It’s generally accepted that High-definition DVDs and DVD players are still years away from being in stores, mostly because the industry hasn’t been able to settle on a standard for the discs. But HomeTheaterHiFi.com has some illuminating details on how Microsoft is making an end run around the industry which means we might have HD-DVD within months, rather than years.
You may recall that Artisan released an “Extreme Edition” of “Terminator 2” this past May which came with two discs: one that plays in a regular DVD player, and another an extremely high-resolution version of the film encoded in Microsoft’s Windows Media 9 format that will only play on a PC with Windows Media Player 9, a fast enough processor, and a good video card. Microsoft is determined to make Windows Media 9 video format the standard for HD-DVD, and they actually have a shot at accomplishing that. They’ve just submitted WM9 to the Society of Motion Picture Television Engineers as a standards candidate, hoping that it can succeed MPEG-2, the standard which is used in DVDs, set-top boxes, and video-editing systems now.
What’s really compelling about using WM9 as a high-definition format is that it doesn’t require a higher-capacity disc to work as its data rate is compatible with existing DVDs. Which means that all that’s needed is for someone to build a regular DVD player that can decode the WM9 format. And guess what? Samsung says they’ll have one out by January, years before anyone thought HD-DVD would be on the market. Whether there will be many movies to watch (besides Terminator 2) remains to be seen. Either way, it’s a promising start and Microsoft’s move should serve as a wake-up call to the rest of the consumer electronics industry.
