The HD DVD format offers 15 GBytes capacity for ROM and 20 GBytes for recordable media whie maintaining physical resemblance with current DVD media.

The HD DVD-ROM physical specification version 1.0 was approved during a steering committee meeting in Seattle this week. If the specification attains final approval from the DVD Forum, both Toshiba and NEC plan to introduce HD DVD products next year.

Toshiba and NEC proposed HD DVD to the DVD Forum as the next-generation DVD format. MPEG-2, WM9 (VC-9) and MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) were approved in version 1.0 as the video codecs for the HD DVD-ROM format.

From EETimes