According to DigiTimes, a Taiwan R&D institute recently introduced an alternative blue-laser technology to compete with Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD as a next-generation DVD format.

The new format is called HD-DVD-1, and was developed by Taiwan?s Opto-Electronics & Systems Laboratories (OES), which operates under the government-sponsored Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI).

OES recently unveiled its testing platform during a December 7 conference attended by more than 100 Taiwan-based companies, including IC-design houses MediaTek, VIA Technologies and Ali; optical disc maker CMC Magnetics; and optical-disc drive makers Lite-On IT, BenQ and Quanta Storage.

The OES-developed HD-DVD-1 format is more closely related to HD DVD than to the Blu-ray Disc format in terms of physical parameters, according to OES deputy director Der-ray Huang. A blue-laser HD-DVD-1 disc will have a storage capacity of 17GB, Huang noted. OES also has an HD-DVD-2 format in development, which will be more closely related to Blu-ray Disc, Huang added.

Although there are still encoding/decoding technology barriers to overcome, Huang claimed HD-DVD-1 drives may debut as early as the end of 2005.

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