Topic: News

The new CD, "X&Y," from bland pop behemoths Coldplay comes with so many restrictions on its usage as to be, in one irate fan's words, "virtually unplayable."

Immigration, social security and trading standards officers have joined forces for a crackdown on traders who sell counterfeit goods in British markets.

Resident DVD meister Flash has been putting the new Labelflash burning drive from NEC through it's paces. You can see what Flash thinks and some images of the results of his experiments in the review here.

A group of Swedish file sharers have got together to form their own political party. The Pirate Party (Piratpartiet) said that it is tired of being deemed as criminals and terrorists by the system for sharing a few measly files for no financial gain or loss to anyone.

A company that makes video gear for the military, eMagin, has developed a wearable headset system that plugs into a video iPod giving it a decent sized screen with a higher resolution.

Google looks set to unveil its own low-price personal computer or other device that connects to the Internet. The machine would run an operating system created by Google, not Microsoft's Windows, which is one reason it would be so cheap — perhaps as little as a couple of hundred dollars.

A free new program called Videora has been released for PC Media Centers that can convert just about any type of video format into something the Xbox 360 can stream.

Global demand for DVD burners, thanks to continued drops in prices, will rise to 120 million units this year, growing by 50% from 2005, according to general manager Michael Gong for the Optical Disc Drive Business Unit of Lite-On IT.

Broadcom today announced what it claims to be the industry's first high definition (HD) audio/video decoder chip that is fully compliant with the emerging Blu-ray and HD DVD optical disc formats.

Film studios today released slates of next-generation DVDs due later this year in a move to jump start a multibillion-dollar industry that risks being bogged down by a standards war.

Droppix have announced its new LightScribe-compliant Droppix Label Maker Pro software (multi-drive version) for creating and printing multiple professional quality CD and DVD labels simultaneously.

A number of subscribers to the North American GameFly video game rental service have received letters regarding an Xbox 360 hardware fault that potentially scratches game discs, making them unplayable.

We would like to thank our readers for all the support over the last year, and here's to an excellent New Year to you all.

Seemingly jumping on the bandwagon of Datawrite's market leading disc brand, Roxio have released Toast Titanium 7.0.2, an update to their CD and DVD burning software for Mac OS X.

Hackers have developed a sneaky technique for installing pirated movie files on Windows PCs infected with the lockx.exe rootkit. Doctored copies of BitTorrent are loaded on infected machines and used to download Disney movies.

The mod chip of Microsoft Xbox 360 is likely to be released within weeks. A member of a hacker group disclosed to press that they will finish the first mod chip of Xbox360 in a couple of weeks.

DVD legend Flash has been in contact about an issue surounding NEC's LabelFlash drives. The ND-4551, it would seem, ships with no software to make use of it's label printing abilities.

The owners of a Los Angeles videogame shop and a business associate have been charged with copyright infringement for allegedly selling modified Xbox consoles loaded with pirated games.

Citing piracy concerns, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment will no longer create DVD screeners for retailers. Instead, advance copies of movies will be available on Fox‘s retail Web site for streaming.

Although second-tier makers of optical discs are making efforts to upgrade production of DVD+R/-R discs from 4x or 8x to 16x, leading makers, especially CMC Magnetics and Ritek, are expected to account for all of Taiwan's production of 16x DVD+R/-R discs next year, according to industry sources.