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DVD Forum committee approved HD-DVD specs

26 November 2003 13:54 by Petteri "dRD" Pyyny | 8 comments

In the format fight that hardly anyone understands anymore, DVD Forum's steering committee has decided to adopt a proposal from Toshiba and NEC as its draft for so-called HD-DVD format.

A month ago it seemed that DVD Forum had abandoned the idea of larger storage space on DVDs, but the latest decision (although as far as we know, not an ultimate decision yet) to adopt NEC-Toshiba disc, which is often also dubbed as AOD, as the HD-DVD base, overturns this decision again. HD-DVD would be able to store 15-20GB of data per disc side and according to various reports, should be backwards compatible with current DVD format. The backwards compatibility is something that AOD/HD-DVD's main competitor, Blu-Ray, lacks.

Specifications for the HD-DVD are very vague and the rival camp of Blu-Ray supporters is likely to go ahead with their own format -- which is already available in the Japanese markets -- and pressure from China isn't exactly helping things. Lets just hope that industry manages to figure out the direction before widespread adoption of new technologies, so that we can avoid a new "Beta vs VHS war".

Source: TechWeb

Permalink to this article

HD-DVD to get support from studios (31 October 2004)

Future DVDs could hold 1TB of data (28 September 2004)

DVD Forum approves HD DVD specification (12 June 2004)

Blu-Ray disc made out of paper released (15 April 2004)

Disney and Microsoft join DVD Forum (26 February 2004)

HP and Dell decide to support Blu-Ray (9 January 2004)

NEC demonstrates HD-DVD drive (18 December 2003)

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Discuss this article!
fedrive (Inactive) 26 November 2003 14:36
Gad Zooks, The industry continues to hobble forward on one leg because they dont want to loose thier infrastructure. They are going to loose their shirts instead ! New technology has a chance to do some REAL Damage to DVD industry ! [ + quote]
alxdotnet (Inactive) 26 November 2003 18:23
come on, blu-ray dvds are OBVIOUSLY superior Comp 1: Dell Inspiron P4 2.4Ghz / 512 MB RAM with 24x CD-RW and Firewire In, SVideo Out running XP Pro Comp 2: Dell Dimension P3 550Mhz / 384MB RAM with old 2x CD-RW running XP Home. [ + quote]
Tundraswn (Newbie) 27 November 2003 3:14
Wrong, HD-DVD was the better proposal, why? HD-DVD will use the newly developed H.264 codec Blu-Ray will use the old MPEG-2 Tech specs: Encoding at DVD resolution H.264 1.25 MBits/s MPEG-2 5.37 MBits/s Bang goes any capacity advantage the BluRay had. [ + quote]
dRD (I hate titles) 27 November 2003 3:31
Tundraswn: Any links to official HD-DVD specs, please? Petteri Pyyny Webmaster http://AfterDawn.com/ Please read our guides before posting questions! Guides are available here: http://www.afterdawn.com/articles/ [ + quote]
Tundraswn (Newbie) 27 November 2003 5:10
Oh yeah, I forgot to provide the link to this info. http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20031117S0059 http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20020920S0049 First link provides info on both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Second link has info directly about the H.264 codec. [ + quote]
Sophocles (AfterDawn Addict) 27 November 2003 20:31
The problem is always money! The developer that wins the standards wars will be well placed to make huge amounts of money from licensing fees. If money was removed from the equation then the adopted standards would be chosen based on merit instead of its value to its developer. If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson [ + quote]
toke0 (Junior Member) 28 November 2003 5:24
I believe that AOD-players and especially AOD-recorders will be more expensive than BD-recorders, because of different codecs. Hdtv-signal is mpeg2, then it has to be converted to AVC before recording to disk. Hardisc for cache might help in this, so the conversion wouldn't have to be realtime. AVC encoding in SD resolution needs 3GHz intel so HD might need something like over 10GHz of intel cpu, so even with dedicated DSP processors encoding of AVC will be expensive for next couple of years. [ + quote]
toke0 (Junior Member) 28 November 2003 11:10
How does it-sector manages to do universal standards like ata, scsi, fw, usb, lan, wlan, bt, etc.? Whats wrong with consumer electronics? They don't understand that profits are made with big volume products better than some royalties? What do they profit that they have to produce triple standard dvd writers to get people buy them, becouse their own fooling around with multistandards... I wonder how cheap it will be to manufacture a aod/aod-r/aod-rw/bd/bd-r/bd-rw/evd/evd-r/evd-rw/pd/pd-r/pd-rw machine? And how much better profits they are going to get with those than with one universal standard? At least AVC is nobodys private property and licensing fees are quite cheap... toke @iki .fi [ + quote]