News.com had an interesting article on the state of video codecs in the Blu-ray vs HD-DVD wars. It turns out Sony Pictures studio is now considering using MPEG2 instead of the newer MPEG4 or VC-1 formats. Why? Sony’s reasoning is – why bother using a codec to squeeze more data onto a disk when the disk capacities are now way larger. Since none of the new codecs actually improve the image, there’s no reason to switch. However, using the newer codecs would greatly decrease the file sizes of the video files – helping not only studios to store more data onto these new disks but also cable and satellite companies too. You can not transmit less data (which translates to less bandwidth needed) to achieve equal picture quality. What’s really behind this? Sony really doesn’t want to use a Microsoft backed codec and it appears that they really don’t see care what the MPEG backs either.

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