Three engineers at the Warner Brothers studio in California have filed a patent that could stop the market for Blu-ray and HD-DVD players collapsing as the battle between the formats comes to Europe.
The idea from Warner allows a disk to hold both formats plus standard DVD so that it will play in either player. Wayne Smith, Alan Bell and Lewis Ostrover propose using a number of ways of solving the problem, from having Blu-ray on one side and the same application in DVD on the other so that it can be read by an HD DVD player, to having both data layers on the same side and at different depths, or even at the same depth.
The higher cost of the disk would be offset by only needing to produce one for all players, rather than both, said Helen Davis Jayalath, senior analyst for video at market researchers Screen Digest.
This is important as the market still has the potential for disaster, warned Jayalath.
It is still possible that the consumer will lose interest in the technology fight and the market will see a rerun of the battle between SACD and DVD Audio, where nobody won, she said at a Screen Digest seminar last week
But the most likely outcome is for a combination drive that can read both Blu-ray and HD DVD disks, and Ricoh launched a drive that will handle both formats earlier in the year.
The battle comes to Europe this month with the launch of Blu-ray and HD DVD players from different suppliers.
The first HD DVD player to be launched in Europe arrives on November 15th, with the HD-E1 from Toshiba, priced between €600 and €700. That compares with the Blu-ray player from Samsung, the P1000 that launched two weeks ago, and followed this week by the launch of the Panasonic DMP-BD10. However, pricing is higher, from £1,000 for the Samsung and £1,300 for the Panasonic.