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View Full Version : British Firm Develops Process to Produce Dual-Format HD Discs


Jeremy Charette
09-27-2006, 08:15 PM
<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://news.com.com/New+technology+could+end+DVD+format+war/2100-1026_3-6119788.html?tag=cd.hed' target='_blank'>http://news.com.com/New+technology+could+end+DVD+format+war/2100-1026_3-6119788.html?tag=cd.hed</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Britain-based New Medium Enterprises said on Tuesday it had solved a technical production problem that makes it possible to produce a cheap multiple-layer DVD disc containing one film in different, competing formats. "Current technologies to create multiple-layer discs mostly don't work. We've created a technology for mass production of multiple layers that does not suffer from the well known problem of low yields," said NME Chief Technology Officer Eugene Levich. A low yield means that many DVDs coming off the manufacturing lines are not working and have to be discarded. The production costs of a multi-layer DVD using the new NME technology are estimated to be around 9 cents, compared with the 6 cents for a standard single-layer play-back DVD, according to Dutch company ODMS, one of the world's leading makers of production lines for optical discs."</i><br /><br /> <img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/SS21059_2.gif" /> <br /><br />While this is a great technological breakthrough, unfortunately making dual format discs will only be the smallest hurdle. The biggest is licensing them. I suspect the HD DVD and Blu-Ray consortiums will do something to make these discs financially unfeasible, by driving the licensing fees up so high as to price them out of the market. That's unfortunate.

Felix Torres
09-27-2006, 09:35 PM
While this is a great technological breakthrough, unfortunately making dual format discs will only be the smallest hurdle. The biggest is licensing them. I suspect the HD DVD and Blu-Ray consortiums will do something to make these discs financially unfeasible, by driving the licensing fees up so high as to price them out of the market. That's unfortunate.

Well, the rumor is that Blu-Ray licensing forbids multi-format hybrid *players*, but content licensing is a different story. If hybrid disks were not included in the original licensing, trying to block them at this stage woud only rile up the content providers into dropping BD support. So its all a matter of how far-sighted Sony's lawyers were when they drew up the licensing.

What I find interesting is that the technology they're using for lamination allows for up to ten layers, which brings up the question: why bother with Blue Lasers at all?

Three to five red-laser (DVD) layers would provide 15-20 GB capacity, more than enough space for any HD movie encoded with VC-1 or H.264. At a full ten layers you'd be talking close to 50 GB, which means that if the Blue Laser folks are not going to accomodate the content providers, the providers can just walk away and launch their own HD disk format.

Big If, here: But if this is real, the format war becomes a player manufacturability war (whoever makes the cheapest player wins) and, regardless of which format prevails, consumers win.

Gotta like that.