In order to control distribution of movies and prevent piracy, many most DVDs are region protected to ensure that they cannot be played outside of their region of issue. In short, this means you can't play American DVDs on an Australian player and vice versa. To further complicate the matter, PC and notebook DVD drives are locked to the least region set with DVD drives correspondingly locked after five changes of region code by the user.

Digital content and cheaper chips driving market.

Want to skip the Christmas crowds, or nab a once in a lifetime bargain? Online shopping could be the answer. Tim Dean looks at the glory and the pitfalls.

When everything from your movie collection to your photo album is digital, why would you want to watch it all on a tiny monitor with tinny speakers while your big television and surround sound sits idle in the lounge room?

But researchers warn of customer apathy and other risks.

But Tiananmen Square still never happened.

Closed source software seen as greater security risk.

Big Blue moves east.

This unit plays more than just your rental movies and existing DVD discs, it's also capable of VBR MP3, WMA, JPEG, PhotoCD, HDCD Xvid, AVI, MPEG layers 1, 2, and 4 play, the latter of which is more commonly referred to as DivX, named after the compression codec.

Region's chip foundries dominate global market.

Security software is one of Israel's specialities and it's easy to see why. The region has a volatile history and a strong military tradition. In fact, Israel hasn't stopped warring with its neighbour

Presumably the ones who bought iPhones.

Still facing strong competition from cable and satellite.

18 million handsets sold as customers demand new features.

Computer graphics chip maker NVIDIA has announced the opening of a new design centre in Bangalore, India as part of its planned expansion into the Asia Pacific region.

Trans-Pacific Express carries five terabit connection between superpowers.

Despite the fact it's aimed at professional users - corporate and event videographers and advanced home-video enthusiasts are the target market - Ulead DVD Workshop 2 retains many of the ease-of-use features for which the company has become known.

Many of the Photo-Paint 10 functions for tweaking images are designed to work with a selected area of the image or a mask, as well as the whole image. This means you can concentrate the effect of a fi

Use intellectual property to promote growth, not make money.

NEC and Northwestern University team unveil compression technology.