DVD Forum committee approved HD-DVD specs

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

Written by: Petteri Pyyny @ 26 Nov 2003 13:54
Advertisement - News comments available below the ad
  • 8 comments

  • fedrive

    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 !

    26.11.2003 14:36 #1

  • alxdotnet

    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.

    26.11.2003 18:23 #2

  • Tundraswn

    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.

    27.11.2003 03:14 #3

  • dRD

    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/

    27.11.2003 03:31 #4

  • Tundraswn

    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.

    27.11.2003 05:10 #5

  • Sophocles

    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

    27.11.2003 20:31 #6

  • toke0

    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.

    28.11.2003 05:24 #7

  • toke0

    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

    28.11.2003 11:10 #8

© 2024 AfterDawn Oy

Hosted by
Powered by UpCloud