An article at Design Technica has some good news:
Blu-ray Disc considered "The New Higher Definition Format"
At Twentieth Century Fox Studios on November 29, the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) gave an update on their blue laser technology. BDA felt that it was time to highlight its progress in bringing "the new high definition format" to market. Andy Parson, Senior Vice President of Advanced Product Development for Pioneer Electronics, opened the meeting by giving an overview of the state of Blu-ray development.
Mr. Parsons noted, "There's no format war looming because it's not Blu-ray vs. HD DVD."
Apparently, 90 percent of the CE industry and seven movie studios now back Blu-ray Disc. And most of the IT industry (except Microsoft) also supports Blu-ray Disc.
Mr. Parsons said, "It's simply Blu-ray versus standard definition DVD -- Currently, DVD has 50,000 titles presently available, and both formats will co-exist for several years to come with new BD players supporting both formats. BD players make the perfect complement to new HDTVs that are being purchased by consumers."
Lastly, Mr. Parsons noted that the group has been working with retailers for the past two months to get them prepared for the Spring 2006 launch of Blu-ray Disc.
Blu-ray is now called "future-proof" by the consortium because it has the capability to play back both Blu-ray discs and standard definition DVDs within one player. It was even shown that a DVD-9 layer can be laid down onto a Blu-ray disc to make a true hybrid disc. On the upper layer, DVD-9 content (DVD-9 layer is the standard definition version of the movie or video) is stored, and on the lower level Blu-ray content is available. It was pointed out that this is all on one side of the Blu-ray disc, and was completely different than what HD DVD has proposed for a hybrid disc, which makes the end user flip the disc over to play a standard definition or high definition version of the same movie. Of course, this goes back to Blu-ray�s original point of superiority regarding storage capability, in that there is enough storage capability on one side of the disc to hold a Blu-ray version, a standard definition movie, a completely interactive menu and a navigation system.
Blu-Ray is based on standard DVD technologies but uses a blue laser instead of an infrared one. The shorter wavelength allows a much higher density of storage -- 50GB instead of 9GB for a dual-layer DVD-R.
The opposing 'standard' was HD-DVD which kept the same drive and optics as today's DVDs but added more layers to the disk (more complex manufacturing so more expensive media) and used both sides of the disk (you would have to pause in a movie and flip the disk). Blu-Ray rocks!
