Most of the movie-lovers who still deck their living rooms with home theatre systems and DVD collections are in for a jolt when they hear about the new war.

It really is not that complicated. Except that the DVD manufacturing industry has now splintered into two very powerful sides, each opposing other's technology.

Before indulging in this battle, movie-lovers or, more appropriately, DVD watchers should enlighten themselves about the history of DVD.

DVD is an optical disc storage media format that can be used for storing mass-data including movies with high video and sound quality. A single-layer DVD can store around 4.7 gigabyte data, seven times the storage capacity of a compact disc (CD). This basic feature is what led the movie industry to reverting to DVD Roms.

Two high-density optical storage standards were being developed in the 1990s. Philips and Sony were working on the Multi-Media Compact Disc (MMCD), while Toshiba, Time-Warner, Matsushita Electric, Hitachi, Mitsubishi Electric, Pioneer, Thomson and JVC on the Super-Density Disc (SD).

In an effort to avoid another costly format war like the VHS versus BetaMax of the 1980's, IBM President Lou Gerstner tried to align the two factions under a single standard. Philips and Sony acquiesced and abandoned the MMCD format. These two giants agreed to adopt Toshiba's SD format with two modifications, both related to the servo-tracking technology.

For 20 years since then, things had gone pretty well, until Sony came up with its Blu-Ray DVD format. The Blu-Ray Disc (BD) is a next-generation optical disc format meant for storage of high-definition video and high-density data. A group of consumer electronics and PC companies called the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) developed the BD. Compared to the High Definition (HD) DVD format, its arch rival, Blu-ray has more information capacity per layer--25 gigabytes instead of DVD's 15. But initially the BD may be more expensive to produce.

Tech giants like Sony, Panasonic, Dell, HP, Philips, Samsung and TDK and several other major names are backing the BD format slated for release in May 2006.

On the other hand, brands like Toshiba, NEC, Sanyo and Memory-tech are opposing this format. They have opted for the HD format.

The HD-DVD, using blue laser technology, is capable of holding 30 GB or a full-length high-definition movie, plus extras, on a pre-recorded double-layer disc. But, its opponent, the BD can store 50 GB at launch. There are rumours that Sony is also working on a quad-layer 100 GB BD.

Besides storage, BD will also offer rewriting options.

But, there is a catch. The BD format does not support advanced video compression codecs like MPEG-4 AVC and Microsoft's VC-1 as well as MPEG-2 codec. BD players are also likely to be two to three times dearer than the current DVD players are.

The HD format, on the other hand, will support and easily convert the existing line of DVD formats on the market. It probably will cost only 10 percent more than the manufacture cost of current DVDs.

Moreover, as Sony owns Columbia pictures and the rights to MGM movies and television libraries along with the Play Station 3, most HD DVD owners may miss these movies on their players.

Meantime, Universal and Paramount studios have already started releasing their movies in the HD format.

Warner Brothers, which earlier released over 50 movies including the Lord of the Rings trilogy, have recently changed sides and joined the BD camp.

So, with the launch of the BD format in May, things are set to get far hotter.

What will be the reactions of the movie-lovers? A large segment of them probably will cling onto the existing DVD line-up or wait for the cable channels to procure the rights to show new movies in the BD format.

Meanwhile, what they can do is to wait and pray for the two warring groups to realise that nobody will compromise and negotiate on a single format, like the SD in 1990.

Hopefully, history will repeat itself in this case, too, rather than carrying on with a protracted war far more vicious than the VHS-Betamax one of the eighties.