DualDisc Coming Soon; DVD-HD Approved

The DVD Forum has approved a new DVD/Compact Disc hybrid format that should help jump-start the slow moving DVD-Audio disc market. The new format will let you store multiple types of content on discs. For example, you could store a high-quality version of an album on a disc for listening on a DVD-Audio device, but have an alternative CD-quality version that would work in standard CD players. The format can also handle DVD video and computer format files on the same disc, yet still function as a regular audio CD in standard CD players. The DVD Forum also approved the first version of the HD-DVD specification, which is competing with Blu-ray Disc (BD) to become the successor to the DVD format. HD-DVD, which is aimed at next-generation movie DVDs, can store up to 30GB of data, and can store high definition quality copies of movies as well as computer data. The HD-DVD specification requires all HD-DVD compatible video players to support MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding (AVC—H.264), and Windows Media Video 9 codec (VC-9) formats. The inclusion of VC-9 is seen as major victory for Microsoft's Windows Media Everywhere campaign.