Topic: News

Panasonic have announced that the company will globally introduce Blu-ray discs with 4x writing speed this summer to coincide with its 4x BD drive launch.

Blu-ray Disc (BD) has become the first high definition format to sell more than one million discs, and the format accounted for 70% of high-definition movies sold during the first quarter of this year, according to sales figures from Home Media Research (HMR).

Sony DADC says that it will replace copy-protected DVDs that are incompatible with a small number of DVD players, caused by Sony's ARccOS copy protection on the discs.

HP will launch in total three new 20x DVD burners. The dvd1040i, and its external equivalent dvd1040e, are new, high-speed drives with DVD±R/±RW and DVD-RAM read/write, ±R double-layer capability, and LightScribe direct disc labeling.

Jon Lech Johansen, known as "DVD Jon" for his notoriety for breaking anti-piracy code on DVDs, has posted on his blog a want ad for a couple of coders interested in working for DoubleTwist Ventures. The company is noteworthy for having reverse engineered Apple's FairPlay digital rights management system.

Fastmac have begun shipping the first and only Blu-Ray optical drive upgrade for Apple's PowerBook, iBook, and MacBook Pro notebook systems.

With a week to go before its dual-format high-def release, pre-orders for 'Planet Earth: The Complete BBC Series' have broken new ground on Amazon's top sellers list. Meanwhile, recent Amazon rankings appear to indicate a turnaround in HD DVD sales.

The short era of small internet radio stations is over after the Copyright Royalty Board have given the thumbs up to new fees to broadcast copyrighted material.

Google is ready to introduce a copyright protection tool that helps media owners to automatically report acts of piracy on its YouTube video site, according to Chief Executive Eric Schmidt.

Nero have announced it will release of the stand alone version of BackItUp 2, a complete data backup and disaster recovery solution.

HD DVD announced it is the first of either format to reach 100,000 stand-alone players sold in the US market, saying Tuesday the price drop helped to spur sales of the product. Not included are PC or Xbox 360 drive sales.

Record numbers of film and TV downloads are threatening high street DVD and video shops, a study has found.

Toshiba has released a new firmware update for it's second generation HD-DVD players.

Just after the previous update a couple of days ago, LUK released another new version of ImgBurn, 2.3.2.0.

Lite-On IT has geared up it's Research & Development teams to producing burners featuring the 16x recording standard recently finalised by the DVD+RW Alliance and may begin volume production by the end of this year.

A Sony spokesperson has confirmed that the company is "considering" producing a new version of PlayStation 3 with a larger hard drive.

The latest patched version of the 'super secure' AACS next generation DVD standard has been hacked already.

Neither Blu-ray nor HD-DVD are close to winning any new format wars, according to research compiled by Sony.

Retailers WH Smith and Play.com have both knocked £25 off the price of the PS3, offering the console for just under £400.

For the past four years, a format battle has been waged over the next generation of DVDs. In 2003, the DVD Forum, a consortium headed by Toshiba, endorsed the HD DVD as its preferred format. A few months later, the Blu-ray Disc Association (spearheaded by Sony) announced that it was launching a competing format.