OK, this HD-VMD is pretty interesting...
First off, there's this:
"The VMD platform is meant for 1920X1080i/p High Definition up to 40 Mbps bit rate playback using its 20 GB-40 GB Red Laser optical discs - the players & burners stand alone and computer embedded, inherently backward compatible with DVD and CD."
It maintains complete backwards compatibility with existing DVDs and CDs. Sure, HD-DVD and Blu-ray accomplish the same, but there's more:
"Presently, all optical laser devices such as DVD operate on red laser technology, have a frequency or wavelength of 650Nm (nanometres), and deliver Standard Definition (SD) quality pictures. New technology has since emerged using blue laser, an inferior wavelength or frequency of 405Nm that can store more information .The downside of this technology is that manufacturing production lines of drives and discs will have to be dismantled and changed entirely, naturally incurring significant costs to the producers, which in turn will trickle to the consumer.
Without making a drastic shift from Red laser technology, researchers at NME, have found a means of exploiting the unused or wasted space between the existing layers of a standard DVD through its unique multilayer technology. This brilliantly innovative technology is evident in Versatile Multilayer Discs or VMD, starting with a minimum storage capacity of 20GB today and expandable further in the future."
Therefore, HD-VMD utilizes the same red lasers as existing DVD technology. Now, regarding the actual storage capacity:
"In order to play a full length motion picture in HD, the minimum storage requirement lies around 20 GB, whereas the latest DVD9 can only contain 8.5 GB.
VMD is precisely the same size and thickness as DVD. While DVD technology utilizes two layers of a disc, VMD technology has conceived multi-layering, whereby the storage capacity is dramatically increased. Each additional layer adds approximately up to 5 GB of memory over a standard DVD disc. VMD provides the ability to place up to 20 layers on a single disc with no quality loss in the content stored. This means capacity to record 100 GB or more."
This is the part that is a bit nebulous: Is current DVD laser technology designed to "understand" multiple layers per disc? If yes, then a firmware update will work. Otherwise, no dice.
But! I then find this nugget:
"Versatile: Inherent backward compatibility with all the existing and previous Disc formats. VMD Drives will be able to read other standard formats including CD and DVD.
Adaptable: VMD multilayer technology does not strictly function with red laser only, but can easily be applied to blue laser as well once the Blue laser technology is flawless. VMD would therefore attain even larger storage capacities easily outperforming all competition by offering increased storage whichever base it uses."
So... a-ha! It seems like this technology does not only apply to red lasers, but blue ones as well! This really gives me the impression that the technology can be applied to all existing formats. Perhaps it's not so much the laser, but the media in which the content is being stored. In other words, be it blue or red laser, as long as you use VMD discs when recording you should be able to attain significant gains in storage.
Then I did a bit more searching, and indeed it seems like HD-VMD technology revolves around the disc, not the laser:
"VMD - Disc
Versatile Multilayer Disc (VMD) is an optical storage device in the traditional DVD format, except that it can hold about 10 times the quantity of a standard DVD, or roughly 5 times the quantity of a DVD9. This is achieved quite simply through a multilayer technology that exploits the unused or wasted space, as we like to call it, within the disc itself.
The usual CD/DVD technology does not allow manufacturing disks with more than two layers (from one side). In contrast VMD technology allows building disks (and compatible players) with 5, 10 up to a maximum of 20 layers. VMD is a multi-layered semi reflective disc. Its format, dimension, weight, coding, technological and operational standards, as well as the corresponding parameters of the drives/players (including reading rate and power consumption) meet the regular standards of CD, DVD, minidisk and other existing information carriers."
