for download. Instructions: 1) Download and unzip this package. 2) Make sure you have a floppy (not necessarily blank, as the program will format it!) 3) Run Flashdisk.exe and let the program create the disk 4) Keep the floppy in the drive 4) Make Pioneer 104 the secondary master. 4) Set bios to boot from floppy. 5) Reboot. 6) Follow on-screen instructions. 7) Once completed drive is ready to accept official Pioneer Firmware.

NB This utility is for drives which have been manufactured by Pioneer and are sold under different brand names such as Compaq, Teac, and Benq.