Maxtor announced that the company will be shipping its next-generation 3.5-inch 7200RPM 3.0Gb SATA and ATA 133 hard drives with capacity points up to 500GB in the third quarter of this year.

BenQ demonstrated its BW1000 prototype blue-laser DVD burner at the recently concluded Computex 2005 and the company plans to start volume producing the product in the first or second quarter of 2006, depending on how quickly the market for blue-laser products develops.

Press Release: This week VSO Software is releasing a new version of its DVD slideshow generator: PhotoDVD 2.0. Hot new features include DVD subtitles for adding comments, multiple audio tracks per slideshow to fit the mood of various audiences, and focus points to each picture.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez warned China yesterday to crack down hard on piracy or risk "an outbreak of protectionism" in the United States.

Swedish Bittorrent outfit, ThePirateBay.org has admitted that its shutdown yesterday was faked. Users who showed up at the site were confronted with a copyright violation notice and some thought that the site had fallen to the Swedish copyright organization responsible for maintaining intellectual property rights Antipiratbyran.

China makes 90 percent of the DVD machines sold worldwide now, and the country produced 92 million players and recorders last year - an 8 percent increase from 2003, the media firm Gobal Sources said Friday in a new industry report.

OEM prices for 16x DVD burners is expected to fall from US$45-50 (£25-£28) currently to US$40 (£22) next quarter or in the fourth quarter of this year, further forcing second-tier makers out of the market, according to associate vice president Alpha Tasi of BenQ's storage business unit.

Samsung recently produced their 100-millionth large TFT-LCD panel. This feat was been achieved in only 10 years, after the company launched an ambitious bid in the TFT-LCD market,

Nero, probably the biggest name in media burning software, have announced today that Samsung will be the first to bundle NeroLINUX with a DVD/CD burner, its TS-H552U WriteMaster. The bundle will be available as a retail kit.

The PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 aren't going to be the only consumer electronics kit with removable hard drives, at least not if Taiwanese developer Argosy Research has anything to say in the matter. At Computex 2005 in Taipei this week, it showed off an hard disk-based media player that can spit out its HDD ready for connection to a PC.

The Phantom PVR from Blue Delta initiates recording on your DVD/HDD recorder in response to triggers from a Sky DigiBox, such as autoview.

At Computex in Taipei this week, BenQ is demonstrating one of the few working Blu-ray Disc optical drive prototypes.

Sony says that it is testing CDs featuring technology from UK anti-piracy outfit First4Internet, that will allow punters to only make a limited number of copies.

InterVideo will demonstrate new capabilities in its embedded Linux multimedia boot environment for Windows laptops and PCs at Computex in Taipei this week. The company says InstantOn now supports DVD burning on select notebooks, as well as DVB-T (digital video broadcasting-terrestrial), a standard popular in Europe.

Press Release: TEAC, a premier manufacturer of DVD-Recorders, CD-RW, CD-RW/DVD-ROM Combo Drives, DVD-ROM, CD-ROM, Internal and USB Floppy Drives, External Hard Drives and USB Flash Drives announces the launch of its full line of 1x1, 1x3, and 1x7 16X DVD-R Duplicators.

Los Angeles is installing a network of surveillance cameras intended to catch street hawkers selling counterfeit goods, especially pirated copies of Hollywood movies on DVD.

Blockbuster is considering building an in-store movie download system as it seeks to fight off online film rental services.

Ricoh yesterday signed an OEM and technology transfer deal with Ritek for the production of DVD+R/-R dual-layer (DL) discs, the companies said.

Students from the university of Aarhus, Danmark and St. Petersburg State Electrotechnical University "LETI", Russia yesterday released a new Compression format specifically geared towards the compression of complete DVDs without loss of any features or noticeable quality called ratDVD.

Toshiba president Tadashi Okamura predicts that producers of the next generation of optical discs will eventually use one format because the market will not allow two formats to co-exist.