Today is the day that once a year celebration of all things good and free, International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Yes, that one day where you can walk up to a co-worker and yell 'Aaaaarh!' at the top of your lungs and not get fired, mutter 'shiver me timbers' in an elevator, and talk about poopdecks in straight bars without much problem.

A US-based retailer who sold illegally modified Xbox consoles pre-loaded with pirate games has been sentenced to 5 months in prison and fined almost $250,000 (£140,000).

In a bid to cut costs for local electronics makers, Chinese researchers plan to develop a version of the next-generation HD-DVD optical disc format specifically for China that will include support for a locally developed video compression technology, called AVS (Audio Video Coding Standard), according to a researcher involved with the project.

At the Tokyo Game Show 2005 Microsoft confirmed that the Xbox 360 will be region locked for both games and DVD movie playback. This means thatusers will not be able to play games or watch DVD movies from another region other than the the one their Xbox 360 is locked to.

Ted Sugano, a representative from Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic), arrived in Taiwan on September 15 in an attempt to win support for the DVD-RAM format from major makers of optical disc drives (ODDs) and optical discs.

Microsoft has confirmed the official release date of the Xbox 360, which is due to be released in America two days before the traditional Thanksgiving consumer rush on November 22nd. The console will be rolled out from there to the UK on Friday, December 2nd and in Japan Saturday December 10th.

Leading producers of DVD discs in Japan, including Maxell, TDK and Mitsubishi Chemical, are under pressure to cut costs and will sooner or later outsource production to OEM makers in Taiwan and India-based MBI, according to the Japanese Nikkei News.

The DVD Forum has published the latest resolutions announced in the 31st meeting of its most significant organization, the Steering Committee. The specifications of the forthcoming dual-layer recordable HD DVD (HD DVD-R DL) format as well as the 6/8-X recording speed for DVD-R DL and 16x for DVD-RAM were approved.

A huge haul of fake DVDs with a street value of about £1m has been seized in a raid at a house in west London. Police said the operation in Park Lane, Southall was the largest uncovered in Western Europe and was capable of producing 50,000 fake DVDs a day.

Both the Recording Industry Ass. of America, the RIAA, and Hollywood lobby group the Motion Picture Ass. of America, the MPAA, have signed up to the Internet2 project which is exploring high-bandwidth DRM.

Sony is recalling 3.5m faulty power adaptors which were sold with the black PlayStation 2 slimline version between August and December 2004.

Although Toshiba has recently admitted that it may delay its HD DVD launch until 2006, Mark Knox, an HD DVD advisor for Toshiba, was quoted as saying that reports of the format's delay are greatly exaggerated and that a 2005 launch is still a possibility, according to Ultimate AV.

The number of pirate DVDs made in the UK rose 133% in the first half of 2005, anti-piracy campaigners have said. The Federation Against Copyright Theft (Fact) seized 386,569 UK-made fake DVDs from January to June, as UK seizures of pirate DVDs from abroad fell.

Toshiba has developed a networked DVD recorder boasting advanced features such as the ability to set up and record TV programmes via email. Toshiba's newly developed RD-XS54 Multi-Drive (DVD-Ram, DVD-R and DVD-RW) recorder, which ships with a 250GB hard disc drive, can be connected to other devices over a home Ethernet network.

Samsung claims it has developed a 16-Gbit NAND Flash memory chip. Built in a 50 nm process, the new chip sets a new record in the storage density race and could be incorporated into memory cards with up to 32 GByte capacity.

Dolby Laboratories have announced a new advancement in lossless audio technology, the Dolby TrueHD. TrueHD is designed to be paired up with the most recent developments in high-definition optical disc formats, says Dolby. Apparently, the audio is equal to that of the "highest-resolution studio masters currently available."

Microsoft plans to cooperate with Taiwanese software and hardware companies to jointly promote Taiwan's next-generation DVD format, the forward versatile disc (FVD), an alternative format to Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.

Press Release: Verity Systems have released the latest in their range of on-demand disc duplicating system with the new CopyStack 100. Designed specially for office and home applications, the CopyStack 100 is described as the ideal solution for desktop duplication. Its compact design means that it will comfortably fit into any workstation environment and as no PC connection is required, it will happily copy up to one hundred DVDs or CDs unattended whilst the user continues to work.

Toshiba is debuting a portable LED pocket projector at the Internationale Funkaustellung (IFA) 2005 in Berlin, with the company stating the projector can be used to connect to 3G multimedia handsets.

Steven P. Jobs, Apple's chief, has taken the wraps off of two new products. One is a new iPod model - the iPod nano. Its two models priced at $199 (£110) and $249 (£137) hold 500 and 1,000 songs in memory; there's no hard drive, which helps the nano crank out 14 hours of music on a charge.