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Standards wars come and go, and one standard usually wins out over time, but at the beginning there is often no clear leader. So it has been with the so-called "next generation" DVD technology -- HD-DVD and BluRay are battling for supremacy, with neither side showing any convincing evidence of becoming the favorite (though my own personal bet is that in the end HD-DVD will win just because Sony is behind BluRay and they have a long track record of betting on the wrong horse).
In the interim, though, the multiplicity of standards is creating nightmares for the content producers who can't just produce a DVD in one single format and get it to work on all players. They're handling this situation in a couple of different ways by either going strictly with one format, or by pressing discs in multiple formats, potentially tripling their production costs.
You should be able to see an obvious solution: make a disc that can be read in more than one format. And so the race has been on to develop just such a disc. In short order, a disc was developed that had more than one layer -- one which would play on a conventional DVD player, and one that would play on HD-DVD players.
Slashdot reported yesterday that Time-Warner may have an even better answer: a disc that can be read on all three formats by writing data on both sides of one layer and using a mirror layer to make the third format visible to theplayer's laser. What doesn't seem to be addressed in the news releases is whether or not it's cost-feasible enough to make these discs and then press them for sale in comparison to pressing separate format discs.
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