James Delahunty
15 Apr 2005 8:12
Taiwan seems to be continuing its support for the High Definition DVD (HD-DVD) format. At a conference in Taipei's Grand Formosa Regent Hotel Tuesday, several representatives from various countries discussed DVD-related issues. Taiwan's top technological research institute promoted the HD-DVD format as the main format on behalf of several Taiwanese firms. Representatives of the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) as well as from over 21 domestic and international firms attended the conference.
The ITRI is to support the HD-DVD format in its battle against the Blu-Ray Disc format. Deputy Director of ITRI's Opto-Electronics & Systems Laboratories Huang Teh-rei said ITRI's participation in developing the HD DVD format shows Taiwan's aspiration to get on the ground floor of the international information industry. 21 firms also showed their latest DVD-related products including HD-DVD discs and optical drives.
Huang said that ITRI hopes successful global adoption of the HD disc format will benefit Taiwanese optical disc manufacturers by reducing significant amounts of royalties paid to Toshiba and NEC, whose HD DVD competes with Blu-ray discs developed by Sony and Panasonic. HD-DVD can hold up to 25GB data per disc whereas Blu Ray supporters claim it can holds up to 50GB per disc. Both are a huge improvement on about 10GB per DVD disc.
Source:
Yahoo