News Blu-ray group gets behind Microsoft tech

Aha - in the comming DVD replacement war, there will only be one winner. Bill. This from news.com:

Backers of the Blu-ray DVD format are adopting Microsoft's video compression technology, giving the software giant a secure foothold in each of the two major camps battling to establish a successor to DVDs.

The Blu-ray Disc Association is making three video compression-decompression technologies mandatory in its read-only disc specification, and one of those codecs is Microsoft's VC-1, a Panasonic representative said Tuesday. Panasonic's parent, Matsu****a Electric, is one of the 13 companies behind the Blu-ray format, which is vying with the rival HD DVD format to replace today's DVDs for the coming era of high-definition programming.

VC-1 is the name given to Microsoft's VC-9 codec by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), which is considering the technology as a possible standard. As VC-9, VC-1 has already won approval as a mandatory codec for the HD DVD format.

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LOL! In case anyone wondered, that company name is "M a t s u s h i t a Electric"