Microsoft is perhaps the biggest attraction with the HD DVD format and the software giant has officially, at several occasions, given its support to HD DVD while it has been very critic of the competing Blu-ray format. Now Amir Majidimehr, VP for Microsoft’s Consumer Media Technology group, has opened up in a podcast about why Microsoft chose HD DVD over Blu-ray and according to Microsoft it was all about the manufacturing of the optical discs. The manufacturing of Blu-ray media will according to Microsoft be considerably trickier than that of the HD DVD format, something that has been known for long and is not very surprising considering Blu-ray’s superior storage capacity. Majidimehr also revealed that Microsoft from the start was very active during the development of the two formats, much to make its video compression technology VC1 a part of the format’s specifications.
What finally made it choose the HD DVD format was that it in the meantime discovered several disadvantages with with the Blu-ray format and specifically the manufacturing process.
“Number one was viability of being able to manufacture that disc. Blu-ray moves the recording surface very close to the top of the disc, the top layer of the disc, and as you do that it gets harder and harder to manufacture those discs with high reliability. And indeed if you look at the marketplace today, Blu-ray has launched at half their capacity, at 25 gigabytes and are having difficulty ramping up to 50 gigabytes.”
To protect the data against scratces and similar, as it so close to the surface, Sony has specially developed a technology to add a protecting layer to the discs. The problem with the application of this protection is that a lot of the discs are destroyed in the process. Something that lowers the manufacturing efficiency and increase the costs.
According to Microsoft Blu-ray’s almost over-exaggerated copy protection is also one of the reasons why it chose HD DVD format. Somehow MS managed to forget about the fact that Sony and PS3 is tightly bound together with Blu-ray, something many believes has played a major part in Microsoft’s decision and that Blu-ray uses Java, a software Microsoft no longer supports.
