If I’m allowed to use military analogies in the Blu-ray vs HD-DVD war then inteset must be considered a ‘neutral’ participant. Their new Home Theatre Media Server releases, the Maximus and Denzel, both sport a Blu-ray/HD DVD combo drive. Good news for the consumer. The down side is that these ‘neutral’ puppies will probably set you back a pretty penny judging by the spec for the Maximus. Here’s a selection of goodies on offer in the Maximus

2 HDTV, 2 SDTV and FM tuners
7.1 Surround Sound, Dolby DigitalEX, DTS-ES, THX Audio
nVidia GeForce 8600GTS 256-bit GDDR3 memory
3 TB of storage space
Windows XP MCE 2005 Edition

Although these offerings from Inteset are aimed at the top end of the market, hopefully the combo drive option will be available in lower end HTPCs and perhaps we can declare that the ‘war’ is over. But that wouldn’t make for fun blogging, now would it? ;)

Source: electronista

According to InfoWorld, Ritek, a Taiwanese disc manufacturer has started production of Blu-ray re-writable discs (BD-RE) as well as HD DVD-RE discs. A small step for disc manufacturing may be, but an important one for the end user - you and me - this dual format production will eventually force down the price of these suckers.

At the moment you’re looking at around US$10 per disc, not a small amount to extract from anyone’s wallet and perhaps even harder to swallow when you’re told the production costs are only US$5. I’m obviously in the wrong business. However as other disc manufacturers start to produce both formats the US$10 price tag will fall.

How much can these suckers handle? Well, the BD-REs have a capacity of 25GB which equates to 3 hours of high-def TV, where as the HD DVD-REs hold 20GB.

As for recording devices, the Sony BWU100A is still an expensive addition to your PC at around the US$700 mark, but as with all tech gear this price will drop and one day the terms BD-RE and HD DVD-RE will be as common as DVD-RW.