Go Ahead and Groan: HD-DVD and Blu-ray Not the Only HD Disc Formats
By Chris on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 11:43 AM PST In Computer, Games Industry, Microsoft, Sony, Sony
New Medium Enterprises is set to release its new high-definition optical disc next month, which it demonstrated at the Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association in Denver just recently. Players and discs should cost much less than Blu-ray or HD-DVD, with the player set for release next month to be priced at around $150.
“Expect a small premium over DVD [discs], and a big discount over Blu-ray and HD DVD,” said Jim Cardwell, an advisor to the company and former president of Warner Home Video.
HD-VMD discs will hold up to 30GB on a single side. The rest of this paragraph will include phrases like “H.264,” so you may want to skip down to the next paragraph if you’re already confused. The discs are encoded with a max bit rate of 40 megabits a second; Blu-ray is at 48, while HD-DVD is at 36. MPEG-2 and VC1 formats are used to encode 1080p, with a possible move to H.264 coming in the future.
There will be 20 movies at launch, which doesn’t bode particularly well for early sales. But Cardwell said that strong sales on the players themselves will encourage major studios to sign on to use HD-VMD. With that logic, you enter a sort of mirror facing another mirror logic – people aren’t going to buy a player with no movies on it, and there won’t be movies on it until people start buying the players. It’s this sort of situation that will certainly make it feel right at home next to HD-DVD and Blu-ray.
Yahoo via Evil Avatar
How dumb would someone have to be to buy one of these?
Man, they’re a little late in the game. The season’s already getting into the finals.
jijijij Now HD-DVD hold 52 GB ufff sorry to late
Honestly if ay of the 3 really want to trump the other, they need to release a sub $100 drive for PC’s. Thats where most HD content gets played anyway, seeing as most people still have standard def TV’s. Just about everyone has a PC that was made in the past 7 years, and 98% of those should be able to display HD content to some degree, so it seems to make some sence that a PC drive would be the way to win this war. Just aint many people going to pay 200 bucks for a disk drive.
jafet10 said: “Now HD-DVD hold 52 GB ufff sorry to late”
No it doesn’t. They haven’t released one that can hold that. BluRay have developed a disc that can hold 300gb but they haven’t released that either.
It’s kind of hard to figure out who will win yet. Im thinking that HD-DVD’s do have an advantage because microsoft will probably be putting them into pc’s sooner or later. And i considering the amount of ppl that use pc’s, that means there will be alot of hd-dvd players in the world giving it the advantage. I also wonder what format nintendo will choose for there next console, i doubt they will stay with dvd’s. And considering sony is there biggest rival in japan, i think they may go hd-dvd too, also its cheaper and nintendo like cheapness