Topic: News

Ahead of the DisplayForum HDTV (High Definition Television) 2005 conference being held in Berlin in September, Sky TV (UK) has announced provisional details of the channels in its HDTV launch line-up, scheduled for some time in 2006.

Recent figures from leading European distributors and independent retailers confirm that Datawrite’s Titanium DVD-R 8x is the best selling disc available in the UK, beating all other brands 5-1 in market sales.

Press Release: Rimage has launched its first desktop CD/DVD publishing model - the Rimage 360i - into the UK market. The Rimage 360i, with a list price of £1595, can burn and label 25 CDs or DVDs an hour, and is compact enough to sit easily on a desk, so is perfect for any small business with a need for high quality disc production.

Press Release: Roxio have announced Toast 7, the 'most significant upgrade ever' to its industry-leading Mac CD & DVD burning suite. Toast 7 will be publicly available direct from Roxio starting August 31 and in stores in early September.

A street trader the authorities could not curb is banned from selling in London - and has been jailed for six months.

CMC Magnetics and Ritek will not be substantially hit by the reduced supply of DVD disc dye from Orgchem Technologies due to fire damage at Orgchem's factory on August 15, according to the two companies.

BenQ plans to offer blue-laser format DVD-ROMs drives based on the Blu-ray platform in the first or second quarter of 2006, according to associate vice president Alpha Tsai for the company's Storage Business Unit.

Sony have introduced its tenth generation of DVD burners. The internal DRU-810A and external DRX-810UL models support the industry's fastest 8X DVD+R Double Layer (DL) recording speed, and can burn up to 8.5GB of video, data, music or images on compatible media in about fifteen minutes.

A programmer called Mattan Gillon has succeeded in porting the open source x86 emulator Bochs to the Sony PSP, enabling it to run Windows 95 and Linux.

CMC Magnetics and Ritek are enjoying considerable profits from production of 8cm DVD discs for use in DVD camcorders, as few producers are able to make such discs and global demand is quickly growing, according to the two companies.

The European Union's anti-dumping investigation into DVD-R and CD-R discs produced in mainland China will produce an unfair ruling for mainland Chinese companies, Chen Huiqing, an official with the Legal Affairs Department of the China Chamber of Commerce for Import and Export of Machinery and Electronic Products (CCCME) has said.

It woul;d seem that whatever the worries about the price of the Xbox 360 console itself, the price of the launch titles might not be nearly as bad as the £45 we had been expecting.

The men behind Britain's biggest DVD piracy ring have been ordered to pay back £1.5 million of their fortune. Mastermind Sidney Austin, 48, and Dino Simm, 31, made up to £4 million selling pirate copies of films in offices, pubs and clubs across London's East End.

With Pioneer and NEC soon expected to release OEM orders for 16x DVD burners, the intense competition among Taiwan and South Korean makers is likely to cause OEM prices to drop from US$45-50 currently to as low as US$35 in the fourth quarter of this year, according to industry experts.

The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) has announced that it has selected the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) as its protection scheme for next generation DVD media. By choosing AACS, the BDA matches the rival HD-DVD (backed by the DVD Forum), which has chosen the same system.

CMC Magnetics and Ritek, the top two producers of optical discs in Taiwan, will cooperate with an investigation by the European Commission (EC) into the suspected dumping of blank optical discs into the European Union (EU), according to the two companies.

The recent decision by 20th Century Fox to use Sony's Blu-ray next-generation DVD format, rather than Toshiba's rival HD DVD, is likely to spark a lengthy format war, industry experts have warned.

Pioneer has started shipping their new DVD burner, the sexily titled DVR-110D. It features 16x DVD, 8x DL and 40x CD burning (amongst others).

The European Commission is investigating whether three Asian countries are selling recordable DVDs in Europe at below cost, a practice known as dumping.

A website has started a petition for SuperDrives in various Macs -- PowerBooks, Mac minis and iMac G5s in particular -- that fail to write DVD media at the advertised rate, instead writing at a maximum 2X speed though a faster speed may be indicated by software displays.