Now this is interesting, we knew that the two new DVD formats were coming out and were taking opposite sides of the ring in the next format war, both are incompatible with each other, both have huge backing and both don't want to budge an inch. Well new technology announced this week is set to make the entire war obselete and allow the consumer choice.

Currently hardware either plays HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, multiple layer discs are difficult and costly to produce with a high failure rate, and none of the studios seem interested in closing the gap.

From CRN, a UK company, New Medium Enterprises, has just solved that by creating the first dual format, multiple layered DVD, more than multi-layered in fact, up to ten. It allows a movie to be recorded on one disk in both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD formats, and for a mere nine cents, when single layer discs are currently six cents to produce.

"Current technologies to create multiple layer disks mostly don't work. We've created a technology for mass production of multiple layers that does not suffer from the well known problem of low yields," said NME chief technology officer Eugene Levich...

...This 50 percent cost increase compares favourably with the current generation of multi-layer recordable DVD disks which cost three to five times as much to produce than a single layer disk, due to low yields.

This announcement comes just a week after Warner Brothers announced the filing of a patent for the application of multiple formats on a single DVD disc. There's not a competition between the two as WB are patenting the software aspect and NME are patenting the technology aspects.

"I can confirm this. We were very sceptical when NME approached us. We have experience with producing dual layer recordable DVD discs and the yield is below 50 percent. But their technology gives a much higher yield and also brings other cost savings," said ODMS Chief Executive Jadranko Dovic.

Okay, so the proof is in the pudding, and Dovic says that they will have the first production line running in 2007.

So what does this all mean to you? Simple. You can own a Blu-Ray player and your mate down the road has HD-DVD, or more probably he has an XBox 360 with HD-DVD drive and you have a PS3. If you've bought some of these new discs then you can swap them back and forth and still watch them on either machine. This is a winner.