The first ever movie to be made available on a Blu-Ray/DVD disc combination will be a Japanese movie. The Hybrid disc can be played on both traditional Blu-Ray disc players and DVD players. The disc would contain two regular DVD layers with a 8.5 GB capacity and will have a blue laser layer on the top. The blue laser layer can hold about 25 GB of data. This innovative idea of combining of both the formats on a single disc was developed by JVC about two years ago.
According to crdinfo.com,
"Using a single layer for the Blu-ray content required the use of a new efficient video-encoding algorithm, since the provided capacity (25GB) was not enough. Provided that the specific title is not very demanding in terms of bandwidth, it was decided to use JVC’s "Intelligent HD encoding technology", a technology based on the MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) specifications. According to JVC, the technology compresses a full HD image of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels and 24p/60i into about 12-24Mbps.
However, the first hybrid releases will be quite expensive. Pony/Canyon said that the fist movie package to be released in February would include a set of four hybrid discs (MPEG-4 AVC, Dolby Digital, 534 minutes in total) that will cost around 36,540 Yen ($406), while the DVD version (7 DVD discs, 534 minutes, Dolby Digital) will retail for 23,940 Yen ($266)."
A whopping 406 dollars!! I think I will stay away from these till the prices of these discs drop.
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