A Media Player To Play It All
With the demise of Betamax years ago, VHS became the one simple choice for videos, and remained that way up until the late 90's. VHS has since met it's end, and DVD has taken over as the format choice for most, but that's all changing now. With the release of Sony's Blu-Ray format, and Microsoft's competing HD-DVD format, deciding which format to choose from can be a bit confusing to the consumer. As Ars Technica reports, Warner may be looking to change all that by creating a player to play it all. One has to wonder how much such a device will cost though.
"The patent then describes an implementation in which both sides of the disc contains data layers, which means that we could see discs with CD and DVD layers on one side, HD DVD and Blu-ray on the other. The downside to this approach is that each format gets only one layer, reducing its total capacity. Discs are not especially expensive to produce, so it may make financial sense for studios to begin shipping two-disc movies that contain all three formats. While this would simplify things for consumers and would free up valuable shelf space, it would also make it hard to offer different price points for DVD and high-definition formats."
