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Panasonic's Blu-ray Recorder To Hit Market In July

Posted by timothy on from the japan-gets-all-the-good-stuff-first dept.

lunarscape writes "Forbes is reporting that 'Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. on Wednesday unveiled what it calls the world's first DVD recorder that supports single-side, dual-layer Blu-ray Discs with a maximum capacity of 50 gigabytes.' It looks like Sony's own Blu-ray recorder will now have some competition."

1 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Stupid Question by Jugalator · · Score: 3, Informative

    Short answer:

    Only drives specifically designed to support Blu-Ray discs can play them.

    Long answer:

    Blu-Ray discs are just "recordable discs", and not DVD discs, since they don't adhere to the DVD specification. HD-DVD discs do on the other hand, and I think they were designed with more backwards compatibility in mind. It might be possible to use tricks on those, like storing "DVD" information in one layer that's backwards compatible and "HD-DVD" in another. Then your "old" DVD player could "see" the DVD information and not even know it's reading from a HD-DVD disc. That's speculation though, but I think there might at least be a small chance things could work with HD-DVD's.

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