One of the chief copy protection mechanisms employed by Blu-ray discs that is unemployed by HD DVD is called ROM-Mark, which basically uses unique identifiers that can only be hard coded on discs by authorized duplicators — in other words, it's that per-disc physical watermarking that makes copying (although not necessarily ripping) Blu-ray movies just that much harder, Which is partly why we're a little dubious about this new app, BRDGen, which claims to be able to make and edit (and export for recording) PlayStation 3 compliant disc images. Anyone with a Blu-ray recorder, PS3, and a healthy…

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Dolby presents the Beowulf trailer with a Dolby Headphone audio track. 5.1 surround sound through any pair of headphones. Dolby Headphone technology allows users to wear any set of headphones and listen to music, watch movies, or play video games with the dramatic surround effects of a 5.1-channel soundtrack.

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HD DVD's trouncing Blu-ray in the Euro hi-def formats war, but Sony's about to reveal its secret weapon

With the latest rumours being that Sony's imminent Blu-ray player debut in the UK, the BDP S1E, will cost a eye watering £1000, you might think that HD DVD would be clearing up over here.And you'd be right. With HD DVD offerings from the likes of Toshiba already nudging towards the magic £300 mark  – the HD-E1 (pictured) was last seen the right side of £336 at Dixons – the Microsoft-backed format has been winning the price and sales wars.Latest figures for January show that European HD DVD film titles out-sold their Blu-ray rivals by five to one. Tosh's bargain …

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Even though the fastest Blu-ray burner you can buy today maxes out at just a 2x write speed, media manufacturer TDK is already looking towards a wonderful future filled with 4x and faster drives writing 200+GB of data to 8-layer discs. Now that they're gotten the capacity part down, the company is hard at work on discs that won't take five hours to burn, and the first fruit of this labor — a 25GB platter rated at 6x — was recently unveiled at Japan's Eighth Data Storage Expo — although don't expect it to hit stores until next year. They were also showing off that 100GB quad-layer BD-R we he…

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Blu-Ray, the next-generation movie disc format that rivals High-Definition DVD, has another powerful new backer. But does the world need a DVD replacement?

The war over the format for next-generation DVDs has taken another interesting turn, with Warner Brothers defecting from the HD-DVD camp. Well, not quite defecting. More a case of hedging its bets by announcing it'll support both Sony's Blu-Ray format and its previous disc of choice, Toshiba's HD-DVD. Warner's decision follows a similar move by Paramount last month.You see, there's currently a big spat over the future of video discs. Why? Because you can't fit a full movie's worth of high-definition video onto a normal DVD – and the increasing popularity of high-def TVs means that a new disc…

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