After Blu-ray, HD DVD and EVD are FVD

In the trend of developing a new generation of high-resolution optical disc formats, some Taiwanese companies have massively developed Forward Versatile Disc (FVD) standard products, allowing the content on the disk to be read with red laser of current DVD players.

Content on the FVD disc is encoded in Microsoft's WMV HD format. FVD was developed to eliminate the price gap between DVD and the new generation formats that are expected to appear massively in the market in 2008.

The 1-layer FVD disc can store between 5.4 and 6 GB of content, and increase to 9.8 - 11 GB per layer if it is a dual disc. That's enough to hold 135 minutes of high resolution 1920 x 1080i HD content. FVD is promoted and developed by the AOSRA Alliance, an organization of 29 broadcasters and disc / player manufacturers in Taiwan.

Der-ray Huang, deputy director of the OES Experimental Center of the ITRI Technology Research Institute of the Taiwanese government and also a participant in the development of the FVD standard, said the models that use this format are now available. produced in bulk by local Idar company. It is expected that next year the company will ship 300,000 products. Idar hopes that by the end of 2006 there will be more than 1,000 films released by FVD standards.

FVD officially appeared in March this year and was promoted in Taiwan market with many other countries in Asia. However, companies supporting this format also want it to be accepted by the West even though this is difficult because of the competition of two giant rivals Blu-ray and HD DVD.

Taiwan's format is not the only optical disc standard competing with Blu-ray and HD DVD. China is also developing its own format, called EVD, to free domestic manufacturers from pressure to pay technology royalties to Western companies when building Blu-ray compatible and HD players. DVD