Family Media Guide has released their list of the ten most violent video games of 2005. Their rating system is based on four color-coded levels in three areas, profanity, sex and violence.

DVD players based on FVD (forward versatile disc), a red-laser high-definition DVD standard developed by Taiwan, were brought into volume production by OEM maker Idar Electronics in November of this year, according to Der-ray Huang, deputy director of the Opto-Electronics & Systems Laboratories (OES), the government-sponsored agency that helped develop FVD.

Macrovision's anti-ripping technology RipGuard, which has been implemented by DreamWorks Animation on their recently released DVD of "Madagascar", effectively works against only some popular DVD rippers, but can be successfully over-ridden by some others according to a research firm.

Speculation abounds that only 300,000 Xbox 360s will be making their way to Europe for the launch of the console on 2 December.

Pioneer has released a new firmware for its latest DVR-110 and DVR110D series of DVD burners.

InPhase Technologies, based in Colorado, has developed a commercially viable version of a holographic disc which can hold 300 gigabytes of data and can be used to read and write data 10 times faster than a normal DVD.

Pioneer and NEC will respectively showcase their Blu-ray Disc (BD) and HD-DVD burners and players at the annual IT Month fair beginning in December in Taipei.

Lite-On IT has reportedly obtained OEM orders for half-height (H/H) DVD burners from NEC through its strategic-alliance partner Sony, according to industry sources. If true, Lite-On IT stands a good chance of replacing Hitachi-LG Data Storage (HLDS) to become the largest global maker of H/H DVD burners next year.

Microsoft have admitted that some Xbox 360 owners are reporting problems with the new video game console that debuted in North America earlier this week.

U-Tech Media, the largest producer of pre-recorded discs in Taiwan, is preparing to produce, both HD-DVD and Blu-ray movie discs, with volume production to begin in the first half of next year, according to the company.

TiVo have announced they will begin testing a feature to let some subscribers transfer recorded television programming to Apple iPod digital music players or Sony's PlayStation portable devices.

US analyst firm iSuppli said it had ripped apart an Xbox 360 to find out just how much the components cost.

The highly controversial XCP digital rights management (DRM) technology bundled by Sony on 52 of its audio CD albums can be defeated by applying a small piece of tape to the discs, according to analyst firm Gartner.

Ritek accounted for 20.0% of the total global shipment volume for DVD+R/-R discs, 21.5% for DVD+RW/-RW/-RAM (rewritable) discs and 18.7% for CD-RW discs for the third quarter of this year, the largest market share of each sector, according to Japan-based market research firm Fujiwara-Rothchild.

Alera Technologies announced last week its 1:4 DVD/CD Tower Publisher LS that supports up to 4 simultaneous DVD/CD Copies, Recordings, or produces up to 4 LightScribe labeled discs.

Resident DVD virtuoso Flash has an on-going campaign to find the best discs in the 16x market. In this review he looks at Europe's best selling 16x DVD-R, the Datawrite Titanium. Why is this disc so astonishingly popular? Well Flash concludes "these discs produced almost perfect burns in all but one of my drives (The Pioneer 110D) and currently can be purchased at a very competitive price so I would advise check your compatibility and snap this media up whilst you can." You can read the full review here.

RIAA president Cary Sherman has backed Sony's use of spyware rootkits and claims that other companies do it all the time.

Panasonic will next month begin sampling what it claims is the first optical drive control chipset capable of writing to any recordable or re-writeable disc format. Well, all except HD DVD, that is.

The discs most users will likely purchase to replace DVDs over the next few years will be double-layer DVDs, while further out the Blu-ray standard appears to be winning the battle against HD-DVD, according to Ritek.

The chairman and president of Japanese electronics group Pioneer are to step down, taking responsibility for a downturn in business.