Let us take our eyes off the Blu-ray and HD DVD format war for a second and concentrate on a new disc format known as HD VMD (Versatile Multilayer Disc). It is a proprietary format from New Medium Enterprises that uses standard red lasers, but crams in more data as it can hold 4 layers per disc. First generation VMD can hold up to 24GB of data, and there is ongoing work to increase its capacity in subsequent revisions. Amazon has already started shipping the first HD VMD players with prices starting from an affordable $189, featuring support for full 1080i and 1080p resolutions, bit rates of up to 40Mbps, video compression, and various audio codecs support. Too bad the current movie library is just too small, but hopefully as more people snap these up, you’ll see even more studios jump on the VMD bandwagon.
Filed in ..