Beyond the HD disc format wars

Alan Bell and Lewis Ostrover, engineers at Warner Bros., have filed for a patent for a triple-standard disc that holds Blu-ray, HD-DVD and DVD data on a single disc.

NewScientist.com reported last week that Warner Bros. plans to create a disc with a special Blu-ray layer on top and an HD-DVD layer below. Both formats use the same blue laser, but to allow either the Blu-ray or the HD-DVD layer to be read on the Warner Bros. disc, the top layer will act “like a two-way mirror.” That way, sufficient light can penetrate the Blu-ray layer to read data on the HD-DVD layer without the former interfering with the process.

The disc is designed to accommodate standard DVD recording on the other side.