The DVD Forum, the industry body responsible for defining and maintaining the DVD standard, has approved Toshiba and NEC's suggestion for a version of the format that will support HDTV.

The proposed specification is based on a blue laser optical system, yielding a disc capacity of 15-20GB per side. The format uses the same disc structure as today's DVDs.

However, while the Forum voted 8:6 to support the Toshiba/NEC format, it only agreed to use the read-only implementation. The two companies also offered a rewritable version, but that failed to gain a majority vote.

Technically, neither did the ROM format, EE Times reports (http://www.eetimes.com/sys/news/OEG20031126S0034). The victory was achieved only through new voting rules that ignore abstentions. In two past ballots, based on previous regulations, the Toshiba/NEC format did not achieve a majority vote.

Crucially, the Toshiba/NEC format offers backward compatibility with the current DVD standard. However, it's up against a powerful consortium of key consumer electronics players, including Sony, Philips, Matsushita and Samsung, who back the incompatible Blu-Ray format.

As we've seen with DVD-R/-RW and DVD+R/+RW, the two formats are likely to go head to head in the market, despite the Forum's support for a particular technology. Blu-Ray has not been offered to the Forum as the basis of a future DVD spec., but it will be offered to the market as the next generation of write-once/rewritable optical storage technology.

Sony began shipping Blu-Ray based storage product this month (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/63/33574.html). ®

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