In the beginning, there was only DVD. Then there was something called DVD+R/RW, and a war of popularity raged across the economical continents. The conflict was easily dispatched by creating DVD-burners capable of burning both types, effectively undermining the problem.
A new DVD generation seems to be approaching, yet again with two adversaries, and yet again DVD-forum seems to have chosen the loosing side. The fight is now between the Asian-corporation supported Blu-Ray, and HD-DVD.
The new technologies are based upon blue lasers, giving extreme precision which increase the maximum storage capacity with quite an amount. Even if HD-DVD only has a raw capacity of a rough 30GB here, it’s codec are apparently able to compress quite a good amount of information of good quality down to this space. Another favorable side of HD-DVD is that it doesn’t differ all that much from the old DVD-standards. Blu-ray, on the other hand very much do so. There usually tend to be a good side of every such downside though, and Blu-ray’s is that it can store up to an amazing 50GB of pure Mpeg-2. Behind Blu-ray stands not only Sony, Dell and HP but also TDK, Mitsubishi, LG, Pioneer and Samsung among others. Despite the large amount of support, the change to Blu-rays technology is expensive, which will weigh heavily to HD-DVDs advantage, at least early on.
If you want to learn more you could visit both standards own websites:
Blu-ray
HD-DVD