OTHER TECH

DVD Wars: Episode II

Not so long ago in a galaxy close to home, Toshiba and Warner Home Video crossed swords with Sony and Philips over a format that would eventually become known as DVD. Now battle lines are being resurrected as the specs for high-definition DVD are hammered out.

When Sony, Philips, and seven other big electronics companies announced the Blu-ray format for high-def DVD players, noticeably absent from the group was Toshiba, the major technology contributor to DVD. Instead, the company is promoting two other schemes. The first, which has garnered support from both Warner and Microsoft, would retain compatibility with current discs by coupling DVD's red-laser technology with an efficient compression scheme that expands disc-storage capacity beyond what is possible using MPEG-2. The second format, which is being co-promoted by NEC, teams another type of blue laser with discs that don't hold as much data as Blu-ray.

Illustration by Steve Bonham.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has been demonstrating its Windows Media Player Series 9 video codec, which is said to be efficient enough to fit a widescreen high-def quality movie on a regular red-laser DVD-ROM. How's the quality compared with what you can get from a higher-density disc read by a narrower, blue beam? Sharp's Bob Pleyer says red lasers can't do the job without producing compression artifacts, which is why the company is backing Blu-ray.

Nevertheless, Warner has shown interest in red lasers as a way to quickly bring high-def DVDs to market, according to Richard Doherty, director of research for Envisioneering Group consultants. "They'd love to bring the third season of The Sopranos out on high-def DVD by this time next year," he says. "Clearly, Warner is interested in red laser so they could slipstream [HD-DVD] into their duplication facilities" with a minimum of retooling.

Doherty notes that Warner has not endorsed Micosoft's video codec, and it could potentially back one of several other compression schemes vying to become the standard codec for red-laser high-def playback, including MPEG-4 and one from RealNetworks.

Toshiba's Craig Eggers doesn't expect HD-DVDs-regardless of which format reigns supreme-to be available for another 2 1/2 years. A veteran of DVD Wars: Episode I, Eggers recalls how "the content community" delayed its support back then because they likened DVDs to giving away the studio masters. "Now that the proposals are about high-def," he says, "that argument will be even louder."

- Michael Antonoff