Thursday, January 04, 2007
Rumour Mill: Warner to release HD DVD/Blu-ray Combo disc
CES 2007 is around the corner, and the rumour mill is already churning. The New York Times is reporting that Warner Home Video has researched and plans to announce an optical disc that can play HD video in both HD DVD and Blu-ray players. The disc is called "Total HD".
The good: well, if it becomes cheap enough to become standard, maybe it could help end this ridiculous "format war". That can only be a good thing, right?
The bad: the word is that the disc might only be able to hold a single layer of each. That means a 15gb HD DVD layer and a 25gb Blu-ray one. For the average length film encoded using VC-1, this probably means that you can still fit a film on without any obnoxious pre-blurring and visible artefacts, thanks to the advanced compression (VC-1 can do some seriously amazing stuff, although more space is always good to be safe).
On top of that, manufacturing the discs could always end up being expensive. There's no word yet on exactly how much these combo discs are going to cost.
It'll be interesting to see how this turns out, but I can't wait for CES to start on the 8th!
Posted at 3:57 PM
