AV Zombie: Sales of HD disc formats haven’t exactly set the world alight, but that hasn’t stopped UK-based New Medium Enterprises from championing its high-capacity Versatile Multilayer Disc (VMD) format at the recent Media-Tech expo in Spain.
The company demonstrated an ‘off the shelf’ DVD drive equipped with HD VMD PC playback software, along with its new HD VMD media player. It says proprietary PC drives will go on sale in Q3 07.
VMD technology can provide up to eight information layers on each side of a DVD (delivery 20GB a side) and can be utilized for both blue laser and red laser formats.
“The release of the HD VMD PC products is timed perfectly to coincide with the launch of HD VMD content from various distribution partners in key regions,” said Mahesh Jayanarayan, NME CEO. VMD claims to have support from content providers and distributors in 12 regions worldwide, including Brazil, Central Europe, China, France, Germany, Iceland, India, Japan, the Middle East Russia, Scandinavia and the US.
top
Interested Watcher | Tuesday, March 13, 2007 at 1:16
If this works out as it is claimed and really can play all the SD & high def resolution codecs promised this would make an excellent economical purchase.
It’d give the HD-DVD & BD ‘teams’ time to end their tedious little ‘war’ and to work out sane pricing leaving the rest of us with this tech to enjoy our current SD DVD collections and a player & burner that can handle anything we download on DVD5/9/18′ for our HD Tvs (and boy is there a wealth of very nice high def material out there on the net).
Personally I’d be happy to use this tech for the next 5 or so years until the other guys get their act together (and btw pack in all that idiotic DRM cr@p that they are attempting to shove into the market and onto the consumer – this tech would be a fantastic way of avoiding that stupidity).
Maybe this’ll be like Divx, hated and ignored by the industry until a ‘ground up’ wave of consumer power forced them to recognise it?