Topic: News

Managing director of Sony Computer Entertainment in Australia, Michael Ephraim, has promised that the functionality of the forthcoming PSX console will be significantly improved before it hits markets outside of Japan in late 2004.

Four of Taiwan's leading optical disc manufacturers - CMC, Ritek, Lead Data and GigaStorage - achieved record revenues in November. A fifth company - Prodisc - enjoyed its second-highest monthly revenues.

Contract manufacturing prices for DVD recorders in Taiwan are likely to fall 20-30% in 2004 from the current average to below US$250 (£143), according to sources at Taiwanese manufacturers.

Recode is a new feature from Nero that enables users to fit a whole film on a normal DVD blank (4.7GB) without suffering terrible compression rates. Recode does this by removing unwanted material (e.g. foreign language sound tracks or bonus material) from the DVD (9 GB). Then the film is converted, but this time with an optimized bit rate so that it fits on a normal blank (4.8 GB).

Teac's new drive, the DV-W58E, is a DVD+R recorder which supports 8x recording for DVD+R media and 4x recording for DVD+RW media. The drive can of course also record CD-R and CD-RW media and does so at speeds of up to 32x for CD-R and 16x for CD-RW media.

The owner of Kazaa has taken legal action against a hacked version of the file-swapping software, threatening DMCA action against anyone hosting the download.

Independent film producers have won a major court battle when a federal judge stopped big movie studios from enforcing the so-called 'Oscars screener' ban that prevents advance copies of films being sent to movie award judges.

Scotland's most famous market, the Barras in Glasgow, is earning the reputation as Europe's epicentre of trade in counterfeit DVDs and CDs, according to a report in The Sunday Times.

Taiwan's three largest producers of optical discs - CMC, Prodisc and Ritek - indicated that they will not adjust their prices of blank CD-R discs for the first quarter of 2004.

Prices for integrated MPEG-2 chips used in DVD recorders are expected to drop from about US$40 currently to below US$30 in the second half of 2004, as a result of intensified competition and greater pressure from clients to lower costs, sources at international chip suppliers said.

Taiwan's second-tier optical disc makers are preparing to begin production of 8x DVD+R/-R discs in the first quarter of 2004. The second-tier makers include GigaStorage, Lead Data, Daxon Technology and Nan Ya Plastics. The first tier consists of three companies: CMC Magnetics, Prodisc Technology and Ritek. Nan Ya Plastics is a leader in Taiwan's plastics industry but its production of optical storage media is small in comparison to its other business divisions.

Police in Edgewater, Maryland say they have uncovered the cause of a friday night shooting incident. Robert Preston Kersey, 34, angered by his flatmates playing their X-box loudly in the early hours stormed into their living room and fired a single gunshot into the game system, disabling it, police said.

Senior officials at Philips Semiconductor, Europe's third largest chipmaker, said yesterday that the outlook for DVD recorder sales next year is rosy. "We see a great role for the DVD recorder in the home," Indro Mukerjee, an executive vice president at Philips, told reporters in Taipei yesterday. "We see DVD [recorders] becoming more pervasive as the price comes down and more and more recorders go into the home."

Xbox has proved to be the biggest hit at Sitex 2003 as more than 2,000 units of the Xbox Limited Edition Holiday Bundle were snapped up over the four-day exhibition in Singapore. The Limited Edition Holiday Bundle contains the Xbox console, 3 games (Halo, Tetris and Star Wars: The Clone Wars) and the Xbox DVD Movie Playback Kit.

Taiwan's top three producers of optical discs - Ritek, CMC and Prodisc - have started or will soon start production of 8x DVD+R/-R discs, according to the companies.

A picture purporting to be concept art of Sony's next-generation console, the PlayStation 3, has been circulated on the Internet, showing a sleek silver console with a slot-loading DVD drive.

Memorex have announced what they call 'the Memorex True 8X' 8X8 Dual Format DVD recorder. '8X8' refers to the fact the drive burns at 8X to both DVD-R and DVD+R formats. The 'True 8x' refers to their claim that "existing competitor 8X DVD drives use a process commonly known as 'overburn' to stretch 4X technology and 4X media limits. This process pushes the power of the drive's laser to its limits through firmware modification, bypassing the specified tolerance levels of the hardware components to deliver 8X DVD recording."

Philips has launched the Nexperia PNX7200, a single-chip MPEG-2 codec for DVD recording applications. The Nexperia PNX7200 enables a low system-cost solution, reducing bill of material (BoM) costs by up to 30%, according to a press release from the company today.

Sony have said it is shipping blue laser-based optical storage drives and related products to equipment manufacturers and system integrators. The new Professional Disc for DATA products include media cartridges that store up to 23GB of data, Sony said.

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