VMD, anyone?

[neil wilkes]

Just got this in my inbox:

Contact:Juliet Francis
NME Press Office
T: +44 (0) 20 7813 0502
[email protected]

MEDIA ALERT

NME DEBUTS HD VMD PC PRODUCTS AT MEDIA-TECH

London – March 7, 2007: New Medium Enterprises (NME) (OTC Bulletin Board: NMEN) today announced that it is publicly debuting its HD VMD PC products this week at MEDIA-TECH, the renowned annual conference for the packaged media manufacturing industry taking place in Barcelona, Spain.
NME's HD VMD PC technology will enable consumers to make their current PC drives compatible with VMD playback format through a simple download, and will also offer PC manufacturers VMD drives for future VMD technology formats. NME will officially demonstrate its true HD VMD 20 (GB) disc playback with an "off the shelf" DVD drive equipped with HD VMD PC playback software, along with its new HD VMD media player. The proprietary PC drives will go on sale in Q3 07.
“The release of the HD VMD PC products is timed perfectly to coincide with the launch of HD VMD content from various distribution partners in key regions,” commented Mahesh Jayanarayan, NME CEO.
VMD is currently being adopted by content providers and distributors in 12 regions worldwide, including Brazil, Central Europe, China, France, Germany, Iceland, India, Japan, the Middle East Russia, Scandinavia and the United States.
VMD technology can provide up to eight information layers on each side of a disc and can be utilized for both blue laser and red laser formats, thereby offering numerous content options and business opportunities for the high-definition and content ecosystem.
About NME
New Medium Enterprises HD VMD format and players provides the world's first low-cost and true high-definition playback solution utilizing today's red laser technology and existing DVD industrial infrastructure. Incorporating break-through optical storage capacity, a red laser-based HD file format, encryption technology, authoring tools and compression technologies, NME is providing the only high-quality and high-value offering for the discerning consumer electronics market. New Medium Enterprises, Inc. is listed on the OTC exchange in the U.S. under the symbol NMEN. For additional information about NME, please visit http://www.nmeinc.com .

Looks like both Sony & Toshiba will be getting a serious run for their money, as the software players for this are not only freely downloadable, but the players will also be cheap, authoring software will be affordable, and it will happily support DTS audio as well as (possibly) DTS-HD MAS for a lossless stream as well, with the advent of DTS getting a new chip manufacturing deal sorted out for embedded decoders to handle all the new High Res & Lossless streams from the DTS-HD MAS encoder.
20+ Gb on red laser discs, all it takes to play them is a free download & a standard DVD-ROM or DVD-RW drive.


This company is worth keeping a close eye on.

 

[Desmo888]

Competition builds a better product at a lower cost!

 

[winopener]

What's inside their "demo disc"?

 

[Chris Gerhard]

I have never heard of it until now but I will watch and see if anything materializes.

Chris

 

[Baba O'Riley]

No Hollywood movies on it. So it's DOA?

 

[elshagon]

No Hollywood movies on it. So it's DOA?

Hollywood didn't want two formats for HD, let alone three. I don't see any major movie studios supporting it, so it is DOA as far as movies go. Plus at 20gb it doesn't have enough capacity anyway.

 

[Dartman]

This product will be a godsend to those of us with HDTV's if it happens and blanks are reasonable. I have so many good shows in HD I'd love to archive with something other then a TV tuner card that makes it almost impossible to put on any hard media for storage and portability to other players in my house.
HDDVD and Blue ray are still way to spendy, and so are the blanks, though I'm sure that will change as more players jump in. But these units sound cheap right now, just a matter of cheap blanks to go with them...
I'm pretty sure they plan pc and settop burners but if they don't then I agree, it's DOA!

 

[sacd user]

The French moves in according to this article http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=38991

 

[neil wilkes]

20Gb?
Only on a single layer disc. DL discs will hold 40Gb.
See http://www.nmeinc.com/index.aspx
HD movies are only a part of this format, with Data storage & gaming being a part of it as well, and as it uses red laser technology it won't be expensive - no Blue Diodes to pay extortionate prices for.

 

[winopener]

Will be intresting to see what kind of player they get and what else it can pl,ay, along with VMD. Too bad there's a lot of time to wait.

 

[Nova74]

Check out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versatile_Multilayer_Disc
Acording to this, VMD is approx. 5 gb per layer.
I think blank 8 and 10 layer discs will be a little unaffordable...
Ryan

 

[sacd user]

Looking at the company web site it seems that the product is moving forward:
HD VMD Debuts in U.S. - Affordable HD Disc Solution Available to Consumers in Q3'07.
DENVER, Sep 05,2007
$199 Price-Point Drives Affordability into the HD Market