Misplaced Pages

HD DVD

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 66.232.88.199 (talk) at 06:39, 16 October 2005 (→History). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Revision as of 06:39, 16 October 2005 by 66.232.88.199 (talk) (→History)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
File:Hddvddisc.jpg
HD-DVD disc

HD DVD (High Density Digital Versatile Disc) is a digital optical media format which is being developed as one standard for high-definition DVD. HD DVD is similar to the competing Blu-ray Disc, which also uses the same CD sized (120 mm diameter) optical data storage media and 405 nm wavelength blue laser. HD DVD is promoted by Toshiba, NEC, Sanyo, and (most recently) Microsoft, and Intel, and may be non-exclusively backed by four major studios: New Line Cinema, Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios and Warner Bros..

Overview

HD DVD has a single layer capacity of 15 GB and a dual-layer capacity of 30 GB. Toshiba has announced a triple-layer disc is in development, which would offer 45GB of storage. This is smaller than its primary competitor Blu-ray Disc, which supports 25GB for one layer, 50GB for two and 100GB for four, but HD DVD proponents point out that multi-layer Blu-ray discs are still in development. The surface layer of an HD DVD disc is 0.6 mm thick, the same as DVD but thicker than the Blu-ray Disc's 0.1 mm layer. The numerical aperture of the optical pick-up head is 0.65, compared with 0.6 for DVD. Both formats will be backwards compatible with DVDs and both employ equal video compression techniques: MPEG-2, Video Codec 1 (VC1, based on the Windows Media 9 format) and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC.

History

On November 19, 2003, the DVD Forum decided with eight to six votes that the HD DVD will be the HDTV successor of the DVD. At this meeting they renamed it to HD DVD, while it had been previously called the "Advanced Optical Disc". Blu-ray Disc was developed outside of the DVD Forum, and was never submitted to the forum for consideration.

The current specification version for HD DVD-ROM and HD DVD-Rewritable is version 1.0. The specification for HD DVD-R is currently at 0.9. The first HD DVD-ROM drives were expected to be unveiled by Q4 2004, with mass production to start in Q1 2005.

In April 2005, Apple Computer, a member of the DVD Forum, updated DVD Studio Pro to support authoring HD content. DVD Studio Pro allows for the burning of HD DVD content to DVD's, and HD DVD media will be supported as burners become available. However, as Apple is on the Board of directors of the Blu-ray Disc Association, its own software/hardware applications are not expected to be focused on HD-DVDs. My name is Aaron

See also

External links

Categories: