Only 2 High Def Disc Formats Not Enough for You? Good News!

[Mike F]

According to PCWorld and Yahoo, there's a third high definition disc joining HD DVD and Blu Ray -- HD VMD:

Next month, New Medium Enterprises' 1080p set-top players, which use the HD VMD (Versatile Multilayer Disc) format, will go on sale on Amazon.com and in stores such as Radio Shack and Costco for around $150--about half the cost of the least-expensive 1080p HD DVD player, and perhaps a fourth the cost of the least-expensive Blu-ray player. The movies that work in them are similarly inexpensive.

HD VMD discs, which hold up to 30GB on a single side, are encoded with a maximum bit rate of 40 megabits per second; that's within spitting distance of Blu-ray's 48 mbps, and quite a bit more than 36 mbps for HD DVD. 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.

At launch, 20 U.S. movie titles will be available, including many from Mel Gibson's Icon Entertainment International. That's pretty sparse, and the list doesn't include that many hot titles. Of course, Blu-ray and HD DVD didn't start out with many more than that either, and New Medium Enterprises says that much more content from around the world, including many Bollywood titles, will be available.

[Winsor_Pilates]

Sounds like a good system, but a bunch of Mel Gibson movies to launch could get annoying.