HP and Panasonic Peace on DVD Standards War

As part of the increasing irrelevance of the DVD standards war, Hewlett-Packard and Panasonic have agreed to use each other's standards in their future DVD drives. Specifically, Panasonic (aka Matsushita, aka Matshita) has agreed to start supporting the "+R" format (both reading and writing) in Panasonic DVD recorders, while HP says they will add DVD-RAM support to the burners in their consumer PCs.

Despite the initial "war" between the plus and minus formats (DVD-R versus DVD+R and DVD-RW versus DVD+RW), the end result was that most burners that people buy these days support both formats. The main remaining nit was really support (or lack thereof) for DVD-RAM. Although a slower format (and no dual-layer version available), many consider DVD-RAM more robust and reliable, and therefore a more appropriate format for backing up data.

See Also

• The official HP press release.
• The Backup Critic web page on HP DVD burners.

January 20, 2005January