HD DVD
discontinued optical disc format
HD DVD (short for High Density Digital Versatile Disc) is an obsolete high-density optical disc format for storing data and playback of high-definition video. Supported principally by Toshiba, HD DVD was envisioned to be the successor to the standard DVD format, but lost out to Blu-ray, which was supported by Sony and others.
HD DVD employed a blue laser with a shorter wavelength (with the exception of the 3× DVD and HD REC variants), and it stored about 3.2 times as much data per layer as its predecessor (maximum capacity: 15 GB per layer compared to 4.7 GB per layer on a DVD). The format was commercially released in 2006 and fought a protracted format war with its rival, the Blu-ray Disc. Compared to the Blu-ray Disc, the HD DVD was released earlier by a quarter year, featured a lower capacity per layer (compared to 25 GB of Blu-ray), but saved manufacturing costs by allowing existing DVD manufacturing equipment to be repurposed with minimal modifications, and movie playback was not restricted through region codes.
On 19 February 2008, Toshiba abandoned the format, announcing it would no longer manufacture HD DVD players and drives. The HD DVD Promotion Group was dissolved on March 28, 2008.
The HD DVD physical disc specifications (but not the codecs) were used as the basis for the China Blue High-definition Disc (CBHD) formerly called CH-DVD.
Besides recordable and rewritable variants, an HD DVD-RAM variant was proposed as the successor to the DVD-RAM and specifications for it were developed, but the format never reached the market.
History
In the late 1990s, commercial HDTV sets started to enter a larger market, but there was no inexpensive way to record or play back HD content. JVC's D-VHS and Sony's HDCAM formats could store that amount of data, but were neither popular nor well-known.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “HD DVD” is discontinued optical disc format. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through discontinued, optical and disc, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q178990. The first chronological checks are 2006 and 2008.
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This entry incorporates text from “HD DVD” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.