The development of a couple of new DVD formats allows true high-definition programming to be available on optical discs. A number of companies have banded together into two groups with competing standards for these next-generation, high-def disc formats:
- Blu-ray: Led by Sony, the Blu-ray camp has developed a high-definition-capable disc format that's also being supported by Apple, Dell, HP, Panasonic, Pioneer, Thompson, Philips - and a whole bunch of other companies.
- HD-DVD: The competing format championed by Toshiba, HD-DVD also has an illustrious list of companies behind it, including Microsoft, HP, Intel, NEC, and others.
Yep, it looks like we're heading into another format war, in which two competing groups of companies agree to disagree and push two different standards on the market. This isn't the first format war to hit the home theater industry - if you recall the early days of VCRs, Sony and Matsushita duked it out over the Betamax and VHS formats.
Sometimes, one format wins out over another (for example, VHS over Betamax); other times, neither one becomes a clear winner. In the case of high-def DVDs, it's still way too early to tell.
If one or the other format really becomes dominant, all of the studios will eventually begin to sell movies in that format, no matter which camp they're in today.
Betting on Blu-ray
Blu-ray is a very capable disc format - Blu-ray discs have a lot of storage space. Storage space is the key for high-definition disc formats simply because HDTV takes up as much as nine or ten times the storage space (for any given length of video) than does a standard-definition DVD-quality video. So you really need to be able to cram a lot of bits on the disc to make high definition work.
Blu-ray can hold a lot of bits and bytes - up to 50GB of data (more than five or six times what a standard DVD can hold). That 50GB capacity is for a dual-layer disc; a single-layer disc can hold 25GB of data - enough space for at least two hours of high-definition programming. Blu-ray discs can hold even more data if the disc is encoded using a more efficient codec (such as MPEG 4 rather than MPEG 2), which means you can potentially fit four hours of high def on a single-layer disc.
Blu-ray discs support all of the same audio formats that a regular DVD supports but can also include the latest and greatest from Dolby - Dolby Digital Plus and Dolby TrueHD.
Blu-ray gets its name from the color of the laser that reads the discs inside a Blu-ray player. Instead of the traditional red laser used by CDs and "regular" DVDs, Blu-ray uses (you guessed it!) a blue laser. The blue laser has a smaller wavelength and is more suited to reading the physically smaller spots on the disc itself. This ability to focus in on smaller spots allows the disc to have more spots - and more spots means more data.
Doing it with HD-DVD
Toshiba's competing format, HD-DVD (high-definition DVD) is in many ways similar to Blu-ray. Like Blu-ray, HD-DVD supports high-definition video. And like Blu-ray, it uses a blue laser to focus in on smaller spots on the DVD itself.
The big difference is that HD-DVD is more similar to a traditional DVD in the way that the disc itself is constructed and in the way that a movie (or other data) is stored on the disc. This similarity is a double-edged sword - it makes HD-DVD discs less expensive to manufacture, but at the same time it limits the absolute storage space on a single disc. HD-DVD discs can hold about 15GB of data on a single-layer disc and 30GB on a dual-layer disc. So you get about 40 percent less video on a disc with HD-DVD than you'd get with Blue-ray.
When you look at the relatively small capacity of HD-DVDs, you might think that Blu-ray is a slam dunk, simply due to its apparent technical superiority. Well, that may or may not end up being the case. Because HD-DVD discs are quite similar to regular DVDs, they can actually be produced on the same manufacturing lines without too much retooling. This is a big deal, especially when you stop and think about how many DVD production lines there are in the world, pumping out hundreds of millions of DVDs every year. Blu-ray requires a much more expensive factory upgrade - something that may slow the availability of Blu-ray discs.
