June 4 - 2:20pm EDT   Today's featured deal of the day from DealNN is on the Sharp Aquos Blu-ray player from OneCall.com. It is regularly priced at $249.95, but has been reduced to $219.95, and a fathers day promo code drops the price again by $20 to $199.95 making this the lowest total price we could find on this Blu-ray player by about $45. The Sharp Blu-ray player features 1080p HD-resolution and provides playback of Blu-ray discs as well as DVDs and CDs with full up-conversion. [full story]

May 15 - 12:45pm EDT   Toshiba has announced that it has filed suit against several companies, including Imation, over DVD patents. The accusations surround DVD format specifications and standards accepted by the DVD Forum. Toshiba claims the companies infringed on patents by manufacturing or distributing recordable media without first establishing licensing agreements. [full story]

February 5 - 11:15am EST   Disc Cover 2.3 ($35) helps users create CD and DVD labels, covers, tray inserts, folding booklets, and more. The application includes over 250 professionally made designs that users can customize with their own images or with some of the included images. Along with several performance enhancements and fixes the update includes support for DiscT@2 which allows to etch text and graphics on the data side of DVD discs using a LabelFlash-enabled drive. [Download - 52.3MB] [full story]

November 4 - 8:35pm EST   EZQuest has unveiled its latest Mac hardware product, the internal Phoenix Blu-ray Super Drive 6X Rewriter upgrade kit. Owners can used the drive to produce their own Blu-ray movies. Recording, rewriting, and playback is supported for Blu-ray, HD-DVD, DVD, and CD formats. The device features a 4MB buffer for writing, and uses integrated buffer under-run protection. Files, folders, movies, or other content can be dragged and dropped directly from the Mac desktop to be written on the 50GB capacity discs. [full story]

August 29 - 1:35pm EDT   LG's Swedish website has revealed the company's new DVD player, the DVS450H. The player separates itself from ordinary readers using a top-mounted loader and eliminating all but a thin slice of the cabinet for controls. To give users options of showing off its new player, LG ensured the DVS450H can be mounted vertically or horizontally, as well as on walls. [full story]

August 29 - 10:00am EDT   20th Century Fox has announced a slate of new movies in its Digital Copy program. Digital Copy is a partnership with Apple, and bundles a digital version of a movie with its DVD counterpart; the file is pre-formatted for iTunes, making it convenient to sync with devices like iPhones and Apple TVs, although the file is not DRM-free, as with a normal DVD rip. Digital Copies can also be loaded onto Windows Media-compatible devices. [full story]

June 26 - 4:35pm EDT   A Tohoku University research team at the Institute of Multidisciplinary Research for Advanced Materials claim to have developed a DVD that is capable of holding 42GB of data, or nearly 9 times as much as a standard DVD. The Japanese researchers achieved this feat by using V-shaped as opposed to flat pits on the DVD's recording surface, which allows for more data-recording space. The same method can be applied to CDs as well. [full story]

June 4 - 12:25am EDT   Westinghouse Digital on Tuesday unveiled four new 1080p-capable LCD TVs, as well as several other multi-purpose LCD TVs, including its portable and all-in-one units. New to the 1080p TX lineup are the 42-inch TX-42F430S, the 47-inch TX-47F430S, and the 52-inch TX-52F480S, which feature an integrated ATSC/NTSC/ClearQAM Tuner, and 1080p resolution through all high-definition connectors, including component and VGA. [full story]

May 27 - 4:30pm EDT   LaCie on Tuesday unveiled a new Blu-ray disc burner, capable of writing to single-layer media at 4x speeds across Firewire or USB 2.0. The drive retains LaCie's durable d2 aluminum casing and boasts whisper quiet operation while burning 25GB and 50GB BD-R and BD-RE media, in addition to all common CD and DVD formats. LaCie is offering the dual-interface Blu-ray burner for $650, available from LaCie directly and authorized retailers. [full story]

May 22 - 6:30pm EDT   Other World Computing on Thursday unveiled low-cost Superdrives for almost any Mac released within the last decade, offering 48x CD burning and LightScribe labeling technology. OWC claims the drives are quiet, and do not require any extra software to be installed with the drive. Users can also write to dual-layer DVDs at up to 12x speeds, while single-layer discs can write at up to 20x. OWC is selling the Superdrives starting from $35. [full story]

May 5 - 6:30pm EDT   Every Mac with a Superdrive can burn your iTunes music files to a CD, your iMovie video files to a DVD, and your digital photographs (or any files and folders) to both a CD/DVD. However, if you want to do more than ordinary CD/DVD burning, you may want to look at Roxio’s latest version of Toast Titanium 9, a multi-purpose optical media authoring application that can burn CDs/DVDs and do a whole lot more. [full story]

March 21 - 10:20am EDT   Equinux has updated two of its key programs, MediaCentral and VPN Tracker. MediaCentral operates as a kind of Mac equivalent to Windows Media Center, combining the playback of several types of media within one program; users can not only load music, photos and videos, but DVD movies and TV, the latter offering the option of IPTV or digital broadcast. Version 2.7 retools the TV engine for better video quality and faster channel switching, as well automatic timeshifting when hitting pause. The software costs $30. [full story]

March 10 - 9:15am EDT   Lionsgate, the independent studio most recently responsible for movies such as Rambo and The Bank Job, has announced that it will be the next company to support Apple's iTunes Digital Copy program. The program puts iTunes-formatted versions of movies on retail discs, as an accompaniment to the standard version; while these videos are restricted by Apple's DRM protection, it provides a quick and legal method of synching movies with computers, iPods, iPhones and Apple TVs. The first company to support Digital Copy was Fox, with the release of Family Guy: Blue Harvest on DVD. [full story]

February 14 - 1:30pm EST   Other World Computing (OWC) today unveiled new Superdrives and CD burners for all Mac computer models. The company's drive upgrade -- the 20X DL SuperDrive DVR-115D -- reads as well as writes DVDs, CDs, and dual-layer DVDs. Capacity for dual layer DVDs is 8.5GB at speeds of 10X; regular DVDs for 4.7GB capacity at 20X; and CDs for 700MB at 40X. "For most Macs, this is an incredibly easy upgrade and one of great return for anyone who's currently making or planning to make their own DVDs or CDs," OWC said. The new drives are priced from $30 and up. [full story]

February 1 - 11:40am EST   MCE Technologies today debuted a new slim slot-loading 8X SuperDrive upgrade (site not updated) for Apple's MacBook and 15-inch MacBook Pro notebooks. The drives write to DVD+R DL (Double Layer) as well as DVD-R DL, and are designed to replace the original 4X and 6X SuperDrives in Apple's stock systems. Built to accommodate the slender form factor of Apple's MacBook and MacBook Pro, the drive upgrade ships for $200 with all required tools and instructions to perform the upgrade at home. [full story]