HD-DVD
HD-DVD is the "next generation DVD" and has been standardized by the DVD Forum as its official "next generation" format.
Originally, the first "next gen format" to gain wide industry support was Blu-ray, which was developed by Sony and Philips. However, due variety of reasons, Toshiba and NEC decided to bring their own format to the table, causing a similar situation to the next generation video format as the DVD-R and DVD+R caused to the recordable DVD media.
Anyway, HD-DVD is supported heavily by large companies such as Microsoft, but it still remains to be seen whether the format can have equal footing alongside Blu-ray.
HD-DVD uses blue-laser technology (just like Blu-ray does, opposed to DVD's red laser) and can fit approximately 15 gigabytes to one disc layer (compared to appx. 4.3 gigabytes on one DVD disc's layer).
HD-DVD's officially supported video and audio codecs aren't decided yet (late summer, 2005), but currently approved are the traditional MPEG-2, the high-quality MPEG-4 AVC and Microsoft's VC-1.
HD-DVD's maximum supported screen resolution is 1080i as opposed to Blu-ray's 1080p.
Originally posted by ireland:HD-DVD's maximum supported screen resolution is 1080i as opposed to Blu-ray's 1080p.
This is a common misconception. The video in commercial HD-DVD's is encoded at 1080p - just like BluRay. This misconception probably arises because the first gen models - HD-A1 and HD-XA1 - and the entry level 2nd gen HD-A2 Toshiba players can only output video at 1080i. However the 2nd gen HD-A20 and HD-XA2 can output 1080p thru HDMI.
The XBox 360 with the HD-DVD add on can output 1080p thru component and VGA if your display supports these input resolutions (like some of the Samsung DLP's).
I have the HD-XA2 and aside from the 1080pHD-DVD output it also upconverts regular DVD's to 1080p.
