Asia introduces own HD-DVD standard "FVD"

March 30, 2004

We already reported about the FVD
standard in January. Now on Golem.de we can read about the presentation of this technology
to the public on April 5th. Development of this Finalized Versatile Disc
(FVD) by the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) was sponsored by
the taiwan government.

This
technique uses DVDs that are written by red lasers and have
the common capacity of 8.5 GB. Possibly something in the data
format was changed compared to standard DVD-ROM/DVD-Video as - according
to ITRI CMC Magnetics, Ritek and U-Tech media will produce special
FVD-media.

As we already heard, Windows Media Video 9 (WMV9) and
Windows Media Audio 9 (WMA9) will be used for video and audio compression.
This way Taiwan wants to produce high resolution movies at lowest
costs for hardware and licensing.

Further announcements will probably be propagated on
April 5th at the "Announcement of new optical disc format of Forward
Versatile Disc (FVD) for high-definition video applications" in
Taipeh/Taiwan. Even copy protection will be an issue on this
event.

First DVD-players with support for WMV9 are already
announced, but they are not yet available worldwide and it is not clear
yet, wether these players will be able to play
FVD-media.

Although the idea sounds good to create movie discs with higher quality, I am
a little annoyed that they use WMA9 and WMV9 - a proprietary Microsoft
codec. I think I will prefer players that are capable of MPEG4 instead of
Windows Media. I would like to see devices that are able to play movies with the
Nero Digital
format.

Our General Hardware Forum is the right place for you to discuss
this new format.

Source: Golem.de