As sales of recordable DVD products continue to skyrocket, feature-rich, stand-alone consumer recorders based on the DVD-RAM format are leading the way, having captured 70.2 percent of the U.S. DVD consumer recorder market in the first three months of 2003, according to leading market information company The NPD Group.

In a survey released today by 321 Studios, makers of DVD copying software, 76 percent of respondents stated that they would not be interested in renting a self-destructing DVD. This survey was conducted in response to the recent reports that Flexplay and The Walt Disney Co. home video unit, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, will launch a DVD rental program in the US this August that makes DVDs unreadable after 48 hours.

Mitsui Chemicals, Japan's fourth biggest chemical maker, have said it had decided to withdraw from the recordable disc business and focus its resouces on optical filters and other growth areas. Mitsui said in a statement it had sold its subsidiary Mitsui Advanced Media Inc -- a maker of CD-R and DVD-R recordable optical discs -- to an unlisted Italian company.

Sony Music have said it would begin selling music downloads in Britain for its top artists, making it the last among the major recording labels to join Europe's music download bandwagon. But the long-awaited announcement comes with a hitch. Sony, home to such artists as Michael Jackson and Jennifer Lopez, will not sell song downloads to European Internet users outside the UK.

Taiwan-based Ritek has maintained the number one position in the recordable DVD disc market since the second half of last year, seizing a global market share of about 30%, according to the company.

Hackers working on breaking the copy protection systems employed by Nintendo's GameCube have caused a stir by posting binary images of several Cube games to the Internet - but their claims are more than slightly exaggerated.

Iomega is taking multiformat DVD burning a step further, unveiling this week the Super DVD Drive, which combines all three rewritable DVD formats into one drive. The internal drive can write to DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and DVD-RAM and is slated for release in August. An external USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 model is scheduled to ship in September.

Prices for both half-height CD-RW and combo drives have dropped sharply since early 2003. Contract manufacturing prices for 52x half-height CD-RW drives have dropped to US$35-40 (£21-24) early this quarter from US$50-60 (£30-36) in the first quarter. The lowest contract price in June is reportedly at US$28 (£17), down by about 50% compared to early 2003, sources said.

It’s all about the AAC these days, mostly thanks to the hype that Apple iTunes have created. Poikosoft has announced an updated version 5.1.0.4 of their powerful audio CD ripper/encoder/burner with AAC support. Besides being one of the oldest and most popular audio CD rippers, the Easy CD-DA Extractor is best known for it’s powerful anti-copy protection routines.

Recently the RareWares published an open AAC / MP4 audio encoder listening test and now the results are ready for you to review.

321 Studios have released a new version of their DVD-9 to DVD-/+R tool, XPRESS. The new version, XPRESS v2.5.1 fixes couple of bugs from the previous (2.5.0) version and adds support for multiple languages.

A Hong-Kong based manufacturer is producing a portable version of Sega's discontinued Dreamcast console, featuring a built in LCD monitor and speakers - but many importers are refusing to stock the machine as it infringes Sega's copyrights.

Italian Police have swooped on a major counterfeiting ring based in Italy and have nabbed €118 million (£83 million) worth of fake software, the Business Software Alliance said. The crackdown, dubbed 'Operation Mouse' was headed up by Italian cops from the crack Green Beret brigade, aided by both the BSA and the Federation against Music Piracy. The Green Berets used dynamic IP address tracing, log file analysis, and code breaking passwords to counter anonymous email addresses and encrypted messages.

Pioneer Electronics have said they have licensed TiVo's TIVO.O digital video recording technology for use in consumer entertainment products it plans to release later this year.

The next big step it optical storage is the use of a blue laser to read and write to the disc rather than the current infrared ones. The smaller wavelength means a tighter focused spot and more pits and lands per square inch and hence more capacity. The blue laser brigade had agreed earlier in the year to co-operate and have just one standard, Blu-Ray. Toshiba and NEC obviously thought they could do better and have announced their own blue laser drive.

It was all going so well. But then one morning our resident DVD guru woke up and things just weren't happy in DVD land: the discs and drives that had been burning just dandy had gone bellyup. Not to be detered, our plucky reviewer (Flash) went through several processes to rectify this state of affairs and has written this article about his experiences to help anyone else who might have these problems.

Memory maker Micron has begun sampling what it claims is the world's first third-generation DDR SDRAM chips developed specifically for graphics applications.

TEAC’s new DVD+/-RW DVD-Recordable drive writes at 4X speed to DVD+R and DVD-R, rewrites at 2.4X speed to DVD+RW and 2X speed to DVD-RW media and plays DVD movies at 12X speed. The drive is also capable of recording to CD-R media at 16X speed, rewriting to CD-RW media at 10X speed, combined with a higher read speed for CDs at 32X speed maximum.

Press Release: Iomega have launched the Iomega DVD Internal 4X Dual Format Drive (DVD±RW/CD-RW EIDE/ATAPI), thus eliminating any confusion customers may have as to which format DVD drives to buy. This latest DVD±RW/CD-RW drive from Iomega can read and record CD-R, CD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW as well as read DVD-ROM and CD-ROM.

Both retail and contract manufacturing prices for recordable DVD drives have plunged since early this year despite tight supply, and prices of some products have declined by as much as 30% during the past month.