NYTimes on the DVD Format Wars...

[DudeAsInCool]

The Coming DVD Format War

JORDAN GREENHALL sat before a flat-panel television that glowed with remarkably crisp, bright images, offering it as evidence that he could put a full-length movie in high-definition quality on a standard DVD, with room to spare.

Neat trick.

So neat, in fact, that it would seem to upstage the efforts of the biggest consumer electronics companies and Hollywood studios, which are choosing sides in a battle between two high-definition DVD formats, Blu-ray and HD DVD. Those formats, expected to reach North America late this year, will require ultra-high-capacity DVD's and a new class of expensive players.

The advent of Blu-ray and HD DVD may give rise to a format war reminiscent of the Betamax-VHS contest in the early days of videocassette recorders. At stake are potentially billions of dollars in hardware and discs as the demand for high-definition content grows.

In the midst of the battle, for which the two sides mounted elaborate floor displays this month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Mr. Greenhall is asking, Why wait for the giants to sort it all out? There's a little guy, he said, with a high-definition solution right now: his own company's DivX 6 software.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/20/technolo...its/20blue.html