Hotwired: DVD format battles looming

Never mind Star Wars, there are enough DVD Format Wars to keep home-entertainment geeks glued to their small screens - the ones with keyboards attached to on-line forums, that is.

We've covered several of the current battle fronts already with DVD+R v R (recording); DVD-A v SACD (audio); CD and DVD v DualDisc (convenience), but there is a more substantial death-star-sized one looming beyond the horizon.

Blu-ray and HD DVD are two competing high-definition, high-capacity optical disc technologies which are respectively pitting the Empire (Sony, LG, Dell, HP, Matsushita etc) against a Rebellion force which includes Toshiba, NEC and leading media manufacturer Memory-Tech.

To the victor will go the spoils of a future generation of hardware and software which delivers to consumers the option of viewing movies, playing games and recording television in high-definition.

It may all seem a bit of a phantom menace here where we have yet to see free-to-air digital television let alone high-definition TV - but believe me, the battle for Planet HD will be the big one.

Even those who have recently spent $20,000 and more on their flash big-screen TVs will be queuing up to trade them in once HD telly takes hold. The home-theatre viewing pleasure of high-def TV is a significant improvement with details, colours, wide-angle perspectives and depth-of-field all enhanced.

HD's superior picture quality requires a lot more disc-storage capacity and much faster data-transfer rates for both playback and recording than the current DVD format can provide. The answer to both apparently lies in using a shorter wavelength blue-coloured laser than the red one that our existing CD and DVD players use.

Both Blu-ray and HD DVD (high-density digital versatile disc) utilise the blue laser which can read smaller pits on the disc surface, meaning more info can be squeezed on to it.

Each also offers single and dual-layered discs, Dolby Digital and DTS surround-sound options and other facilities except the ability to play the new-format discs on current DVD players.

So what is the difference? Why does there need to be two opposing forces and which is the dark side? These are just some of the issues those geeks are debating while both formats are readied to launch an invasion in the US later this year.

HD DVD is evolutionary in that it is structurally similar to DVD, while Blu-ray is revolutionary, being designed from the outset for high-def. As a consequence, Blu-ray discs offer 60 per cent more capacity (a single-layer Blu-ray disc can hold about 25GB or more than two hours of HD video plus audio), but manufacturing them will require new production plants and therefore high costs. In contrast, an existing plant can be readily converted from stamping standard DVDs to HD DVD discs, making them and their players a lot less expensive.

Which side will the force be with? Sony will be backing Blu-ray with their movie catalogue and the launch of PS3, while HD DVD fight from the popular front of existing format familiarity, with the backing of Microsoft and most of the major movie studios. It's less a phantom menace, more an attack of the clones.