The war between these two high end products is still on. The DVD forum had a disagreement over whether to go with the more expensive Blue Rays or not. The proposed Blue Ray disc was expensive and physically different from the Digital Video Disks. Being in the initial stages, there were lots of problems also. To avoid a costly format war the Blue Ray Disc Association and DVD forum started to negotiate a compromise.

Both products basically differ in storage space. The HD DVD has a single layer capacity of 15 GB, dual layer capacity of 30 GB and 51 GB of triple layer disc. The DVD supports so many file systems such as UDF, ISO and others. The former player is required to play Dolby digital audio format AC3, Dolby Digital Plus and Dolby Digital EX and others. HighDef format supports a wide variety of resolution for the video to play.

Comparing both in terms of resolution will give a better idea. Usually, a standard 4.7 GB Disk supports maximum resolution of 720x576. However, HighDefTV support starts from the 720p resolution.

The publisher wants to protect the HighDef content they may use in the Advanced Access Content System (AACS). There is no Region Coding in the HighDef specification, which indicates that the titles from any country can be played in players

of any other country. In Europe and other places, the consumers have used multi region players to play DVDs purchased in or from the US. High Defs use the HDI format for the interactive content. HDI is based on web technologies such as HTML, CSS and others.

The hybrid HD DVD format is the one to contain both species of the same movie in a single disc, which gives a smoother transition for the studios. The disc replication companies are using the current production equipment with some minor alterations to change the formats.

Microsoft supports both systems. Xbox was shelved with a DVD drive. Xbox 360 contained HD DVD drive. The Microsoft HD DVD drive for Xbox 360 game console gives the Xbox 360 the ability to play the HD DVD movies. The Xbox 360 has an add-on HD DVD drive. It is used with a desktop or a laptop PC running windows XP or windows Vista. The third party player software can play HD DVD movies using the add-on drive. So many buy this add-on drives for the PCs because of their cheap price.

The major studios in North America along with Universal Studios have backed the HD DVDs strongly. It is the same with music groups and the music industry as a whole. Both systems have the same conventional methods of manufacturing process and protection too. There are two types of hybrid formats, which contain standard DVD format videos for playback in regular players.

Article Source: http://www.discoveryarticles.com/authors/3047/Victor-Epand

Article Tags: DVD  HD-DVD  studios  hybrid format