The battle between Blu-ray and HD-DVD is heating up. Reuters carries the story of Disney pledging support for Sony’s Blue-ray. Disney will make films available on the release of Blu-ray players, which are first expected in 2006 in North America.
At the end of November Warner, Paramount, Universal and New Line Cinema pledged their support for HD-DVD.
Blu-Ray uses a blue-violet laser with a very fine focus. This enables it to store 25GB of data on a single-layer disk, sufficient for 2 hours of HDTV, or 13 of standard-definition TV. The dual-layer versions of the discs that can hold 50GB. HD-DVD holds 20Gb on a single-layer disk.
“Everyone is looking for the right format … to release their content. That is a combination of consumer adoption of the players and the platform, content protection, and adequate capacity. We think Blu-ray is there,” Murphy told Reuters in a phone interview.
Having said they’re supporting Blu-ray, Disney isn’t saying that they won’t support the rival HD-DVD. At least they’ve has gone one step further than 20th Century Fox, who, despite being founding members, haven’t committed to publish on the format as yet.
There’s been a trickle of announcements over the past months giving support to Blue-ray, from HP on 15 Nov saying they’ll ship computers with drives next year and in their laptops in 2006; Sharp on 11.Nov saying they’ll ship the BD-HD100, a combined HDTV tuner, 160GB hard disk and Blu-ray recorder (25GB) in December this year;