Sainsbury's is dumping its online DVD rental service. The website will be hauled down tomorrow, with punters redirected to Sainsbury's erstwhile partner in the venture, Lovefilm.

While Microsoft's HD-DVD add-on drive for the Xbox 360 was briefly unveiled earlier this year, Microsoft's senior program manager Kevin Collins officially demonstrated the device before a DVD Forum in Los Angeles yesterday, confirming that the peripheral will ship in time for Christmas.

Nvidia has unveiled a graphics card that can only fairly be described as the ultimate, being priced a staggering $18,000 (£9,450) - the Quadro Plex 1000.

All sorts of rumours are doing the rounds regarding both the Microsoft Zune and the next incarnation of the Apple ipod.

Mitsubishi Chemical Media Ltd. announced that the first 8cm DVD+R DL for video cameras will be available in the end of August.

Verbatim said it will start selling a dual layer mini DVD-R disk at the end of the month which will hold 2.66GB of data on a single side.

Hitachi-Maxell will reportedly ship the first holographic storage media by Christmas, according to executives of the Japanese company.

EMI is to license its digital music catalog to former P2P felon Mashboxx - a sign that the major labels are blessing a "try before you buy" approach to digital music. But it also leaves the door open to other approaches.

A group of US record labels agreed to drop a music piracy case in the US after the alleged file-sharer argued that it could not be proved that she downloaded any illegal music. The case may set a precedent that undermines scores of other music piracy cases.

The first reviews of Samsung and Toshiba's next-generation DVD players have been published by leading US financial magazines. And while opinions vary on the Blu-ray format adopted by Samsung, and the rival HD-DVD format pushed by Toshiba, columnists at BusinessWeek, Forbes and Fortune all agree that a dearth of content could hold back the take-off of either technology.

AOL will unveil a revamped video portal this week, the latest move by a major Internet company to strengthen its position in this very competitive market.

Just one day after the company passed the testing requirements for the playing of HD DVD discs, CyberLink announced today that PowerDVD has passed the testing requirements for the playing of BD-ROM and BD-R/RE discs.

Japanese hardware maker Plextor will release in the middle of September the PLEXERASER, a device that will help users and enterprises avoid leakage of sensitive data stored on CD/DVD media by destroying them in a few minutes.

A lawsuit by Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. (Panasonic) against Taiwan's CMC Magnetics Corp. covers three patents related to recordable DVD technology, according to the court complaint.

Sony Media Software has announced the availability of Blu-print™ which it claims is a complete and cost-effective software solution for use in authoring DVD's in the new Blu-ray format.

LG Electronics, the one-time DVD peace-maker, has scuttled plans for a combination Blu-ray/HD-DVD player that was planned for launch this year.

Samsung have announced that it has developed the industry's highest density MultiMediaCard (MMC)-format flash-memory card, based on its most advanced multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory. It has also developed the highest performing MMC card, based on SLC (single-level cell) NAND flash, in rounding out its large portfolio of MMC memories.

Microsoft does not expect an immediate return on its outlay for its upcoming "Zune" media player, predicting a three- to five-year investment period for the new device.

Optodisc Technology and Prodisc Technology, both second-tier producers of optical discs, are facing financial pressures and are eagerly competing for orders of 8x DVD+R/-R discs by lowering OEM quotations from US$0.15 to US$0.12 per disc, according to industry sources.

European Commission competition officials are looking into the licensing strategies behind the two rival next-generation DVD formats.