There's no guarantee you'll be able to pick one up in North America or Europe anytime soon (or ever), but new discs that can store information readable by both DVD and Blu-ray players have gone into production. Infinity Storage media is the company responsible, and the details of how it was done are a little bit technical, but it suffices to say that the DVD data is stacked on top of the Blu-ray data, and the discs are constructed in such a way that the different kinds of optical readers present in DVD and Blu-ray players will only read the layers they're intended to.

A Blu-ray player will look right past — but the DVD player won't dive any deeper than — the DVD information. If you ever get your hands on one of these, you'll be able to watch the standard definition version of a movie on your friend's old fashioned DVD player at her house before heading home and watching the same movie in high definition on your Blu-ray player.

The discs are already about to go on sale; the first commercial product will be a boxed set of episodes of the Japanese TV series Code Blue. Whether you'll see this technology pop up with other products and elsewhere depends on how it sells there.

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