NEC makes hybrid chipset for BR and HD-DVD!

Matt, our resident Media Center expert, spotted a beauty of a story today. In an effort to make the format war more like a little girl's tea part, NEC has shipped a chipset that will work with Blu-ray and HD DVD. See? If Sony and Toshiba could just get together and sing cumbaya, we would be a lot better off and further down the technology road.

From the article:

According to an English-language translation
by the publication CDRInfo, samples of the two-chip set are now
available at 10,000 yen (about $83.55 USD), with mass production
expected to begin by the end of the fourth quarter of 2006. The
company, according to the translation of the AV Watch article, expects
to ship 300,000 units per month by next April.

With no single
manufacturer committed to hybrid drives, it would actually appear NEC's
motivation isn't really to enable hybrid drive production – although
this could happen anyway. Instead, NEC may be more interested in simply
creating a single, mass-produced chipset for high-def device
manufacturers.

Another extremely important revelation from NEC's news this morning
is that its hybrid chipset also contains the full logic for
implementing Advanced Access Copy System (AACS) copy protection, which
is formally supported by the architects of both HD DVD and Blu-ray even
though the first players for both formats left this scheme out.

Once
implemented, AACS will enable users to connect their players and
recorders directly to the Internet, ostensibly so that they can enter
into a sophisticated bartering process with content providers as to
whether they can make backup copies of discs they've purchased. Content
providers can allow or disallow copies on a case-by-case basis, through
an AACS process with the historically confusing title "mandatory
managed copy" (MMC).