DVD standard wins approval
Published: 01 Dec 2003 09:30 GMT
Japanese electronics giants Toshiba and NEC have had their next-generation DVD standard approved, just weeks after China clarified its own EVD format.
The DVD Forum, an international association of electronics makers and movie studios, granted approval of the Toshiba and NEC format, called HD DVD, the Associated Press reported on Friday.
This puts Toshiba and NEC ahead in the race to develop the next DVD standard, against the Blu-ray format endorsed by Sony, Matsushita, and Philips Electronics, and China's domestically developed Enhanced Versatile Disc (EVD) technology.
The Blu-ray format has a larger recording capacity of up but is costs more than HD DVD. Toshiba and NEC said their format will be priced around $2,700, about 20 percent lower than a comparable Blu-ray model. The HD DVD has another advantage over Bluray in that current DVD assembly lines can be adapted to make HD DVD, instead of replaced as with Blu-ray.
China's domestically developed technology standard EVD is part of a government-backed push for local intellectual property that avoids paying foreign royalties. It offers high-definition content on optical disks with a red-laser pickup, reported the EE Times. However, implementation of EVD has been limited to Chinese companies so far.
The DVD Forum endorsement does not mean the end of Blu-ray, as its advocates are also members of the DVD forum.
A DVD Forum official told the Associated Press that neither Toshiba nor NEC had commercial HD DVD products to launch yet. NEC plans to use HD DVD in personal computers by late 2005, and Toshiba is considering adding HD DVD drives to notebooks, and plans a HD DVD recorder later next year.
The approval is limited to "read-only" DVD players, with further approval needed for "rewriteable" DVD recorders. The official, who requested anonymity, said that it was not clear what would be approved yet, and that there was conflict between the different standards backers.
The battles over definitions of advanced digital video technology are growing more intense as digital media and bandwidth becomes a crucial driver for new technology.
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