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UMD Approved As An ECMA Standard
News for nerds writes "Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. announced today (press release) that the UMD (Universal Media Disc) optical-disc physical format which holds 1.8GB, used in Sony PSP, has been approved as a standard format by Ecma International, and would be submitted to ISO/IEC as well."
The Universal Media Disc (UMD) is an optical disc medium developed by Sony for use on the PlayStation Portable. It can hold 1.8 gigabytes of data, which can include games, movies, or music.
Unlike the Minidisc, another proprietary Sony-developed format, blank media will not be commercially available, in order to avoid piracy. However, there has been recent discussion about the UMD movie and music formats being opened by Sony, although it is not clear if this will result in the development of UMD "burners" (through CD or DVD burners). Sony has said that it intends to keep the game-formatted UMD specifications to itself, in order to avoid competition (and presumably to profit from licensing fees).
It has recently been found out that if the disc is removed from its casing and shaved down to fit into the mini DVD slot in a DVD drive that it will register on your computer. However, no files are shown if the game disc has been written on.
* Dimensions: Approx. 65 mm (W) x 64 mm (D) x 4.2 mm (H)
* Diameter: 60 mm
* Maximum Capacity: 1.80GB (Single-sided, dual layer)
* Laser wavelength: 660 nm (Red laser)
* Encryption: AES 128-bit
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Editors: please add this links to the story. Thank you.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
It's not [Universal [Media Disc]], it's [[Universal Media] Disc].
It's named because it can contain a relatively wide variety of types of media (audio, video, games); not because the number of devices it can be played in (for now, only the PSP).
Ambiguity of the English language. Gotta love it.
~ Aero
I got snail spam from RadioShack yesterday hawking a personal DVD player the size of a DVD case and it's on sale for $99 I honestly think UMD is another dead-end format.
Clear, Dark Skies
You thought you were joking, weren't you... Click.
Click.
standard != open/patent-free. .NET, for an example.
See another ECMA standard,
Don't forget that when you read the press release, the footnotes clearly state there was _no_ approval of the logical layers of the UMD standard (which includes the security - read DRM - features of the format).