HD VMD Shows Up Late For the Format War

Fishead writes "As the fight heats up between HD DVD and Blu-ray, and as consumers seem to care less and less, a new contender has entered the fray. Next month, New Medium Enterprises will be selling a 1080p player through Amazon and stores such as Radio Shack and Costco for around $150 — half what the cheapest HD DVD player costs, and a quarter the cost of a low-end Blu-ray. The difference this new HD VMD (Versatile Multilayer Disc) format brings is that the discs are created with the same (cheap) red laser as DVDs. From the article: 'HD VMD discs, which hold up to 30GB on a single side, are encoded with a maximum bit rate of 40 megabits per second... between HD DVD's 36 Mpbs and Blu-ray's 48 Mbps. The format uses MPEG-2 and VC1 video formats to encode at 1080p resolution for the time being, and will possibly move to the H.264 format in the future.'"

Comments

Re:I hope it wins!

[Anonymous Coward]

Four layers? Cheap to manufacture? Are you on crack?

Sure, the players might be relatively cheap to manufacture. But the big studios avoid pressing even two layer discs whenever possible, because the manufacturing cost of creating two layers, gluing them together with a semi-transparent layer in the middle, and throwing out the rejects is still a lot higher than a single layer, where you stamp it out, cover it with silver, and glue a non-critical bit of plastic to bring it up to 12mm.

Crank that up to 4+ layers, and we're talking about a pretty insane manufacturing process here. And you'll likely never get that sort of density in recordable technology--recordable dual layer discs today still carry a hefty premium over single layer discs, because now you need to add a recordable layer that you can also shoot the same recording laser through to record the other layer. You can't even get re-recordable dual layer DVDs; the technology simply does not commercially exist.

Blu-ray is the best hope for future computer interchange needs, because the 25 GB single layer recordable and re-recordable discs are going to be dirt cheap compared to anything else. It'd be awfully nice if it turned out to be the HD video disc format as well, since it'd mean fewer components. While I'm sure plenty of people would just argue for dual format players, long term I think that's a horrible solution. :-(

And no, HD-DVDs are not necessarily superior to Blu-ray in terms of durability. The hard coating process on BD has done a lot to address any scratching issues (HD-DVD could also benefit from hard coating, of course, but it's not mandatory, and thus usually skipped--making HD-DVD actually more susceptible to scratching issues), and keeping the data layer closer to the surface actually has a lot of positive benefits in terms of readability, improving robustness. In fact, it's the main reason Blu-ray can achieve higher densities than HD-DVD to begin with. Keep in mind that with a relatively thick disc, any warping in the transparent medium is going to affect the ability of the laser pickup to track, especially at the laser frequencies used by HD-DVD and Blu-ray. With a thin optical layer, it almost doesn't matter.

Re:I hope it wins!

[evilviper]

The recording surface in a BD disc is very close to the underside of the disc. This will increase the likelihood that scratches will cause errors

Which is why the BD standard absolutely mandates scratch-proof coatings on the surface of the discs, instantly making them the most durable (bare) disc format anyone has ever seen. HD-DVD, OTOH, is the most dense disc format, and without such a scratch resistant layer, the most easily susceptible to damage anyone has seen.