HD format wars.(about high definition digital videodisks)

Undeniably, high definition is becoming increasingly prominent in just about all areas of the video production world. Maybe it's due to the FCC's mandated migration to digital television. Maybe it's an altruistic desire for higher image quality. Or perhaps it's simply a result of manufacturers successfully hawking a new mousetrap.

In any case, more HD content is being produced, edited, and distributed over the air, satellite, and cable. However, HD is not being recorded for mass distribution, nor rented at video stores, nor delivered to clients on disc. That's because the DVD-Video disc format doesn't support HD.

While DVD was the most successful new product launch in history in terms of the speed of mass adoption, according to the Consumer Electronics Association, the DVD-Video specification cannot accommodate HD content, and, therefore, neither can DVDs as we know them.

That's a problem the industry is trying to solve. Unfortunately, there is more than one solution, and a format war is already afoot between competing proposals: HD DVD and Bluray Disc. At stake for content creators is the final piece of an increasingly enticing HD puzzle that goes from production to post and increasingly to broadcast, but not yet all the way to other forms of distribution.

Bigger Buckets

On the one hand, of course, DVDs are just discs--bit buckets that can hold any kind of data, whether video, text documents, or photographs. And a standard 4.7GB DVD-ROM can hold well more than an hour of HD video content if it's compressed with MPEG-4 or VC-1 (the SMPTE name for the pending Windows Media HD standard). Unfortunately, almost no DVD players can play them because they are all built to support only the standard-definition MPEG-2 based DVD-Video standard. Thus, there's a need for a new authoring standard and a higher-capacity disc.

The first option, HD DVD (originally known as Advanced Optical Disc), was developed by Toshiba and NEC, and will have a capacity of up to 30GB on a dual-layer disc (15GB/layer). It squeezes more data into the same physical area of an Audio CD or DVD, in part by relying on a shorter wavelength blue laser instead of the red-laser technology used in existing players. HD DVD augments that storage capacity by supporting current MPEG-2 compression, but also the more efficient compression and smaller file sizes of MPEG-4 (including H.264, Advanced Video Coding) and VC-1.