Topic: News

Philips have said that they would make more broadband enabled devices, after inking deals with four of Europe's main telecoms. In an attempt to differentiate their product line from those of rival companies, Philips is developing devices such as PDAs, DVD recorders and flat-screen TVs, with built-in broadband Internet connections. The Dutch company aims to sell these products in the UK, Belgium, Germany and Italy, where the likes of BT, Belgacom, T-com and Telecom Italia respectively will provide the high-speed Internet hook-ups.

Slated to hit the market on November 14, Sharp's SD-PX1 is an all-in-one digital theater system which packs a 1-bit digital amplifier, a DVD player, and a decoder into a compact and stylish body with dimensions of 368x243x116mm.

The revolutionary DivX technology first emerged as a spoof of a failed scheme of the same name and has slowly usurped the MPEG-4 initiative. For all practical purposes, it has become MPEG-4. DivX can turn a 4.7GB DVD into a 700MB disc with no degradation in quality. The technology has been flying under the radar for a while, but that will end in a few months, when DivX-compatible DVD players will flood the market.

A group of small Webcasters on Wednesday filed an antitrust suit against the Recording Industry Association of America, alleging that the trade association tried to push independent music stations offline.

ATI seems to have a real FX5900 Ultra killer or maybe a better word is outperformer this time round. Its R300 that evolved to R350 and now one more time to the R360 architecture is still based on the old 0.15µ (micron) process but will give NvIdiA a run for its money. The newest graphics card from ATi has recently scored 7000+ in 3D Mark03.

Many of the Web's finest moments have been created by people with a little too much time on their hands and an overactive imagination. And The Real Getaway Tour is no exception. Daniel Hansson and friend, known collectively as The Geeky Boys, grew tired of the realistic rendering of their home town London in the PlayStation 2 game Getaway and decided to get out there and do it for real (an unusual twist for a pair of gamers).

I-O Data has introduced a new DVD/TV tuner package which turns the PC into a personal DVD recorder. Scheduled to hit the market in mid-September, I-O Data's DVR-ABN4/TV packages a DVD+R/RW/DVD-R/RW multi drive, a video capture PC board, and easy-to-use video authoring software.

Among the Sony camcorder announcements today, Sony also provided more details on the new line of Sony DVD camcorders which were originally announced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January. The Sony DCR-DVD100, DCR-DVD200 and DCR-DVD300 will apparently be available in October. The new camcorders can record on both DVD-R and DVD-RW discs.

Plextor, one of the leading companies for the development and production of CD-ROM drives, CD-Recorders and CD-ReWriters is expanding its range with its first Dual Format external drive: PX-708UF, which writes DVD's at 8-speed, rewrites at 4-speed using the DVD plus format. With the DVD minus format, this drive writes at 4x and rewrites at 2x.

Intensified competition among suppliers have pushed prices for DVD player single-chip solutions down to US$7 recently, compared to US$8 in the second quarter, according to sources.

Toshiba have announced new optical drives for mobile computers and portable projectors with updated features. The company's storage device division said its new optical disk drives will provide higher media recording speeds for mobile computers.

Security software and service company Symantec has added a controversial type of antipiracy technology to the new version of its main virus-zapping program. Norton Antivirus 2004, which Symantec announced Monday for release next month, will use product activation, an increasingly common technique to tie a copy of an application to a particular PC. Symantec plans to add activation to the rest of its consumer software line over the next year.

The US Department of Justice have said they have accepted a guilty plea in a criminal copyright case involving the former leader of a Net music piracy group called the Apocalypse Crew. The defendant in the case, 21-year-old Mark Shumaker, faces a prison sentence of up to five years and a maximum fine of $250,000 (£157,998). Shumaker helped coordinate the supply and release of albums online before they hit retail stores and ran the Apocalypse Crew's Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel, federal investigators charged.

The BBC's director general has floated plans to make its television content available on the Internet for free download. The BBC plans to digitise its archive and let people download television programs, according to a recent speech by Greg Dyke.

Targeting graphics and digital editing professionals, Maxtor will release a new version of its external hard drive with one-touch backup capability. The upgraded product comes in a sleek aluminum casing, with new features such as expanded system backup, the ability to launch applications with the drive's main button and retooled power management.

Adobe have announced the release of Adobe Video Collection, a new package that combines several of the company's video-related applications. The standard version of the collection includes the Premiere Pro editing applications, the After Effect 6.0 special effects program, the new Audition sound editing package and the Encore DVD authoring tools. The professional version of the collection adds version 7.0 of Photoshop, Adobe's popular image-editing application.

The California Supreme Court ruled Monday that a Web publisher could be barred from posting DVD-copying code online without infringing on his free speech rights. The state's high court overturned an earlier decision that said blocking Web publishers from posting the controversial piece of software called DeCSS, which can be used to help decrypt and copy DVDs, would violate their First Amendment rights.

Toshiba has launched what it claims is the thinnest, lightest and smallest hard drive-based portable music player yet to grace the market. And, looking at the pictures the company supplied, we have to say, probably the sexiest one too.

In Hollywood, 2003 is rapidly becoming known as the year of the failed blockbuster, and the industry now thinks it knows why. No, the executives are not blaming such bombs as The Hulk, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle or Gigli on poor quality, lack of originality, or general failure to entertain. There's absolutely nothing new about that. The problem, they say, is teenagers who instant message their friends with their verdict on new films - sometimes while they are still in the cinema watching - and so scuppering carefully crafted marketing campaigns designed to lure audiences out to a big movie on its opening weekend.

Hitachi have announced that it is now shipping qualification samples of its 4GB Microdrive to consumer product manufacturers worldwide. The one-inch diameter drive features a data transfer rate that represents a 70 percent increase from the previous-generation Microdrive. The new drive will also continue its tradition of offering a significantly lower cost-per-megabyte than competitive solid-state memory solutions.