HD DVD and Blu-ray at battle to win studios

Almost half of the major studios in the US have chosen to use the HD DVD format to record movies in the future, when it becomes available to them in almost a year from now.

Warner, Paramount, Universal and New Line Cinema have all agreed to embrace the technology, which has been created by Toshiba, despite Sony making aggressive moves this year to push its Blu-ray format.

The battle between Blu-ray and HD DVD has been touted as being as big as that of VHS and Sony's Betamax during the 80s.

Both technologies offer bigger capacity than current formats and use a blue laser to read data off the carrier rather than red lasers used in today's DVDs.

The studios are expected to release films on the HD DVD format when HD DVD players are released late next year.

There is good news for Sony Blu-ray though however. It has the backing of Sony Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. has also implied that it will back this format too.

Blu-ray makers say that their format is better because it provides a single-layer disc that can store about 25GB of data, which is enough to record three hours of high-quality TV footage, whereas the HD DVDs only have 20 GB of storage space.

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