We've written plenty about the battle between Sony's Blu-Ray next generation DVD and Toshiba's HD-DVD standard - a scrap to see who can win the hearts and wallets of film fans around the globe.
Now New Scientist has picked up on a patent filed for a "triple standard DVD" from some researchers at Warner Bros. Essentially it would use a few clever tricks to be able to play ordinary DVD, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD formats...
Two top Warner engineers, Alan Bell and Lewis Ostrover, have been working on a cheaper and more elegant solution.
[...] Warner's plan is to create a disc with a Blu-ray top layer that works like a two-way mirror. This should reflect just enough blue light for a Blu-ray player to read it okay. But it should also let enough light through for HD-DVD players to ignore the Blu-ray recording and find a second HD-DVD layer beneath. An ordinary DVD recording could be put on the other side, so that conventional DVD players can read the disc as well.
Not the easiest answer, but probably what most customers want, I'd imagine.
