Microsoft Corp. on Monday said four makers of DVD players would start supporting its digital audio technology, letting users play disks with up to 250 hours of music and extending the software giant's reach farther into the living room.Electronics companies Panasonic, Toshiba Corp. , Apex and Shinco will make DVD players capable of playing Windows Media Audio (WMA), a ``compression'' technology that shrinks digital music to a fraction of its original size without much loss of quality.

Until recently people using WMA, or the popular MP3 format, have had to listen to compressed music on a computer or special digital music device because most regular CD players cannot play the compressed songs. Electronics manufacturers have been enabling new CD players to recognize a variety of formats and play discs containing 10 to 20 hours of music. The Microsoft deals will enable new DVD players to play music recorded on recordable DVDs, high capacity disks that can store about six times more data than CDs. The players are starting to break into the mass consumer market as prices come down. ``This is going to make Windows Media content very broadly available to people in the living room at high quality,'' Microsoft digital media unit group manager Jonathan Usher said in an interview.