The new HD-formats delayed?

From “DVD Insider”, a news letter for branch people, we got a rather depressing prognosis. Acoording to the writer the plans on joining  HD-DVD and Blu-ray will prolong the wait for the new format(s). He tells us that the new format is epxected to be built on Blu-ray. Further he says the launch will be delayed until 2008 and expect an acceptance from the market during 2010. Thus a delay of 2-3 years. Besides that it is insinuated that we will never see Blu-ray or HD-DVD as any of the accepted formats but the new holographic medias (with the capacity up to terabyte size) will be available “already” at 2010.

To make us cope with this he predicts we will already this year see DVD-players with HD-decoding in form of support for MPEG4-based on VC1 and H.264 on regular DVD9-discs. We can’t other than hope that these pessimistic thoughts are unfounded. No matter what, today available, codec they will use DVD Dual Layer is not enough to house high quality HD-material.