Video Without Boundaries, Inc., manufacturer of media mixing home entertainment devices, is demonstrating its breakthrough MediaReady 4000 convergent Internet/DVD Player to OEM manufacturers at Computex Taipei 2003. The new set-top box, offers a plethora of features and popular media entertainment options including DVD/MPEG-1/MPEG-2/MPEG-4 playback, television, email, web surfing, karaoke, CD/MP3 playback, and network storage to name some of it's features. The unit also sports a penguin under the hood with an open source, Linux-based architecture that allows it to support virtually any kind of OEM configuration or upgrade.

Toshiba and Samsung have signed a memorandum of terms covering the integration of their respective optical-disk-drive businesses in a joint venture. The two companies will now finalize details of the agreement in readiness for incorporation of the joint venture.

ASUS have announced their new DRW-0804A, a DVD±R/RW drive capable of reading data from and writing data on DVD+R/RW or DVD-R/RW formats. The drive burns both flavours of recordable discs at 8x and rewritable discs at 4x. CDs can also be burnt at 16x.

Hard-drive shipments for consumer electronics devices are set to escalate this year, as consumers choose to store more of their favorite TV shows and films on magnetic hard drives rather than on traditional media.

BMG Entertainment plans to release a compact disc today that allows consumers to download and copy a limited number of songs, the music industry's latest experiment to come up with a viable alternative to the free trading of music over the Internet.

NTI have announced CD & DVD-Maker 6.5 Platinum with new features and new packaging. CD & DVD-Maker is an all-in-one authoring program for recording data, audio, photos and video on CD-R, CD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW discs.

Pioneer have announced the new PRV-LX1 set-top recorder which is aimed at "professional video customers and serious video users". Features include "one-step conversion of existing content from videotape formats to DVD, easy authoring of video projects and archiving video tape assets to the DVD-Video format."

Advanced Micro Devices have unveiled its Athlon 64 processor. Along with added performance, the chip offers PC buyers the option of upgrading to 64-bit software -- a feature Intel's Pentium doesn't offer. Such software, which offers improved graphics capabilities, will start hitting shelves later this year.

Microsoft have announced it will shut down its Internet chat rooms in 28 countries, saying the forums had become a haven for peddlers of junk email and sex predators. From 14 October, the software giant will shut down its MSN chat services in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and much of Latin America, forcing millions of message board users to find alternative online forums to discuss the topics of the day.

Aladdin Systems is now shipping StuffIt Deluxe 8.0, a new Mac OS X version of the access and compression utility. The update lets you schedule backups and burn to CD/DVD, adds plug-ins for Adobe's Photoshop and Illustrator and offers a performance boost.

BenQ have presented its 8x DVD-Dual drive, the DW800A, at Computex. The new product, at a suggested retail price of about NT$12,000 (£215), allows 8x DVD+R and 4x DVD+RW writing, 12x DVD-ROM reading, 24x CD-R and 10x CD-RW writing and 40x CD-ROM reading.

Thanks to the firmware genius of >NIL: over at the Firmware Forum the hacked version of the new Pioneer A06 firmware version 1.07 has bee released. The hacked version now allows 2x burning to any 1x speed media, is RPC1 region free and has had the DVD-VIDEO rip speed limit removed, the drive is now enabled to rip at up to 12x speed. You can download the firmware here.

The CEO of Nvidia, Jen Hsen Huang, introduced three new products at Computex today. The product line up includes Forceware, a set of software tools to deliver digital media across a number of different platforms including desktop and mobile PCs using Geforce and Nforce products.

Software giant Symantec last month announced that it will add product activation technology to all of its consumer products, starting with Norton Antivirus 2004. The idea is to prevent large-scale piracy operations from thieves who counterfeit Symantec programs and offer them to customers on the Web. The company estimates at least 3.6 million bogus copies of its programs are sold annually. The measure may help alleviate the counterfeit problem, but the product activation itself is not exactly waterproof. The Register had no problem of finding a key generator on the Web and installing a full version of Norton Antivirus 2004 on several PCs without Symantec knowing it.

Sonic is currently rapidly expanding it's product line and announced today RecordNow! 6. This version brings the version number in line with competing products of Ahead (Nero Burning ROM 6) and Roxio (Easy CD/DVD Creator 6) and also the package of Sonic contains all tools needed to record CDs and DVDs. The software is targeted at the OEM market and according to the press release bundled by several hardware manufacturers. But the package is also available on the retail market in the United States.

Ahead has released two new patches for Nero Burning ROM v5.5.10.50 and v6.0.0.15. These patches seem to fix a bug that Nero had with the Plextor PX-708A drive which caused the drive not to finalize a DVD recording session properly. The Nero Burning ROM Patches are, of course, available for download from this site.

A Norfolk man has been arrested on suspicion of deception after claims by hundreds of customers of an internet auction site that he had taken their cheques for DVDs but failed to deliver the goods. Following an investigation by Yarmouth police, 33-year-old Adrian Bailey, who traded under the name of zippymilk on eBay UK was arrested on Friday.

Ritek, CMC Magnetics (CMC) and Prodisc Technology, Taiwan's three first-tier optical storage disc makers, all presented their new 8x speed DVD-R and DVD+R discs at Computex.

Audio technology company Dolby Laboratories have said it had purchased a small digital rights management company, hoping to cement its role in digital movie distribution.

Our regular contributor and DVD guru Flash has contacted us with further details of the new hacked version of the Pioneer firmware. He tells us, "I am happy to have been part of the testing team for this firmware. The latest firmware 1.07 just released this weekend has been hacked to allow 2x burning to any 1x speed media. RPC1 region free and DVD-VIDEO rip speed limit removed, the drive is now enabled to rip at up to 12x speed. I have successfully burnt at 2x speed to Datasafe Classic RitekG03, Choice GSC, Traxdata RITEKG03 and 3A Media. All that remains to be patched now is the Upgrade tool and that should be completed within the next 24 hours and the firmware will then be released." So watch this space, as we'll have the hacked firmware for download here very shortly.