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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.'"
True that, I guess you can count out anything supported by Apple to begin with. Not all that related but their vendor lockin is stronger than anyones and now when they released iTunes with ring tone supports for the iPhone you have to PAY for being able to transfer over the ringtone which are made of a piece of music you already owned!?
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People came around this by simply renaming the files but then Apple updated iTunes, so someone came up with a new idea, and we'll see how long that one works
In that regard Apple really suck and are worse than even Microsoft.