HD VMD - Another high def player
I somehow missed this news. I accidentally came across this news in PC World today. The news was 3 months old. It was talking about a new technology, namely HD VMD (Versatile Multilayer Disc) which was supposed to be cheaper than Blu Ray and HD DVD. It uses the current DVD technology, the red laser technology, unlike Blu Ray’s and HD DVD’s blue laser technology. HD VMD discs holds 30GB on a single disc (one sided). The format uses MPEG-2 and VC1 video formats to encode at 1080p resolution for the time being, and will possibly move to the H.264 format in the future.
The 1080p set-top players, which use the HD VMD (Versatile Multilayer Disc) format, should be on sale on Amazon.com and in stores such as Radio Shack and Costco for around $150. People are already pulling their hair between the Blu Ray and HD DVD war and I don’t think we want another format now. I’m not sure if any movie studio is supporting this format.
I have a Toshiba HD-A2 HD DVD player. One cool new feature I like (not yet tested) in HD DVD player is sharing movies with families and friends. If you and any of your friend’s or families have HD DVD player (in separate places) and both are connected to the internet through the ethernet port (all HD DVD players have ethernet port, but it’s not the same with Blu Ray players), you can play a movie and share it with the other people through the internet connection. They can watch whatever you are watching, but they won’t have the control to operate or pause or stop the movie. It’s a cool features, but I’m not sure how useful it’ll be in a practical world. (Source: Tech Consumer).
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