Digital Home Thoughts: Triple-standard DVD

"The electronics industry is in a fine mess, with two blue-laser disc standards (Blu-ray and HD-DVD) competing to succeed ordinary red-laser DVDs. On 26 September, Warner will be the first studio to release a movie, Lake House, on all three disc standards simultaneously. Meanwhile, however, two top Warner engineers, Alan Bell and Lewis Ostrover, have been working on a cheaper and more elegant solution. Blu-ray uses a 405-nanometre wavelength laser to read data from tracks 0.1-millimetres-deep on the top surface of a disc. HD-DVD, on the other hand, uses the same wavelength to read recordings at a depth of 0.6 mm. Warner’s plan is to create a disc with a Blu-ray top layer that works like a two-way mirror. This should reflect just enough blue light for a Blu-ray player to read it okay. But it should also let enough light through for HD-DVD players to ignore the Blu-ray recording and find a second HD-DVD layer beneath. An ordinary DVD recording could be put on the other side, so that conventional DVD players can read the disc as well."

Hmm, I am almost praying that this WB media releases soon just to avoid the royal mess that is the media war these days. I can see companies like Netflix and Blockbuster loving this technology as they would have to stamp just one DVD and could cater to a larger number of customers. But I can see using this as a consumer as well, so as to be able to share DVDs with friends more flexibly.