by Anton Shilov
11/02/2007 | 10:01 AM
New Medium Enterprises will market about 120 movie titles on the HD VMD format in the next few months, the company has announced. The relatively high amount of movies as well as availability of appropriate players in such stores as Amazon.com is claimed to help the company to have a successful launch of the high-definition format that is totally different from Blu-ray and HD DVD.
<%BANNER[article]%>“Currently, we have 110 movies and titles available on HD VMD, most of which will be going on sale by Nov 1st 2007. Titles will be available through both an HD Bundle Box with Player and as standalone films. Our roadmap is going to be growing our library of HD titles in each of the regions we are releasing in, the U.S., India, China, France, Australia, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Iceland, and the UK,” a spokeswoman for NME said.
HD VMD format is the third optical disc type to record high-definition movies. The technology is based on multi-layer DVD discs and red laser head. Each additional layer adds approximately up to 5 GB of memory over a standard DVD disc. VMD provides the ability to place up to 20 layers on a single disc with no quality loss in the content stored. This means capacity to record of 100 GB or more without major changes to DVD players, but the disc technology requires new manufacturing process and production lines. Currently the company can produce up to 30GB discs. HD VMD is not supported by any major movie studios, like Blu-ray or HD DVD.
At this point it is possible to acquire HD VMD ML622S and ML777s players from NME for $199 and $209, respectively, through Amazon.com. Eventually NME will offer the HD VMD gear via its own online store.
NME’s ML622S player is capable of CD, DVD and HD VMD playback. The device can decode streams encoded using MPEG-1, MPEG-2/MPEG-2 HD, VC-1 or H.264 codecs in up to 1080p (1920x1200, progressive scan) resolution with up to 45Mb/s bitrate along with Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, DTS audio. The ML777s model can up-convert standard DVDs and has futuristic design.
The list of movies, most of which should be available shortly and some of which dues to be out by February, include such titles as:
In addition, NME will market 33 episodes of The Lazy Town series for children.
The aforementioned movies are projected to be available both online and through retail stores.