Topic: News

The Japanese TDK website has announced that the company has released two new DVD-R media types which have an ultraviolet radiation protective coating. This coating makes the discs three times more resistent against sunlight when compared to normal discs. TDK has released two types of discs, the DVD-R47HCG for data (4.7GB) and the DVD-R120HCF for (120 minutes) video recording. Click for the babel translated TDK page.

Sony's new Vaio PCV-W1 centres on entertainment and aims squarely at the living room. On the one had it is a rather stylish 17.5 inch wide screen and on the other a P4 2.8GHz PC with 160GB of hard disk and a DVD-burner.

Big news from France today where EMI has landed in the soup for selling 'defective' copy protected CDs. A Nanterre court has ordered the music label to refund a woman who could not play her new Alain Souchon CD on her car CD player. Alternatively, EMI is to provide a full-working copy. The ruling applies to all people who have bought CDs which they cannot play on some CD players, computers and Walkmans.

Macrovision have announced that Artisan has signed a multi-year agreement renewal to use Macrovision's technology to copy protect 100% of its DVD releases. Artisan is a leading independent producer and distributor of DVD home entertainment with a library containing over 7,000 titles ranging from Academy Award winning classics such as "The Last Emperor" to action adventure blockbusters such as "T2," "Reservoir Dogs" and the "Rambo" series and cult favorites such as "The Blair Witch Project."

China's Ministry of Information Industry (MII) recently negotiated a reduction in DVD player technology royalties paid by Chinese manufacturers to the 3C alliance, led by Philips, from US$5 to US$3.50, according to sources. The move is likely to be followed by Taiwnese makers, meanng further reductions in DVD player prices.

Prices for recordable DVD pick-up heads (PUHs) are expected to drop by an average of 7-10% in September due to increased supply and stronger pricing pressure from downstream customers, according to sources at Taiwanese optical storage drive makers.

Sales of video game consoles are expected to slump until a new crop of machines is introduced in a few years, according to an industry analyst. In an article published earlier this week, Jay Srivatsa, a senior analyst for research firm iSuppli, said console sales have slowed significantly this year, in contrast with the steady growth that has marked the industry until now.

The day after a report suggested the compact disc is heading the way of the 8-track tape, the world's largest music label conglomerate promised a steep cut in music CD pricing.

Once again it seems that net-based anonymity services are only anonymous until someone really wants to know who you are. After a recent 'technical outage', the popular anonymiser service AN.ON's Java Anonymous Proxy software reappeared with a few new feature built in: The new version of the JAP client software included text like "Loading Crime Detection Data".

Sony boss Ken Kutaragi has confirmed that the PlayStation 3 will feature backwards compatibility with the PS2 and PSone, ensuring continued support for older software formats in the new hardware.

JVC, Samsung and Sony have all used the IFA conference in Berlin to reveal their Blu-Ray recorders. Blu-Ray uses a blue-violet laser (hence the name) which has a much shorter wavelength when compared to today's optical storage media working with a red laser. Because of the shorter wavelenth the capacity of a Blu-Ray disc is around 25 GigaByte, more than five times as much as a recordable DVD.

A new DivX and DivX Pro version have been released and according to DivX this is the biggest improvement ever, even bigger than the jump from DivX 4.1.2 to DivX 5.0. Besides the new DivX version a new DivX Player version has also been released yesterday which is included in DivX 5.1 or available as separate download.

There’s hope for all the mistreated, abused and worn-out CDs and DVDs of the world. They can be salvaged, those nagging pops, clicks, skips and scratches repaired, by a little gadget called the SkipDoctor by Digital Innovations. The SkipDoctor has been around awhile, but it’s now available in an updated motorized version (about $50 ~ £32) that makes it even easier to repair digital discs, whether it’s a CD, DVD, CDROM or video game. It also repairs 3-inch Nintendo discs without the adapter required by previous Skip-Doctors.

Roxio is now shipping Toast 6 Titanium, an update to its CD and DVD authoring solution announced last month. The boxed version ($100 ~ £63) will ship in 3-5 business days, while the downloadable version ($90 ~ £58) is available now.

LaCie have announced a very stylish new range of external dual format DVD drives that are designed by F.A. Porsche. The drives support both DVD-RW and DVD+RW and are available with either USB 2.0 or FireWire connectivity. It is also offering the 52x CD-RW drive in the same stylish design with both FW and USB 2.0 connectivity. The FireWire DVD±RW Drives include Sonic MyDVD Video Suite, ArcSoft ShowBiz, and Toast Lite for Mac.

A new Sony hard-disk based video recorder will go on sale in Japan in November, capable of recording for two weeks nonstop, the company said Tuesday. The Cocoon CSV-EX11 uses a pair of 250G-byte hard disk drives to record up to 342 hours (over two weeks) of video in the lowest of three quality modes. Standard mode cuts this to 171 hours, while high quality mode reduces this further to a still-respectable 114 hours -- or just under five days.

Taiwan-based IC designer Realtek Semiconductor today announced the launch of the ALC850, claiming it to be the world’s first eight-channel AC’97 Rev 2.3 audio codec.

For those of you old enough to remember the heady early days of computing when so-called experts were widely predicting the dawn of the paperless office there comes a similar claim about CD and DVD. Forrester Research have predicted a steep fall in CD sales, as audio and video file sharing over the Internet continues to emerge as a preferred option among consumers.

Philips has developed a re-writable optical disk-based, Portable Blue standard and it is something to behold. Already able to hold 1000 megs, they claim the ability to increase the storage capacity to "several gigabytes" with a dual layer disk, already in development. Will it undermine the solid-state rivals such as Secure Digital, Compact Flash and Memory Stick? A PC card housing for the Portable Blue disks has also been developed and Philips intends to use a storage housing that will fit into existing Compact Flash slots. So they have their sites set on the solid state market.

ATI has finally decided what it will call the R360 and now it's no secret anymore. ATI had two names for this technology from the beginning. One was Radeon 9900 PRO the only step left for this generation of cards, and the other the Radeon 9800XT.