For those of you with money to burn we have a wee Christmas tip for you - Meridian Audio, based in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, manufactures what it believes is the world's most expensive DVD playback machine.

Panasonic has modified its existing pilot production line for single-layer Blu-ray Discs, called BD-ROM, so that it is able to replicate dual-layer BD-ROM discs with 50 gigabytes (GB) of storage capacity.

Movie sales on DVD are likely nearing their peak worldwide as more people look to computer downloads and video-on-demand to watch their favorite programming, according to a report.

The term 'podcast' has been declared Word of the Year by the New Oxford American Dictionary. The term is defined as "a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the internet for downloading to a personal audio player".

Press Release: Sony's forthcoming VRD-MC1 DVD recorder allows burning your home videos and photos directly onto DVD media, without the need for a computer.

Resident DVD master Flash has an ongoing campaign to find the best discs in the 16x market. In this review he compares two very popular mid-range discs from Datawrite - their Classic Yellow and their General Purpose Grey. Both discs score highly for being good value for money. You can find the review here.

New York may be known as show biz central, but now it's earned a much less appealing distinction: DVD piracy capital of the world. Some 50% of those bootlegged discs sold by peddlers on street corners in cities across the globe originate in NY, according to figures to be released tomorrow by the Motion Picture Association of America.

A Chicago man who bought Microsoft Corp.'s new Xbox 360 has sued the world's largest software maker, saying the new video game console has a design flaw that causes it to overheat and freeze up.

Sony BMG released a new downloadable edition of its XCP content protection removal tool.

In the ongoing battle between still-unreleased next-generation DVD formats, Fox Filmed Entertainment has already chosen sides. The studio says it sees Sony's Blu-ray as the clear winner due to PlayStation 3 support, and, unlike other studios, will not produce movies in HD DVD.

The Japanese company RockRidgeSound has started shipping a device which allows you to record DVDs and TV shows straight on to PSP (and other) memory cards. The "VRX-02" media recorder is an MPEG-4 video recorder which can record movies directly to Memory Cards, without using a PC. The device is expected to retail in Japan for approximately 17,800 Yen (£85).

An American disc manufacturer come up with a novel way to prevent scratching and produce what they modestly title 'The World's Safest Optical Disc', a disc which actually prevents scratches from occuring in the first place, rather than just adding coatings to resist scratches.

DVD meister Flash has made some important updates to his article on DVDInfoPro - the tool he uses to analyse DVD disc performance. DVDInfoPro 4.50 now incldes "Quality Rating", DVDInfoPro Toolbar and IBG ImgBurn capabilities. Impressed? Want more info? Then go to his updated review.

Crackers have already discovered a method of illegally adding MP3 storage capacity to Microsoft's super soaraway Xbox 360.

Press Release: The new edition of the popular software lets users manage their digital photo collection while providing them with a personalized website to share their memories online.

Skype - which is being acquired eBay for $2.6bn - is to offer video calls as part of the latest version of its internet telephony software.

Maxell plans to ship its first holographic storage system late next year based on 300GB holographic versatile disc media with a data transfer rate of 20MBps.

Japanese Plextor said today it plans to release another DVD burner, capable of recording on DVD+R DL media at 10x, and DVD±R at 16x. The PX-755 series will come with ATAPI and S-ATA interfaces, and is expected in the market mid January.

A Dutch company has launched a mediacenter under the name of Lamabox, which takes all its content from P2P networks such as Edonkey, Bittorrent, Fasttrack (Kazaa), Gnutella and Overnet.

Production costs for HDD (hard disk drive) DVD recorders remain high and are unlikely to drop due to few back-end LSI (large scale integration) ICs and no locally produced HDDs for leading Taiwanese makers.