Format and vendor rivalry helps drive revenues to $1Billion this year. According to new research from Strategy Analytics, DVD video recorders are set to become the next hot trend in digital consumer electronics. The findings, released to subscribers to the Broadband Device Strategies service, show that worldwide sales this year will reach 2.7 million units and be worth $1 Billion in retail revenues. By 2005, consumers will spend more on DVD recorders than on play-only DVD players. Falling DVD recorder prices are being driven by competition between different format vendors and by new suppliers in the Far East and China.

We have a glimpse of the future with a review of Sony's new BDZ-S77 Blu-ray Recorder. Available in Japan on April the 10th, and at an RRP of approximately £2,400, it may be a while before you or I get out hands on one.

Notebooks will soon gain more onboard capacity for storing data, thanks to new 80GB hard drives introduced this week. Fujitsu on Monday announced its new MHT line of notebook hard drives that offers manufacturers the ability to boost their notebooks' maximum storage capacity from 60GB to 80GB. A new drive family from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies provides a similar boost.

Ahead Software is about to drop the bomb at CeBIT. They will be expanding their product line even more to the DVD and video compression field. New Nero products include an M-PEG4 digital compression codec, a new DVD player software package and updates to there range of media manipulation suites.

Thanks to our regular contributor Flash we have a review of the most popular DVD-Rom Readers. Click here for the review.

The DVD Burner II is less than half the price of its predecessor, and offers a lot more features, but Panasonic faces an uphill battle to establish DVD-RAM in Europe. Panasonic has launched the first sub-£200 DVD-RAM drive as part of a major push for DVD-RAM acceptance in Europe, but analysts say it has little chance of breaking the hold of a rival DVD format camp.

Versatile recording device combines DVD+R/W and CD-R/W for creating video, audio and data discs. Micro Solutions has started shipping its new Hi-Speed USB 2.0 DVD+RW backpack drive. The new external backpack DVD+RW gives computer users an easy-to-use, portable, removable storage device for creating, storing and sharing their own collections of home videos, photographs and music as well as backing up data. With a DVD+R recording speed of 4x when using 4x media, the drive is among the fastest on the market.

Japanese electronics giant Matsushita (better known by its consumer brand names, such as Panasonic) announced this week world's first video solution using the WLAN technology, compatible with IEEE802.11a and IEEE802.11e standards.

The signal processor that uses 5GHz frequency for wireless operations, transfers standard MPEG-TS stream (the MPEG stream wrapper used for digital TV, etc transfers). By installing the signal processor into, for example, a (digital-only, no analog input) DVD recorder and digiTV receiver box, could allow wireless operation between these devices, so that the digibox decrypts the broadcast and sends it to the DVD recorder which then unwraps the stream into regular MPEG-2 stream and records it to a blank DVD-R disc. And the DVD recorder could play later the stream through WLAN link to a MPEG-TS capable TV wirelessly.

This will allow you to flash *ANY* DVR-104 drive to 1.20 RPC-1, while turning your drive into a "true" Pioneer DVR-104. Click here for download. Instructions: 1) Download and unzip this package. 2) Make sure you have a floppy (not necessarily blank, as the program will format it!) 3) Run Flashdisk.exe and let the program create the disk 4) Keep the floppy in the drive 4) Make Pioneer 104 the secondary master. 4) Set bios to boot from floppy. 5) Reboot. 6) Follow on-screen instructions. 7) Once completed drive is ready to accept official Pioneer Firmware.

NB This utility is for drives which have been manufactured by Pioneer and are sold under different brand names such as Compaq, Teac, and Benq.

Offering a glimpse of a faster digital future, researchers announced they have set a new Internet speed record. Scientists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center used fiber-optic cables to transfer 6.7 gigabytes of data -- the equivalent of two DVD movies -- across 6,800 miles in less than a minute. This technology could revolutionise how media is distributed.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese electronics conglomerate Toshiba Corp. said on Friday it was aiming to double its group operating profit and become the world's leader in DVD recorders under a three-year business plan.

Ricoh is pleased to announce the new MP5240A-DP - a High-Speed DVD+RW/+R writer combining high read- and write- speed, ease of use and the highest level of compatibility with DVD players and DVD ROM drives. The high speed of this drive is achieved because the Ricoh MP5240A-DP writes DVD+RW and DVD-R at 4x speed – the new generation standard from Ricoh.

According to sources, Taiwan-based AOpen has landed orders for slim-type DVD+R/RW drives from Japan’s Ricoh and has started shipping the product this month at 10,000 units per month.

Singapore has been a success story in fighting pirated movies, but an industry association warns the city-state could just be shipping the problem out of the country. "Singapore is the third lowest in terms of losses due to piracy in Asia-Pacific," said Michael Ellis, vice president and regional director of the Motion Picture Association, a U.S.-based film industry rights advocate.

Jusrt in: the multi-region hack for the new Datawrite DVD Player: click here.

Panasonic wants to make DVD-RAM the dominant video recording format in the near future. During the last week of February, the industrial giant introduced five new models of DVD-RAM recorders intended for the Japanese domestic market. Two of the recorders were designated as export models, including the DMR-E50, which was shown at the 2003 CES. That model should be available in the US in March at approximately $600 (£380) retail. By June, US retailers should also have the DMR-E60, a DVD-RAM recorder with an IEEE-1394 DV input and slots for two memory cards.

Japan's Sony Corp said on Monday it would start sales next month of the world's first DVD recorder that uses blue laser light and can pack a two-hour high-definition TV programme onto a single disc. It won't be cheap, with a retail list price of 450,000 yen (£2,500). But with digital satellite broadcasts in Japan, the United States and elsewhere now bringing high-definition TV to a small but growing number of households, Sony wants to get an early start in what could become a hot product.

Just a quick reminder about our monthly newsletter. Anyone who joins before the 31st of March will be entered into a prize draw to win a Pioneer A05 and 200 4 speedDatawrite.DVD Discs. Details of how to join our mailing list are on the left hand side of our homepage. This competition has been sponsered by Datawrite.The new brand from Datasafe Media.

LG has let slip that it will be launching a new DVD writer at Cebit. The drive will support every major standard out there: DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, DVD-RAM and CD-R/RW. Hopefully we can expect price wars soon.

Samsung Electronics announced the launch of its SU-408 CD-R/DVD-ROM combo drive for notebooks. Company officials claimed it is the lightest and slimmest optical drive to date. The SU-408 is 9.5mm thick, 25% thinner than drives generally available in the market, and weighs 145 grams, 35% less than the 220 grams for conventional models.