Total Hi Def

~ the obit ~

The press release is dated 9 January 2007 and the verb in it is "unveiled". Warner Home Video, at a presentation hosted by Warner Bros. Entertainment chairman Barry Meyer at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, showed a disc that played HD DVD on one side and Blu-ray on the other. Wikipedia puts the press conference on the 8th and Warner's own release is dated the 9th, which is the usual one-day gap between a stage and a wire.

The pitch was the format war itself. Buyers were being asked to pick a side without knowing whether their films would come out on their player or how long their player's format would last, and a disc containing both would make the question disappear. The second argument was aimed somewhere else entirely. Kevin Tsujihara, running Warner's home entertainment group, talked about consumer choice; the release also pointed out, more quietly, that one disc would halve the shelf space a retailer needed to carry the same film twice. The customer for Total Hi Def was the shop.

Warner said discs would be available in the second half of 2007 and that titles would be announced on the company's normal schedule for home entertainment releases. No title was ever announced. No copy was ever pressed for sale. Neither player was ever common enough here for the question to reach me, and by the time high definition did arrive here it came as a file on a hard disk, with no tray involved at either end.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ one and a quarter millimeters ~

The physical problem was real and Warner's release spells out how it was solved. The finished disc is 1.2 mm thick, exactly like a DVD or either of the discs it was impersonating, and it carried 15 or 30 GB on the HD DVD face and 25 or 50 GB on the Blu-ray face. Both formats read with the same blue laser, but they do not read at the same depth: Blu-ray keeps its data a tenth of a millimeter under the surface, HD DVD puts it six tenths down. Two different answers to the same question had to sit back to back inside one 1.2 mm sandwich.

Warner said the disc had been tested with leading manufacturers and replicators, which was the part that needed to be true for anyone else to join in. The cost was the thing double-sided discs always cost. With data on both faces there is no label side, so the printing that tells you which film you are holding has to go on the sleeve and nowhere else.

And the design only makes sense for somebody who has not chosen yet. A buyer who already owned an HD DVD player was being asked to pay for a Blu-ray layer with no machine in the house to read it, which inverts the problem Warner said it was solving.

~ for the moment, it is on hold ~

By September 2007 the launch had already slipped past autumn and into 2008. On 16 November, Tech Digest asked Warner where it had gone, and Jim Noonan answered: "The short answer is, for the moment, it is on hold." Noonan explained that Warner had no financial stake in the thing. It had been put forward as an industry compromise and no other studio or manufacturer had picked it up, which left Warner as the only studio releasing in both formats and therefore the only studio a both-formats disc was any use to. Noonan is also the press contact printed at the bottom of the launch release eleven months earlier.

On 4 January 2008 Warner Bros. announced it would release its high-definition titles exclusively on Blu-ray later that year. Both formats on one disc only works while there are two formats. CES opened in Las Vegas days afterward with the HD DVD promotional group cancelling all of its press interviews, and the BBC's man on the floor got Sony's Howard Stringer declining to declare victory: "I never put up banners that say 'Mission Accomplished'." Warner's compromise disc lasted 361 days from its own press release.

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