The high-definition format war pitting the Blu-ray Disc against the HD DVD standard ended in February of 2008 when Toshiba announced that it would stop promoting HD DVD players and produce Blu-ray players instead. Blu-ray was obviously the gold standard.

Blu-ray was developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association-a consortium of consumer electronics makers, computer hardware manufacturers, and motion picture studios which included Sony, among others firms. Some studios like Paramount Pictures hedged their bets and supported both Blu-ray and HD DVD during the height of the format war. But now all bets are off as Toshiba and its supporters conceded defeat in 2008.

The good news is Blu-ray players are able to read standard DVDs. And by June of 2009, some 2,500 movie titles were available for sale in the U.S. as Blu-ray discs.

All the while, Blu-ray titles still gather dust on store shelves, leaving studios wondering whether the time has come for multi-platform interoperability-allowing consumers to watch their favorite movies on up to as many as five electronic devices or more. Perhaps an overview of the standard will help clarify why consumers should purchase Blu-ray discs when they shop for movies they wish to own.

Blu-ray discs are used for storing high definition video, Sony Playstation 3 video games, and other data. While the Blu-ray disc shares the same physical dimensions of standard DVDs and CDs, you can store up to 25 GB per single layered disc, and 50 GB per dual layered disc. Meanwhile, 200 GB discs are available, and 100 GB discs are readable without extra equipment or modified hardware. The Blu-ray disc is read using a blue-violet laser (hence the name Blu-ray) that permits users to store more than ten times more data than can be stored on a standard DVD. You should know that Sony and Panasonic plan to increase the storage capacity on their Blu-Ray discs from 25GB to 35.4GB through a technology called i-MLSE, which stands for Maximum Likelihood Sequence Estimation. The higher-capacity discs will be readable on current Blu-ray disc players with minimal upgrade.

To be sure, the technology now exists to give consumers streaming video of their favorite films, but does cloud-computing-access constitute true ownership? Can you really pop in your favorite film whenever and wherever you want without compromising graphics resolution?

For more information about Blu-ray, please see my firm's weblink at:
http://www.chromavision.net/dvd_authoring.html

Yossi Rosenberg, Digital Media Specialist, Chromavision: (212) 686-7366

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