Nine consumer electronics makers including Japanese giants Sony Corp and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd said on Tuesday they had agreed to a uniform standard for next-generation DVDs.
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In reaching a basic agreement, the firms hope to avoid the fragmentation of standards for recordable DVD (digital versatile disc) recorders that has plagued the current line-up.
There are now three DVD standards.
The new format will have 27 gigabytes of memory on one side of a single 12-cm disc, allowing for more than 13 hours of television to be recorded, compared with two hours on the current 4.7 gigabyte disc, the companies said.
Also agreeing to the format were Philips Electronics NV of the Netherlands, South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and LG Electronics Inc , and France's Thomson Multimedia .
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