Monday, November 29, 2004

Universal, Warner Bros, Paramount, and New Line Support HD-DVD

Major movie studious Paramount, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros., and New Line Cinema all said today that they have adopted the new high definition DVD disc format (HD-DVD), and will begin issuing movie titles in the new format in 2005. Universal cited better picture and sound quality, and backwards compatibility of the format as reasons for supporting the standard, and Paramount said that advantages in cost of manufacturing and ease of replication led it to support HD-DVD. The HD-DVD format was created by Toshiba, and is going head to head with Sony's rival optical disc format, Blu-ray. Blu-ray currently supports 25GB on a single layer disc, versus 20GB for HD-DVD; however, the HD-DVD format is easier to produce and can use existing DVD disc production equipment.

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