Not letting all that time and money poured into HD DVD research and development to go to waste, it’s reported that the DVD forum wants to bring at least a few upgrades to standard DVDs.

A reader comment on an earlier posting has some of the rumor-tastic details, and we’ll all find out for sure when the DVD forum officially publishes some meeting results in several more weeks (or more members blab). Reader “Peter” reported from this article that the WG-12 Working Group is looking into bringing completely backward compatible upgrades to the DVD standard revolving around networking and including some form of interactivity.

As I write this post one week after April Fool’s, I should let you know that much of what has been divulged here is actually plausible, much of it is documented, and there has already been discussion about this at a few websites back in March.

The DVD Forum’s site has a news item dated December 17, 2007 announcing the formation of WG-12 which has the objective of studying network application related issues for DVD and HD DVD, with the first meeting to be held on January 11, 2008 in Mountain View, California. Formation of WG-12 was approved at the November 15, 2007 meeting under item #3, and also included nominating Microsoft and Panasonic as Provisional Chair-companies for WG-12 (item #4).

According to the minutes of that November meeting, even Sony approved formation of the WG-12 group, but only Pioneer voted no, giving the reason that they felt the subject of network applications was outside the scope of the DVD forum. But it turns out that Pioneer had announced their own networking features earlier, and since their single vote didn’t change the outcome on WG-12, any conflict-of-interest concerns were disregarded. Nominating Panasonic and Microsoft as co-chairs was approved unanimously, however.

WG-12’s scope was defined at the February 27, 2008 meeting: “To study and specify network applications and related network specification of DVD Forum formats, make recommendations for better interoperability and functionality of network connected DVD Forum specified devices and content, and communicate on relevant recommendations with other standard creation organizations.”

Calling this DVD 2.0 and including video up-conversion to 960p was never mentioned in that mission objective above, so I’d heavily discount the credibility of those items if you’ve ever read about them pertaining to WG-12. Besides, they’re not related to networking.

Just so you properly understand what this is about: it’s not bringing the HD DVD format back. This new spec is just a way to improve DVDs. Depending on how many new features they’re talking about, it’s definitely going to require purchasing a new player since existing DVD players don’t already have networking hardware on them. Maybe an HD DVD firmware update will allow our existing HD DVD players to read these new DVDs.

On the other hand, this is just another R&D project at the DVD forum. There’s no reason to believe that everything they come up with will be implemented, or that it will succeed. The excellent case-in-point that all of us can relate to is HD DVD itself. As planned by the DVD forum, HD DVD was the official successor to DVD and we painfully know how that turned out.

Going back to the original article that Peter quoted from, it’s questionable whether any companies would build the new machines, especially if Blu-ray takes off big this year.