DVD Truce Between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD?

An anonymous reader writes " Reuters is reporting that Toshiba and Sony are in talks about reconciling the two next-generation DVD formats. Ideas floated in the article include a unified DVD arch which could use "Blu-ray's disc structure and HD DVD software technology" (Sony's idea) or "HD DVD disc structure and employing Sony's multi-layer data-recording technology" (Toshiba's idea)"

Comments

It's about time

[ghingy]

Finally these guys have decided to put their egos aside and work on a compromise. If they had thought about this in the first place, imagine how much money these corporation would save on wasted R&D.

Blu-Ray wins!

[Qzukk]

While I could care less what "data format" is used, the Blu-Ray disc itself is far superior in capacity and data rate, and I'm glad it won.

With a paltry 15mbit per second, HD-DVD's disc would not have a high enough data rate to encode 1080p video in MPEG4 (or any other codec) at any reasonable quality, essentially crippling HD until the next generation. (For comparison, the highest bitrate allowed in DVD video is 10mbit. D-VHS allows 30 mbit, Blu-Ray allows over 50mbit (section 3, bottom of page 5))

Of course, more space per disc is always nice. Whether you're just trying to cram the Janitor's Commentary track into the extras, or providing Star Trek with a Klingon subtitle track, every little bit helps. More space also allows for movies to use that 50mbps data rate for longer periods of time. Fans of superbit DVDs would drool all over the promise of superbit Blu-Ray discs.