Aw, shucks: the shooting has jut barely begun on the blustery format war for dominance of the next-generation DVD landscape, with Blu-ray still struggling to get out of the gates and HD DVD out dancing on its own, in small numbers, in a mostly empty, uncaring market. Hardly the dramatics of a D-Day or Johnny Depp film opening…but the battle is yet young.
Now Warner engineers Lewis Ostover, Wayne Smith, and Alan Bell have applied for a patent on a triple-format DVD disk which could combine HD DVD, Blu-ray, and standard definition DVD video on a single disk, enabling studios to support all three formats on on piece of media, eliminating customer confusion and making movies compatible with…well, everything. What fun is that?
The idea is that Blu-ray media works by focusing a 405nm wavelength blue laser on data tracks embedded 0.1 millimeters beneath the top surface of a disc. Conversely, HD DVD focusses the same laser at a depth of 0.6 mm. Warner’s idea is a semi-reflective top layer which would enable Blu-ray compatible players to see enough reflective Blu-ray light to read a Blu-ray disc layer, but enable enough light to pass through that HD DVD players could read an HD DVD layer underneath the Blu-ray data. The other side of the disk could carry standard DVD data, or any other supported disc format, like audio CDs or DVD audio.
Such triple-format discs would be more expensive to produce than standard single or (pending) double-layer Blu-ray or HD DVD media, but they would have the advantage of doing away with customer confusion: consumers wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not a particular disc was compatible with their particular player. And, of course, discs would be limited to single data layers of HD DVD and Blu-ray content: movies and other content scheduled to be released on single multi-layer next-generation DVD disc would have to ship on multiple triple layer discs.
No idea whether any manufacturers or studios will get behind Warner’s idea, but even Warner along adopting a triple-format disc might be enough to generate market momentum—especially if the HD DVD/Blu-ray thing erupts into a full-fledged shooting war.
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