About Us

Back in the 1970s 2 major home video formats arose VHS and Betamax, by the 1980s the was was over and VHS had one, if you owned a Beta Player you were now abandoned by the studios and the manufacturer, you were on your own with defunct equipment. Millions of pounds spent by consumers on now useless gear. Consumers were powerless to help themselves.

Years later a similar lower scale disc based format war (barely a war) occurred with VCD and DVD, VCD allowed you to skip adverts and was region free, but was lower resolution and required you swapped discs halfway through a film where DVD was region locked but higher resolution and allowed you to watch a movie without a disc change. Later SVCD was developed which gave a similar resolution to DVD and the disc issue was tackled by multi tray players, ultimately this made players expensive and discs inconvenient. DVD won across the western world although is embraced even now in Asia and Africa, studios however do not make an effort to release new titles on the format leaving anyone in the west with a player out of pocket.

From 2000 – 2008 a new format war arose, HD DVD v Blu Ray this was the high def format war. Blu Ray discs came in 25Gb and 50Gb discs and HD DVDs came in 15GB – 30GB discs. The visual output was relatively similar although there is propaganda about HD DVDs being a lower resolution both formats run a 1080p source so its basically untrue. But HD DVDs carried a better compression Rate allowing more HD footage on a lower capacity disc. HD DVDs were also region free allowing them to be purchased and used anywhere in the world. So how on earth did blu ray win ? Well there are a few reasons for this. 1 is marketing many stores marketed the Blu-Ray players as higher resolution even though the output was essentially the same with early players (Blu ray now is higher resolution due to the ceasing of development in HD DVDs, if the format had remained it would now be available in higher resolutions). 2. The clincher, Blu Ray was adopted in sonys Next generation PS3 Games console, if you bought a PS3 you automatically had a blue ray player, where as Microsoft HDDVD player for the XBOX was an add-on. Had it been integrated we might be telling a different story. This time was worse than the previous wars with consumers this time spending Hundreds of millions on HDDVD hardware and media. And then left in the cold with equipment that they could no longer get parts or films for, in fact  even software manufacturers stopped supporting the HDDVD format making it impossible to continue to use even on a PC.

This time however we said no! I as an advocate bought a HDDVD player and more than 80 films! And when I found I was out in the cold, with my HD DVDs destined to join my beta cam, and VCDS. I decided not this time and headed up the HDDVD-Revived project. Blank media was no longer available, so the compression algorithm had to be further improved upon to allow HDDVD content to be burned to Standard DVD discs that would play not only on the HDDVD players made by Microsoft and Toshiba but in any PC, With a DVD or HDDVD drive (this basically meant if we got the compression ratio right basically any PC with an Optical drive could play our HD Discs), 8 Months later we were able to pull this off and get a HDDVD onto a DVD9 disc, this still had issues in Some Toshiba players we needed to get them down to DVD5, 6 months later by stripping the audio track off he video and encoding it as a separately synced Dolby track we did it! A universally compatible HDDVD was born, the project started producing HD DVDs using public domain films and shipping world wide. Then research into software that would allow playback on a standard PC began. All the software was located and added to the HDDVD-Revived website.

In 2016 somebody attacked the website and damaged it heavily, we were flooded by emails asking what was happening and when it would be back, this warmed my heart so much we began a full rebuild of the site, adding more than twice the original product lines, more software, more firmware and More VCDs than we had ever stocked before, thank you for all your support and the love my team felt when it mattered to you for the few days we were gone.

Never Give Up.
Never Surrender.

PS. We are looking for original content to put onto HDDVD, VCD and DVD feel free to drop us a message if you would like to get your production out there.