The Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) of Taiwan last week detailed two optical-disk formats, developed with Taiwanese suppliers, that it has submitted to the DVD Forum for consideration as industry standards for high-definition DVD recording disks based on blue lasers.

ITRI and 28 companies formed the Advanced Optical Storage Research Alliance (AOSRA) last year to develop the formats in an effort to put control of the intellectual property (IP) for next-generation disk formats in the hands of Taiwanese suppliers, which dominate the market for disk-related products.

AOSRA defined specifications for two formats, Blue-HD-DVD-1 and Blue HD-DVD-2, last November. The formats specify a disk size, substrate thickness and lens numerical aperture that are shared by other next-generation DVD formats under consideration by the DVD Forum and by the Blu-ray Disc system. But they feature proprietary compression, error correction code and file formats that are not bound by patents held by foreign companies.

The Blue-HD-DVD-1 disk will have a capacity of 17 Gbytes per side and a maximum data-transfer rate of 25.05 Mbits/second. The Blue-HD-DVD-2 disk has a 27-Gbyte capacity and a data-transfer rate of 31.59 Mbits/s.

The Blue-HD-DVD specs exclude MPEG-2 compression, but ITRI is working on a proprietary compression technology, AVC, that resembles MPEG-4 and that "stores more than five hours of HDTV motion pictures," Huang said. MPEG-2 requires about 15 Gbytes of capacity to store two hours of video, he said.