"My ongoing coverage of the inter-DVD industry slapfighting is undertaken entirely because of morbid curiousity. I LOVE it when industries fight like junkyard dogs over minor things, while people are starving, New Orleans and Texas are flooded, and wars are raging all over.

However, not only are people reading it, they're emailing us about it. I got this next piece from a PR firm after my last update. I don't know the technical bits enough to verify them. All the talk of gigapixels or whatever make my eyes glaze over, and that makes reading hard. If this is as good as I think it is, though, it doesn't matter who wins, because the consumer loses either way. Read and judge for yourself. It's a worthwhile read.

DVD Insider 08.21

It has been three-and-a-half years since next generation DVD was first announced (actually CES of 2002) by Sony. To regain its position as the guides to the future, the DVD Forum adopted a different blue ray technology approach AOD (now known as HD DVD) and thus even before present DVD products had gained widespread use, the warlords battle for royalties began anew.

While the two “standards” share blue laser technology shorter wavelength and a more precise ability to focus the laser there are enough differences to make it obvious to even the most casual Tech Watch reader to realize that a compromise solution will be difficult.

More importantly it will be too complex and too expensive to simply take the route Sony took in 2004 of throwing all of the technologies into a single burner and let the consumer choose the write/read solution he or she wants to use. Because the construction of the media and writing layer for BD and HD DVD are completely different between the two the chance for a compromise solution one where both sides save face appears to be slim to none!

Sony has Blu-ray all keyed up for the Playstation 3 (Microsoft just endorsed HD DVD for the Xbox 360), and Blu-ray offers 25GB per layer. HD DVD offers 15GB per layer but reads and writes data at the same depth as DVDs, enabling possibly better backward compatibility. Recently, Toshiba demonstrated a 45GB triple-layer HD DVD. TDK showed a 100GB quad-layer Blu-ray. JVC demonstrated a 33.5GB disc with a 25GB Blu-ray layer combined with 8.5GB DL DVD layers. It's nothing but a blue mess!

The industry appears to have learned nothing from the years of revenue lost in the standards battles. As a result, IDC in their aggressive DVD forecasts show good growth for DVD±R with burner prices now as low as $40 at retail and media in the 30 50 cents range but virtually no sales for blue laser. In the war of news releases from the two sides, the movie studies are fairly evenly split on the support of either BD or HD DVD. All of the copy protection schemes they're pushing to have built into the next-gen discs are almost maliciously attacking consumer wishes. The concept of fair use is all but an anachronism.

Fortunately for software and content developers, both sides have agreed on the same codecs which will simplify development for both approaches. Both will implement MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 and Microsoft's VC-1. Both can support today’s 480p and 480i content presentation which is not a reason to buy a new digital TV set. However if you have an HDTV set with 780p/i and 1080p/i video viewing you may be persuaded to “need” blue laser recording." [more]