Blue Ray DVD.

Approximately two decades ago, the world witnessed the first battle for video standards when Sony's Betamax fell to JVC's VHS standard. It was from the momentous failure of Sony, that companies finally took in to consideration the importance of having a winning format in their own hands. Sony itself was forced to produce VCRs that supported VHS, a humiliation that is still being taught and studied in a variety of business schools through out the world. The war is now heating up again as the next generation of video standards are going head-to-head against each other. The following article will shed light on the different video standards roughing it up in the market for dominance ncluding Blu-ray, HD DVD, DivX HD, and WMV HD.

When it comes to the manufacture of optical discs meant for high definition storage of audio and video, Sony is pushing for the Blu-ray standard for next generation high-definition video. This has been the center of almost as much controversy as Betamax in its day. Competing head on with Toshiba's HD-DVD standard, many analysts claim that the war between the two storage media would be far bigger than what Betamax and VHS was two decades ago. This is because the market size has become exponentially larger, and so have the royalties and premiums associated with adopting a certain format. Blu-ray employs a similar mechanism to that of regular DVD drives, with the only difference being that the reading laser is blue instead of red, hence the rather unimaginative name. Blue has a shorter wavelength of 405 nanometre compared to red's '650 nanometre, and 'hence it can read data from smaller footprints than a red laser can. On a single layer format it can hold up to 27 gigabytes and in a double layer format it can easily touch 54 gigabytes. Currently researched four and eight layer architectures would allow Bluray to hold up to 100 and 200 gigabytes respectively. This would allow enormous levels of video data to be stored, which means even higher detail per square centimeter for all movies. This makes the standard highly future proof as post HD quality video could easily be dumped on to the discs.'

Blu-ray discs support three standards namely MPEG 2 (current DVD standard), MPEG 4 H.264 and WMA HD-based VC-1 standard. The latter two allow more video to be recorded than the MPEG 4. For audio, Blu-ray supports nearly every format under the Dolby standard including DTS-HD. All of this technical jargon means that movies, on Blu-ray would be far clearer (both in terms of sound and video) than today's best DVD output. The first iterations of the Blu-ray discs were highly scratchable, making them difficult for regular use. TDK has finally managed to introduce scratch proof BD ROMS (Blu-ray Disc ROMS), which according to TDK can even withstand screw driver scratches, although one might wonder who would want to attack a 30 dollar movie disc with one.

Recently, however, Panasonic switched to the HD-DVD side of things, which does not make life easy for Sony. Because of a lack of industry support and the fact that Betamax players were more expensive than VHS players, consumers easily switched to the worse standard. Entry level Blu-ray players cost a whopping 1 000 dollars, compared to the almost half-priced HDDVD players. Sony intends to upset the balance by introducing the Blu-ray PlayStation 3 at 500 dollars, but there is only so much a single supplier can do. In order to be a mass-level winner, Blu-ray players need to be built by the entire consortium of manufacturers and Panasonic's move is definitely not helping things. Still, Sony's existing partners include Apple, LG, Dell, Hitachi, Hp, Sharp, TDK and Pioneer which is a strong enough team to compete with HD-DVD's onslaught.

A direct competitor to Sony's standard, Toshiba's HD-DVD is already for sale in Japan and is gaining substantial momentum. Ironically, HD-DVD is also based on the Blu-ray concept, with the exact same wavelength being used for its disc reading. But unlike Sony's standard, HD-DVDs hold significantly less data per disc. Single layer discs contain a paltry 15gigabytes, while dual layers hold only 30 gigabytes. This is a bit disappointing players will also sport both red and blue lasers allowing easier transition for consumers as a whole. It is also possible to .'Use hybrid discs that allow both regular DVD as well as HD-DVD players to run the same disc. This means that the average Tom  can pick up an HD-DVD and plop it in a Noble DVD player and directly view the DVD content from it, while the rich people can use the same disc on their .HD-DVD player to view HD-quality movies. Such flexibility is sadly missing from Blu-ray's current technological situation.

HD DVP supports exactly the same video and sound formats as Blu-ray does. In addition it uses a rather simple anti-piracy feature known as "Audible Watermarks". This means that only mastered DVD movies would run on the players, while any cinema prints made from camcorders will not. This is done by detecting whether the sound is authored in a manner copyrighted by production houses. And since cinema prints produce distortion, they would not be utilized. This has both pros and cons compared to Bluray's methodology for anti-piracy. Blu-ray players have an active database shipped on every disc which selectively checks the serial number of the Blu-ray players that have been blacklisted for running pirated products. This database locks the player upon running, thus blocking the pro-piracy customer out. As movies ship every week, this update would be a regular feature, hence keeping media pirates on their toes.

On the other hand HD-DVD requires no such database activities, making life easier for studios. However, it is more susceptible to piracy as watermark patterns would easily be detected down the road. As soon as the watermarks are hacked, the HD-DVD player would shoot to the number one position in a place like Pakistan where piracy is rampant. The success of any media player is built compared to Blu-ray's 57-plus gigabyte capacity, but the argument held by the proponents of the technology is that current movie studios do not require such large volumes. On the other hand, advocates of. Blu-ray argue that tomorrow's movies, games and software would require such enormous space to be present on the media. HD-DVD however holds the advantage of backward compatibility for existing DVDs, which might or might not be present with Blu-ray due to sheer physical differences. HD.DVD was developed directly by the DVD forum, which was never involved in the development of Blu-ray. DVD disc replication companies can easily move over to HD-DVD burning with a slight change in their present equipment, decreasing the barriers to entry unlike the overhaul required by Blu-ray. HD-DVD around the support it gets and this is where HD-DVD loses ground. Five out of nine major Hollywood studios have promised exclusive support for Sony's Blu-ray, while the rest of the four present non-exclusive support for HD-DVD. Intel and Microsoft, two of the chief proponents of the technology, have been widely criticized for bad mouthing Blu-ray which is an equally effective solution for mass level usage. Microsoft in particular has been lambasted for not including an HD-DVD drive in its XBOX 360 console by default. Microsoft has promised an HD-DVD add-on for the console, but that of course is not as effective as having Blu-ray as a default answer to the PlayStation 3's media needs.

Just like the media disc wars, the format wars for video files are increasing in confusion and chaos every day. DivX is one of the chief players in the format wars as it supports open source. The original DivX Alpha was a hacked version of Microsoft's MPEG 4 Version 2 codec, which later led to an open source revolution that made DivX the defacto choice - for online video entertainment. Things took a turn when the open source DivX project turned commercial with DivX 4.0, which made open source developers who were working on the codec, a little uncomfortable. These developers revolted and used the existing DivX 4.0 code to create another codec aptly named XviD. Nevertheless the patents stayed with the DivX organization, and they released the highly successful DivX 5.0 on the internet. Almost all video files present on Kazaa and BitTonent are encoded and compressed in DivX 5.0. DivX uses a lossy version of MPEG 4V2 to compress videos while maintaining very high quality. As a result is has become the standard format for videos on the internet.

The DivX 6.0 standard, cunently under development, will support HD quality 72Op resolutions while still maintaining to fixed standards around the world. The codec is - absolutely free for everyone's viewing pleasure, and can easily be the HD standard for internet videos everywhere.
The new codec includes DVD-like menu features and subtitles and has finally become user friendly. But the cunent MPEG 4 standard H.264 has already surpassed it in producing a higher quality compression standard even before its commercial launch and has the potential to raise a few worried eyebrows at the DivX organisation.

The king of monopolies, Microsoft could not wait any longer to enter the - format W8IS and carve a slice of-the pie for itself. Just as the standard WMA was pitched as an alternative to the very popular MP3 format, WMV HD has risen from the ranks to challenge the great DivX HD and H.264 standards for High Definition movie viewing. Also known as VC1, this standard has been fully adopted by both Blu-ray and HD-DVD players as one of the three major standards being supported. Microsoft has further made WMV HD the default coding standard for all Xbox 360 movie clips, forcing developers to adopt the standard first hand. Although Microsoft is pitching WMV HD as
a standard for internet-based video transfers, its piracy protecting mechanisms make it ,a lot more suitable for fixed media players such as Blu-ray and HD-DVD as compared to the fluid, free-flowing nature of the internet. The first iteration of WMV HD was based primarily around producing progressive scanned videos for computers, but by the third iteration it turned into VC-1 which was platform independent and hence made for both HD-DVD and Blu-ray players.

Keeping in mind the design decisions Microsoft has taken up, it can easily be seen that WMV HD is more likely to be a "metoo" format in the larger media disc wars, rather than a direct contender of the DivX HD. This can only be a good thing, as the next iteration of Windows Vista should have enough copyright protection mechanisms for WMV HD to lock out any of the less fortunate movie lovers to preventing them from viewing their favorite downloadable movie.

At this point in time, one can predict a few things: the HD-DVD would be very popular with consumers thanks to its lower price and backward compatibility, while the Blu-ray would be more popular with movie studios and player manufacturers. It remains to be seen as to who would win this turn of the war, but if it follows the same dynamics that 'Betamax versus VHS took, we might be seeing HD-DVD as a close winner. On the format front, DivX HD will be here to stay while WMV HD is more likely to extract support from both HD-DVD and Blu-ray. Either way, the consumer is most likely going to be a winner as, no matter what the format, the beginning of the HD era will bring a lot of fun and excitement.

_{source Spider Mag.}