I just saw something in the Boston Globe today,An Andover Massachusetts company has come out with chip or something that will enable dvd players to play both blue ray and Hd dvd, it is suposed to come out in mid 2007,I didn't read the whole article but just kind of glanced thru it.

If you want to read the article go to boston globe and then to business section

The article indicates that Broadcom developed the chip, but unfortunately they still don't have a disc drive that will read both formats. That's something that both LG and Samsung (among others) have reportedly been playing with, but nobody has been willing to say definitively when such a drive could be available. It's not even real clear from the article what the chip does. Presumably it's a video decoder, or perhaps something that can handle both audio and video decoding - the article just says it's a "chip" that will "handle" both formats.

The breakthrough was originally reported on July 10th by Ricoh. http://technabob.com/blog/2006/07/10/device-to-allow-both-blu-ray-and-hd-dvd-on-same-hardware/

There was another news article a few weeks later with more technical details but I can't find it.

Perhaps things have been purposely quiet so more people buy $1,000 players to fund additional research and development... I first read about BluRay about 6 years ago.. why didn't we hear about this dual chip sooner?

Some people have compared this to the Beta/VHS war. IMHO, this is closer to the PAL/NTSC "conflict". Which has proven that both formats can coexist and people don't mind buying equipment that can support both, "just in case". Other than fueling an infinite number of turf-vs-natural-grass-type arguments, there are no losers and the only people who would need to "re-tool" would be the consumers which, let's face it, how many of those first-generation players will still be around 2 years from now? Early adopters are always willing to re-tool.

I bet that after Christmas we will see the hype curve on this technology really take off, and some players appearing on the market around the time most stores' return guarantees would typically expire.

It's really closer to the DVD-A/SACD format war in my opinion - PAL and NTSC are video standards on different continents (not competitors in a single market) and VHS and Beta were the only way to get video at home, but Blu-ray and HD-DVD (like DVD-A and SACD before them) are a more advanced version of an existing format (DVD or CD) whose benefits can only be seen or heard with other special hardware (HDTV's, surround systems, ...).

We won't see combo HD-DVD/Blu-ray players for at least nine months - probably a year or more, since even after more than a year of publicly-announced work nobody's got a disc drive that can read both formats. Heck, we've barely got any Blu-ray players on store shelves at this point, with other first-gen players stuck in the factory while firmware gets squared away.