The competing Blu-Ray and HD-DVD camps are quietly considering two proposals that could avert a format war and create a single next-generation DVD standard. A source close to the effort said a final decision may not be announced for as long as two months.

Dropping prices of DVD burners is driving replacement of CD-ROM drives and CD-RW burners with DVD-ROM drives, DVD burners and Combo drives (combination of DVD-ROM and CD-RW), according to major Taiwanese makers of optical disc drives (ODDs).

Two Americans have been sentenced to jail in Shanghai for selling pirated DVDs over the Internet, China's state-run media have reported.

A British judge today ordered five ISPs to name another 33 music file sharers. The individuals concerned had uploaded more than 72,000 music files to the internet, according to a statement by the BPI (British Phonographic Industry), which sought the court order as part of its broader legal offensive against illegal downloading on P2P networks.

In December 2004, Datawrite launched a competition to help young British art students get their 'foot in the door' of the art world and gain unprecedented exposure for their creative talents. They were asked to produce funky, original designs to be printed onto premium quality blank media and sold throughout the UK and Europe. The response was phenomenal! Datawrite received thousands of entries of the highest calibre. Ten winning designs were chosen and are set to take the optical media world by storm!!

For more information on this new range visit www.discs.co.uk.

Note:
According to our sources, due to prohibitive printing costs, Datawrite are only producing a very limited quanity of this product. So it might be worth buying a pack to stick in the attic for some future date with Ebay ;-)

InPhase Technologies have announced that it has successfully demonstrated a data density of 200 gigabits per square inch, significantly higher than any other optical format.

Among DVD+R/-R discs of varying speeds, 16x discs will account for the largest portion in terms of shipment in beginning the third quarter of this year at the earliest, according to Taiwanese makers of optical discs.

Press Release: Microboards have unveiled a manual duplicator that records ten full DVDs in under seven minutes. The unique controller architecture used by the CopyWriter Tower makes this tower-style disc copier the fastest available on the market.

At a three day press event in Bordeaux Sony this week announced it is going to add Blu-ray and DSD (Direct Stream Digital) to its Vaio series of PCs and notebooks.

A Finnish based company called Viralg is predicting the end of unauthorised file sharing. The company claims their patented “overwrite” technology can mix files on a P2P network, corrupting downloads and rendering them worthless to play.

The tenth DVD Conference in Asia, an annual meeting of the DVD Forum organized by the Opto-Electronics Systems & Laboratories (OES) of the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), was held in Taipei on April 12, with an agenda focusing on progress of standard specifications, licensing, certifications and market outlook of HD-DVD, a next-generation blue-laser DVD format developed by Toshiba and NEC.

DVD visionary Flash has posted in his latest eagerly received review: Ritek 16x Silver DVD-R. They might not be the sexiest discs on the planet but Flash thinks "this media has produced good burns with perfect speed curves each time and is a very good media at 12x speed burning".

Apple Computer blew away Wall Street expectations Wednesday by reporting its second-quarter earnings soared six-fold to $290 million thanks to booming sales of iPods and computers. Revenue rose 70 percent.

British sources have confirmed that the next generation Xbox is indeed called Xbox 360, that the logo is a simple, round nexus, and that the console itself has a concave design - and a platinum white finish.

The recording industry intends to sue hundreds of college students accused of illegally distributing music and movies across Internet2, the super-fast computer network connecting leading universities for researching the next generation of the Internet, industry officials said Tuesday.

Music fans could soon be able to download their favourite tunes over digital radio under plans from UBC Media. The owner of Classic Gold analogue and digital stations is investing in technology to let listeners push a button on their radio and transfer songs to their computer.

The US Congress is pondering laws to force digital music companies to use a single, unified DRM system, in order to allow songs purchased from any download service to run on any hardware.

In the Blu-ray/HD-DVD battle, it looks like the Blu-ray side has been the first to blink. Ryoji Chubachi, Sony's president-elect, said at a news conference last week that he would be open to talking to the DVD Forum to merge Sony's Blu-ray format with the Toshiba-developed and Forum-backed HD-DVD format.

Ritek and CMC Magnetics are preparing to begin production of HD-DVD (High-Density Digital Versatile Disc), a blue-laser DVD standard of the next generation developed by Toshiba and NEC, discs in the third or fourth quarter of this year, according to the two companies.

Microsoft have said it would unveil the next generation of its Xbox video game console in a May the 13th special on cable music and entertainment channel MTV.