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."

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What's Holding UMD Back

[Hobart]

Exhibit A - Tron for $13 on DVD

Exhibit B - Tron for $26 on UMD

Why are they expecting consumers to pay more for less?

WTF is UMD?

[Mensa Babe]

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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Picture 2.

More info.

Editors: please add this links to the story. Thank you.