Sony, Panasonic partner on camcorder HD-on-DVD spec
Posted on 11/05/06 16:52 by Dan Bell                             
Sony, Panasonic partner on camcorder HD-on-DVD spec

D4rk0n3 used our news submit to tell us about this updated report from The Register, that gives us details on a new spec for HD camcorders using DVD discs for storage. Both Sony and Panasonic have announced the launch and have said they will promote the AVCHD specification on their corresponding products. Below, we can read a little about the spec itself.

The AVCHD specification supports both 4:3 and 16:9 aspect-ratio images recorded at a range of resolutions from 576i - equivalent to the PAL TV standard - through to 1080p, each with the requisite number of pixels - 720 x 576 up to 1,920 x 1,080.The video signals, both HD and SD, are encoded on the DVD using the H.264 MPEG 4 codec.

The system supports Linear PCM and Dolby Digital (aka AC-3) for sound encoding with, respectively, SD and HD pictures. Multi-speaker set-ups are supported: up to 7.1 for SD and up to 5.1 for HD. The discs use an MPEG 2 transport stream, which suggests while they won"t be playable on a regular DVD player, they can be used in a standard DVD drive to extract, edit and transcode the pictures and sound. However, neither Sony nor Matsushita have confirmed this.

Doing a little digging around the Internet reveals that about 20 minutes of HD video can be recorded on a single-sided DVD disc at average quality setting, as compared to 30 minutes of video on a standard definition camcorder using a similar disc.

Matsushita (Panasonic) has stated that they intend to use the specification with HD video on SD memory cards as well. Even though both companies intend to push hard for the new spec, they have not given a time-frame for when we might see products using AVCHD.

Source: The Register

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By Ron the 2nd, Thursday 11 May 2006 23:32
Current DVD recorders are using only MPEG2 - and therefore only short recordings can be made on a single DVD disc. Personally, I've wondered for a long time why doesn't anyone develop a DivX DVD recorder, and also a DivX DVD camcorder. I think that it could be great. Many people have DivX DVD players - so there won't be any compatibility issues with this. After reading the news report about the utilization of AVC in camcorders, I think that it's time that this codec should also be used with set-top DVD recorders. Now, with dual-layered DVD+RW discs, at last we would be able to record "decent", long enough recordings on DVD. There's still a lot of time until Blu-Ray / HD-DVD would catch-up with DVD's prices - so there is a justification to offer new features to DVD recorders.
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