Major Japanese home electronics manufacturers such as Toshiba and Pioneer are preparing to release DVD recorders overseas according to Japanese sources. In September, Toshiba will begin marketing DVD recorders in North America, aiming to sell 10,000 units a month. It will start selling them in the U.K. in October, and in such other countries as France and Germany in November and beyond. Toshiba is targeting monthly sales of 5,000 units in each of these markets.

NewTech Infosystems has announced a new version of Dragon Burn, a disc burning utility for Mac OS X. The new 3.0 release offers new performance, stability and feature enhancements and is available now.

Philips Electronics is the latest major consumer electronics maker to license Sony's Memory Stick technology, which continues to gain support from large manufacturers and expand its potential for wider distribution.

Video on demand is a growing business for cable companies, according to a new study that predicts that 15 million cable subscribers worldwide will be paying for the feature by 2007.

Roxio has announced Toast 6 Titanium, the latest version of its industry standard CD and DVD burning application. Scheduled to ship in September, Toast 6 will cost £69.99 (including VAT) and features a host of improvements.

The recording industry is insisting its antipiracy campaign will refrain from taking legal action against small-time song swappers and will focus only on those copying "substantial" amounts of music via the Internet.

A handful of technology and consumer privacy experts testifying at a California senate hearing Monday called for regulation of a controversial technology that's designed to wirelessly monitor everything from clothing to currency.

Computer makers are increasingly looking to hard-core gamers to make up for a lackluster PC market. Gateway is the latest to try to take advantage of the trend. The company plans to release this week customized versions of its midrange and high-end desktops, which it aims specifically at gamers.

The printable online coupon (voucher) is getting more and more attention from studios looking to beef up DVD sales. "Daredevil" is the latest example -- and is also the first time Fox has embraced the fairly new technology. Within the studio's monthly e-mail newsletter, which goes out to 1 million subscribers, 20th Century Fox featured a $5-off coupon for the Ben Affleck superhero film. The e-mail went out the weekend before the DVD's street date.

Movie bosses have formed a task force to tackle a £400 million film piracy racket in the UK. Piracy increased by more than 80% in the past year, according to figures from the Federation Against Copyright Theft.

Miraizon, a San Jose- based multimedia software company, announced today the immediate availability of Cinematize 1.0 for Mac OS X. Cinematize is the first and only commercial DVD extraction tool that handles complex DVDs with multiple angles and sound tracks. With Cinematize 1.0, users can extract a clip or segment of content from any DVD and save it in a format compatible with standard movie and audio editing applications.

Taiwanese suppliers have confirmed that flexible printed circuits used in recordable DVD drives are in short supply. But they were not willing to confirm rumors of rising prices. As flexible printed circuits are an important component in recordable DVD drives, the shortage has reportedly affected shipments by Taiwanese recordable DVD drive manufacturers.

321 Studios have release a minor version change to their popular DVD X Copy Xpress. Version 3.02 has a bug fix to a drive speed error caused at the beginning of a burning session. The fix is also replicated in the bundled Xpress version in the Gold package.

Thanks to disQworld we have been given permission to use a review by red321 on that forum. The review details a number of facts and issues surrounding the popular Sony drives, including useful info on firmware and different media format capabilities. Click for Sony Drives Overview.

If you watch movies on a laptop or on an LCD monitor, you may like to check out CyberLink PowerDVD 5 Deluxe ($69 ~ £41). The newest version introduces a technology called CyberLink Eagle Vision (CLEV) that will make you wonder how you ever watched movies on LCDs before. Even CRTs benefit to some degree.

A plea agreement has been reached in the case of the college student who leaked details of DirectTV's anti-piracy technology, while elsewhere DirecTV lawyers move against a message board poster for giving hacking advice to satellite pirates.

More than a million pounds' worth of mobile phones and games consoles were nicked from a lorry parked outside a Carphone Warehouse store near Birmingham earlier this week.

The Motion Picture Association and the Malaysian government have raided operators of five Web sites suspected of selling illegal DVDs, in the film industry's latest attack on Internet piracy.

Western Europeans are being offered a new ITunes-like digital music store that is accessed through Microsoft's Windows Media Player 9 Series software. The pay-per-song service launched Thursday in the U.K. and is being branded by both the MSN Music Club and the Tiscali Music Club. The store draws from On Demand Distribution's music catalog of more than 200,000 tracks from the five major labels and a handful of independents.

In a move that may speed the death of floppy disk drives, M-Systems on Tuesday said its USB flash memory storage device can now start a PC's boot-up process.