Ongoing History Daily: The death of the HD-DVD CD
In the early 2000s, there was a push to replace the compact disc with something better, a format with greater frequency response. One attempt was called HD-DVD, which was an offshoot of DVD technology.
Regular CDs are played using a red laser but DVDs use a blue one. The shorter frequency of the laser allowed it to read more information on the disc. The thinking was if people are using this sort of tech for watching movies, why not use it for listening to music?
The problem was HD-DVD had a competitor in Blu-ray, which was based on the same principles. Even though HD-DVD was first to market, cheaper to produce, and was supported by both Intel and Windows, it lost out to Blu-ray, especially when that format started appearing in Sony PlayStations.
Those HD-DVD are now just relics, useless pieces of plastic.
Yesterday’s post had a story on a great where-are-they-now situation.
And don’t forget to check out my podcast The Ongoing History of New Music where you listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google, Stitcher, or wherever you get your on-demand audio.
DVDs used red lasers (and CDs used infrared). HD-DVDs and BluRays used blue/violet lasers.