Microsoft Chooses Different Rewritable DVD Format than Apple and Compaq
Martin O'Donnell pointed out this CNET News.com article which reports on Microsoft's selection of the DVD+RW recording format for future support within Windows operating systems. This is a format favored by Dell and Hewlett-Packard. A competing format, confusingly called DVD-RW, is supported by Compaq, Apple Computer, and several Asian manufacturers.
Supposedly, the reason Apple chose to support DVD-RW and DVD-R in the first place was that disks created in these formats are compatible with more existing DVD players connected to televisions than are disks created with the DVD+RW and DVD+R format. But, these are formats that are still lining up support, they have different advantages depending on whether they are to be used for video or for data storage, and we think the jury is still out on both of them.