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VideoLAN, the group behind the popular open-source video playback app VLC, has updated the platform to version 2.1.

With the new update, the group has improved audio processing, most notably adding full support for surround sound output.

In addition, 2.1 adds 4K video playback support, although the group warns that it is in its early stages.

Finally, VLC for Android and iOS have been updated, as well, with support for more devices now included. If you have Windows Phone 8, Windows 8 or Windows RT, there are now "partial ports" of the applications available.

Get VLC here: VLC version 2.1 at Afterdawn

Samsung's Galaxy Note line, originally a surprise hit and now a standard bearer in the industry, has reached 40 million units sold.

The figure was confirmed by Samsung's general manager for Taiwan, Andy Tu, during the launch of the Note 3 in the nation.

Tu says about 10 million of the original Note were sold, followed by 30 million Note II.

Early expectations for the Note 3 are for the phablet to beat out its older brothers, but the phone has generally had less hype than in the past.

One news source says pre-orders for the device have been noticeably disappointing. However, we will have a better idea when the device actually launches.

Samsung has unveiled the pricing and availability of their "2014 edition" Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet.

The tablet, which will ship with a stylus, goes on sale on October 10th for $550, a surprising choice given Apple's next flagship iPad will sell for $500.

Galaxy Note 10.1 tablets have a high-resolution 2560 x 1600-pixel display and are powered by a quad-core Exynos processor and 3GB RAM.

"Last year's launch of the Galaxy Note 10.1 introduced the integration of S Pen capabilities to the tablet category and created a new experience for consumers," said Travis Merrill, vice president of tablet marketing at Samsung Electronics America. "We continue to evolve the Galaxy Note experience with the new Note 10.1 – 2014 Edition. With premium software features and a sophisticated design, we're delivering an exceptional and even more engaging tablet experience."

Pebble has announced that AT&T will be the exclusive carrier for the smartwatch.

The company set Kickstarter records last year by raising over $10 million, and this year began shipping to early adopters. The device is also available through Best Buy.

Starting on Friday, AT&T customers can purchase a Pebble in some retail stores and at att.com. The release should rollout to all AT&T stores by late October.

"The Pebble is fun, practical, and easy to use,"adds AT&T's director of Mobility's Accessory Portfolio, Michael Cowan. "It is simple to see why people have been clamoring to get their hands on it."

Netflix will soon to available to subscribers of Swedish pay TV service Com Hem, securing its second deal with a cable TV provider in Europe.

Swedish subscribers of Com Hem will be able to access Netflix content through their TiVo set-top-boxes from December, the company announced. Com Hem boasts more than 600,000 subscribers in Sweden.

The deal is a boost to Netflix, who already managed to secure a similar deal with Virgin Media in the United Kingdom this month.

Getting its service right to set-top boxes is an important goal for Netflix as it seeks to make it as easy as possible for consumers to use its service, rather than having to switch over to games consoles, Blu-ray players or PCs to stream video.

"We would love to reduce the friction to the end consumer, and to be available via the existing device in the home which is the set-top box," Netflix CFO David Wells said at an investor conference in New York.

An NVIDIA executive has insisted that games consoles cannot keep up with PCs for performance any longer.

Tony Tamasi, senior vice president of content and technology at NVIDIA, said that the company spends around $1.5 billion every year in R&D related to graphics, which totals more than $10 billion in the average console life-cycle. Marketers of video games consoles, like Sony and Microsoft, just can't afford that kind of investment.

Outside of that R&D advantage, there are other reasons why consoles just can't keep up anymore.

"I'll tell you why. In the past, certainly with the first PlayStation and PS2, in that era there weren't really good graphics on the PC. Around the time of the PS2 is when 3D really started coming to the PC, but before that time 3D was the domain of Silicon Graphics and other 3D workstations. Sony, Sega, or Nintendo could invest in bringing 3D graphics to a consumer platform. In fact, the PS2 was faster than a PC," he said in an interview with PC PowerPlay.

By the release of the PS3 and Xbox 360, the consoles were on par with PCs, he said, but even by that time, all of the graphics innovations were coming from PC graphics companies.

T-Mobile US has revealed it will no longer stock smartphones made by BlackBerry in its stores.

The Canadian firm has hit hard times as of late as its new BlackBerry 10-packed devices fail to reverse a decline in demand from consumers.

T-Mobile US has decided that its time to stop stocking BlackBerry devices in its stores, but says it will still ship BlackBerry devices to interested customers directly.

"Keeping stock in the retail distribution system was inefficient," David Carey, executive vice president for corporate services at T-Mobile US, told the Reuters news agency.

Carey said that BlackBerry devices are mostly bought by businesses who do not make their decisions in stores anyway.

UK regulators are investigating practices of app developers who charge in-game fees, seeking to enforce guidelines to protect consumers.

We are all familiar with "freemium" game apps by now; they are games that are free to download and use but that attempt to generate revenue via in-app purchases. There is, of course, nothing wrong with generating revenue by marketing add-ons and other premium features, but the manner in which they are offered is the subject of a UK regulatory investigation.

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is looking at "potentially unfair and aggressive commercial practices" after checking 38 very popular titles.

Among examples it disapproved of were the attempted exploitation of children by withholding previously promised rewards until they spent money. Other examples appealed to emotion, such as showing an ill virtual animal and promising they could be healed if something was purchased.

"I don't think children are always aware that when they click 'yes' it's spending money," Cavendish Elithorn, executive director at the OFT, told the BBC.

"Although parents can change their device settings to deal with some of that, many parents might not know, or it's only when they get the bill that they realise the setting was wrong. So, part of what we're keen to do is support parents in having the right tools to be aware of what their children are doing online."

A French regulatory body is investigating conditions in Apple contracts with national mobile providers that sell its iPhones.

DGCCRF is investigating clauses in Apple's contracts - such as sales volume requirements and restrictions on adverts - amidst reported complaints about the sway Apple holds in negotiations. Given the popularity of Apple's iPhone products, a mobile carrier would be at a severe competitive disadvantage if they did not offer them, giving Apple quite a lot of authority when it gets down to the details.

Clearly, France's competition authorities suspects this influence damages competition in the marketplace and probably hurts consumers in the long run.

This latest development adds to a growing number of headaches Apple is experiencing in France and indeed, the wider European market. The European Union is already probing potential antitrust violations in the market involving the distribution of Apple's i-devices.

In July, its offices in France were searched in an investigation into its relationship with wholesalers.

An airport in Alaska gas to close an aircraft access route and erect barricades because Apple's Maps app directed drivers across an actively used runway.

Fairbanks International Airport witnessed two incidents where drivers had driven along a taxiway and across a runway. It turns out the Apple Maps app on their devices had indicated that was a correct route to take.

Through the attorney general's office, the airport contacted Apple about the problem a couple of weeks ago, asking that they disable the service in the area.

"We asked them to disable the map for Fairbanks until they could correct it, thinking it would be better to have nothing show up than to take the chance that one more person would do this," Melissa Osborn, chief of operations at the airport, told Alaska Dispatch.

Apple has since changed their system to provide a message of "not available" rather than display the earlier route.

This is not the first time that the Maps app has been criticized on safety grounds. Australian police branded it "life threatening" after motorists were stranded in a national park after getting the wrong directions to Mildura, Victoria.

Valve has announced that 'Steam Machines' will be available in 2004, and it will be running a limited beta of its own hardware this year.

Just as with the announcement on Monday of SteamOS, Valve was light on details about Steam Machines, but did say that a variety of different hardware products will be available from different manufacturers - including Valve - and they would differ in specs, price and so forth. They will all run SteamOS and are all linked to bringing the Steam digital gaming system to the living room to compete with consoles.

Steam Machines will be on the market from 2014, but until then, Valve is running a limited hardware beta for its own product. It has designed a high-performance prototype that is optimized for gaming, for the living room and for Steam. It is also completely "open and upgradable."

Valve intends to ship 300 of these boxes to Steam users this year for free to be part of the testing program. If you want to apply, follow this link for details.

Valve will make another announcement on Friday, which is expected to address questions about input when a game is being streamed to a Steam Machine from a PC in another room.

After a two day delay, a Swedish appeals court has reduced the hacking sentence for Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg in half.

The hacker will now face one year in prison for his part in hacking the Swedish IT company Logica and the Nordic bank Nordea. Svartholm was convicted of hacking, aggravated fraud and attempted aggravated fraud in the original case.

In the appealed decision, the Svea court dismissed the charges related to Nordea, citing new evidence that showed that Warg's computer may have been remotely operated during the incident.

Warg was also convicted in 2008 along with the other three founders of the Pirate Bay for copyright infringement.

According to DisplaySearch and iSuppli, Microsoft's oft-rumored Surface "Mini" will ship with a 7.5-inch display, slightly smaller than the iPad Mini but larger than the Kindle Fire HD and Nexus 7 FHD.

The current Surface tablets have 10.6-inch displays, which nobody else in the industry use, so Microsoft is not new to unique sizes for their devices.

Earlier this year, developer tools for Windows 8.1 referenced 7.5-inch tablets with a 4:3 aspect ratio and 1440x1080 resolution.

The device is expected to go into mass production later this year for a 2014 release.

Earlier this month, Microsoft began offering a buyback program for iPads, giving consumers at least $200 in store credits for used tablets.

It appears that now the company is expanding that buyback to iPhones.

Just like the iPad, Microsoft will offer at least $200 for working, used iPhones.

Microsoft Stores in the U.S. and Canada will offer the credit for iPhone 4S and iPhone 5 devices.

In addition, Microsoft is also offering Visa gift cards for older Apple devices as well as Android and BlackBerry phones.

Amazon has introduced new higher-end Kindle Fire tablets, dubbed HDX, in 7-inch and 8.9-inch varieties.

The displays feature very nice resolutions, 1920x1200 at 323 ppi for 7" and 2560x1600 at 339 ppi for the 8.9" and under the hood are quad-core Snapdragon 800 processors running at 2.2GHz. Amazon boasts that they are the only company offering clock speeds above 2GHz.

In addition, the company has dropped the weight of the larger tablet to 13.2 ounces, 34 percent lighter than the second-generation Kindle Fires. The tablets will launch with Fire OS 3.0, which upgrades and improves on many of Amazon's popular features such as X-Ray, Cloud Collections and Goodreads. The company says battery life is much improved, as well, with up to 11 hours of mixed use, and 17 hours of reading.

Amazon has added dual stereo speakers with Dolby Digital Plus audio and virtual 5.1 multi-channel surround sound, and dual cameras, 2MP/8MP with 1080p video recording capability.

"It's been just two years since we introduced the first Kindle Fire, and the team is innovating at an unbelievable speed," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Founder and CEO. "2.2 GHz processor, 339 ppi display, new 34% lighter design, Fire OS 3.0, and new exclusive features like the Mayday button, X-Ray for Music, Second Screen, and Prime Instant Video downloads. We've worked hard to pack this much hardware, innovation, and customer obsession into these prices."