Advanced Content provides interactivity in the

HD DVD HD DVD (short for High Density Digital Versatile Disc) is an obsolete high-density optical disc format for storing data and playback of high-definition video.

optical disc format. Advanced Content is used to provide interactive menus and "special features" such as additional bonus/extras content and games for

HD DVD HD DVD (short for High Density Digital Versatile Disc) is an obsolete high-density optical disc format for storing data and playback of high-definition video.

(one of the high-definition video formats). The Advanced Content runtime engine is responsible for responding to user navigation input (e.g., from a remote control) as well as events set to occur during playback of a movie, controlling all actions and interactive properties during the playback of a movie. The Advanced Content specification was developed by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

and

Disney The Walt Disney Company, commonly referred to as simply Disney, is an American multinational mass media and entertainment industry, entertainment conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios (Burbank), Walt Di ...

with input from other members of the

DVD Forum The DVD Forum (initially DVD Consortium) was an industry consortium for DVD specifications from 1995 to 2025. History The founding companies were Hitachi, Panasonic, Mitsubishi, Pioneer, Philips, Sony, Thomson, Warner Bros, Toshiba, JVC, ...

including

Toshiba is a Japanese multinational electronics company headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. Its diversified products and services include power, industrial and social infrastructure systems, elevators and escalators, electronic components, semiconductors ...

and

Sonic Solutions Sonic Solutions was an American computer software company headquartered in Novato, California. In addition to having a number of offices in the U.S., the company also maintained offices in Europe and Asia. It was acquired by Rovi Corporation in 2 ...

. Advanced Content also enables network access to download additional content and access to persistent storage which is used for storing bookmarks and other state information. The ability to play back Advanced Content is a mandatory part of the HD DVD-Video specification. Its features were defined by content providers (specifically

and

Warner Bros. Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (WBEI), commonly known as Warner Bros. (WB), is an American filmed entertainment studio headquartered at the Warner Bros. Studios complex in Burbank, California and the main namesake subsidiary of Warner Bro ...

) based on the scenarios they required for a next generation disc format. The most popular implementation of Advanced Content (running in both the Toshiba HD DVD players and Microsoft Xbox 360 add-on) is Microsoft's HDi. The rival

Blu-ray Blu-ray (Blu-ray Disc or BD) is a digital optical disc data storage format designed to supersede the DVD format. It was invented and developed in 2005 and released worldwide on June 20, 2006, capable of storing several hours of high-defin ...

format does not use Advanced Content. It uses BD-J instead.

Technology

Advanced Content is written using the declarative

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

language and the imperative

ECMAScript ECMAScript (; ES) is a standard for scripting languages, including JavaScript, JScript, and ActionScript. It is best known as a JavaScript standard intended to ensure the interoperability of web pages across different web browsers. It is stan ...

language. Advanced Content applications are very similar in structure to

AJAX Ajax may refer to: Greek mythology and tragedy * Ajax the Great, a Greek mythological hero, son of King Telamon and Periboea * Ajax the Lesser, a Greek mythological hero, son of Oileus, the king of Locris * Ajax (play), ''Ajax'' (play), by the an ...

applications on the web, using a combination of script and markup in an asynchronous execution model. A "page" is created using markup and it can be modified over time based on user input, the progression of the movie, and so on. A new "page" may be loaded as needed (e.g., when switching to a different part of the application) and the process starts again. Advanced Content includes an XML element grammar based on

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

for content such as images, buttons, text, etc.; An XML attribute grammar based on CSS and

XSL In computing, the term Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is used to refer to a family of languages used to transform and render XML documents (e.g., XSL is used to determine how to display a XML document as a webpage). Historically, the W3C XS ...

to describe layout, color, font types, etc.; and an element and attribute grammar based on SMIL for timing, animation, eventing, and synchronization. Whilst it is possible to write complex, interactive pages using only the declarative XML dialect, any interactions with the player itself (e.g., to change audio language or jump to a new title) requires imperative code written in ECMAScript. To support the ECMAScript code, Advanced Content defines a large number of objects, properties, and methods ("

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

s") that are analogous to the DOM in a web browser; these APIs allow the script to query and control the player, animate the markup page, respond to user events, and connect to the

internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

to download new content such as trailers, cast & crew bios, or other information.

HDi

HDi (formerly iHD) is

's implementation of the Advanced Content interactivity layer in

HD DVD HD DVD (short for High Density Digital Versatile Disc) is an obsolete high-density optical disc format for storing data and playback of high-definition video.

. It is used in the

Xbox 360 The Xbox 360 is a home video game console developed by Microsoft. As the successor to the Xbox (console), original Xbox, it is the second console in the Xbox#Consoles, Xbox series. It was officially unveiled on MTV on May 12, 2005, with detail ...

HD DVD add-on as well as stand-alone HD DVD players. Applications written for HDi are written using the XML dialect and ECMAScript, the latter of which is processed by the

JScript JScript is Microsoft's legacy dialect of the ECMAScript standard that is used in Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser and HTML Applications, and as a standalone Windows scripting language. JScript is implemented as an Active Scripting eng ...

engine when running on Microsoft Windows platforms. The HDi runtime exposes the

s defined by the Advanced Content standard. It provides only a single threaded programming model, though certain operations (such as network and persistent storage access) are executed as asynchronous operations. An

HD DVD HD DVD (short for High Density Digital Versatile Disc) is an obsolete high-density optical disc format for storing data and playback of high-definition video.

movie, including the interactive functionality, is presented as an Advanced Content application, which is executed and rendered by the HDi runtime. The advanced content application consists of the

playlist A playlist is a list of video or audio files that can be played back on a media player, either sequentially or in a shuffled order. In its most general form, an audio playlist is simply a list of songs that can be played once or in a loop. ...

files (.xpl),

subtitle Subtitles are texts representing the contents of the audio in a film, television show, opera or other audiovisual media. Subtitles might provide a transcription or translation of spoken dialogue. Although naming conventions can vary, caption ...

s (.xas), markup files (.xmu) and scripts (.js) in addition to the actual video, in a defined directory structure. The HDi runtime parses the markup and the scripts to execute the action. The playback of the video, along with its integration with the rest of the navigation system, is initiated from and controlled by script code. The HDi runtime is responsible for execution and final rendering of the movie playback and navigation application. The markup is parsed into a

Document Object Model The Document Object Model (DOM) is a cros s-platform and language-independent API that treats an HTML or XML document as a tree structure wherein each node is an object representing a part of the document. The DOM represents a document with ...

, which allows ECMAScript code to control and modify the UI layout during execution. By dynamically altering the layout of UI widgets is how animations and interactivity is achieved. The DOM and associated APIs is used to enable other scenarios such as pausing playback and replacing it with the navigation UI, or seeking to a certain area in the movie (used for either manual seek or seeking to bookmarks). For the rendering stack, it presents six ''planes'' (which are containers for graphics) that are layered in front of each other. The final image displayed is the composition of the images from the individual planes. The composition of the planes into the final image is handled by the HDi runtime. These rendering layers, from back to front, are: # Background plane: The background plane defines the background color for the application. # Main video plane: When Main video is visible, it is displayed on this plane. # Sub video plane: When Secondary video (such as picture-in-picture) is playing, it is displayed on this plane. # Subtitles graphics plane: All subtitles (both standard and advanced) and are rendered on this plane. # Application graphics plane: The UI rendered by the script and markup is displayed on this plane. # Cursor plane: The cursor, if visible, is displayed on this plane. Microsoft does not provide design tools for development of HDi applications, though third parties have made such tools available. Because the components used by Advanced Content (and HDi) -

XSL-FO XSL-FO (XSL Formatting Objects) is a markup language for XML document formatting that is most often used to generate PDF files. XSL-FO is part of XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language), a set of W3C technologies designed for the transformation and f ...

XPath XPath (XML Path Language) is an expression language designed to support the query or transformation of XML documents. It was defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1999, and can be used to compute values (e.g., strings, numbers, or ...

- are widely used, any development tool supporting these can be used to develop HDi applications. However, Microsoft has made an HDi simulator available as a free download, as a part of the HD DVD Interactivity Jumpstart Kit, to let users author and debug HDi content on computers running

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct successor to Windows 2000 for high-end and business users a ...

, although this is not intended as a full authoring tool nor a playback device. HDi is not inherently limited to being used on optical media; it can be used on media delivered or streamed over the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

or any other network. In fact, on October 4, 2007, Toshiba and Microsoft announced the creation of the Advanced Interactivity Consortium (AIC) to "extend and promote interactive experiences beyond optical media to new platforms."

Advanced Interactivity Consortium

The Advanced Interactivity Consortium (AIC) was to be an open forum designed to extend the Advanced Content interactive capabilities of

HD DVD HD DVD (short for High Density Digital Versatile Disc) is an obsolete high-density optical disc format for storing data and playback of high-definition video.

to new devices and delivery mechanisms. It was jointly announced by

and

on October 4, 2007 but never implemented. The companies included in the announcement included: * Microsoft * Toshiba *

DreamWorks Animation DreamWorks Animation LLC (DWA, also known as DreamWorks Animation Studios or simply DreamWorks) is an American animation studio, owned by Comcast's NBCUniversal as part of Universal Pictures, a division of Universal Studios, Inc, Universal Stud ...

Paramount Paramount (from the word ''paramount'' meaning "above all others") may refer to: Entertainment and music companies * Paramount Global, also known simply as Paramount, an American mass media company formerly known as ViacomCBS. **Paramount Picture ...

Universal Studios Universal Studios may refer to: * Universal Studios, Inc., an American media and entertainment conglomerate ** Universal Pictures, an American film studio ** Universal Studios Lot, a film and television studio complex * Various theme parks operat ...

Examples

Some examples of Advanced Content on HD DVD are: * Interactive features such as picture-in-picture, story boards, actor biographies, GPS, and "Tech specs" on many

titles, branded as " U-Control" * Passive features such as picture-in-picture and story boards on many

titles, branded as In Movie Experience * User-defined chapter points, known as "Bookmarks" or "My Scenes" found on many titles from various studios * Downloadable features such as a colouring book on for '' Shrek the Third'' from

* Downloadable trailers and other content on various titles, including ''

Freedom Freedom is the power or right to speak, act, and change as one wants without hindrance or restraint. Freedom is often associated with liberty and autonomy in the sense of "giving oneself one's own laws". In one definition, something is "free" i ...

'' from

Bandai Visual was a Japanese anime, film production, and distribution company, established by Bandai and a subsidiary of Bandai Namco Holdings. They focused mainly in international distribution of anime properties in North America. Most of the anime and ...

* On-line shopping for goods and services depicted in the film, such as ''

Evan Almighty ''Evan Almighty'' is a 2007 American fantasy comedy film that is a spin-off and sequel of '' Bruce Almighty'' (2003). The film was directed by Tom Shadyac, written by Steve Oedekerk, based on the characters created by Steve Koren and Mark ...

'' from Universal Studios

References

Bibliography

External links

HDi trademark press release

MSDN HD DVD Authoring Forum

MSFT Peter Torr's HDi Blog

MSFT Amy Dullard's Application Development for HD DVD Blog

* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20061031201356/http://www.duplicatorguide.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=270&Itemid=2 HP Pressures Blu-Ray Camp
Microsoft's Amir Majidimehr describes the genesis of HDi (and other things)

{{High definition media Film and video technology HD DVD High-definition television Interactive television