After waging battles over storage capacities and costs, the next generation formats for optical supports, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, have a new quarrel: DRM.

Ever since the beginning of the year, the HD-DVD and Bly-Ray formats are trying in every way possible to convince that only one of them deserves to become the successor of the DVD, and although both of them has powerful allies, the competition is still stiff.

If a few weeks ago, the news on the HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray front seemed to point out truce, the battle is on again, this time, fiercer than ever. The reason: the announcement made by the Fox Entertainment studios that they will back the Blu-Ray format.

Now that Fox Entertainment is on Blu-Ray's side, the odds are even, each format being backed by 3 studios.

For the movie studios, issues such as: storage capacities and manufacturing costs are trivial, the most important detail being the protection scheme for the content offered by the two formats.

In HD-DVD's case, things are somehow clear, the protection scheme proposed by it being called Advanced Access Content System, which is a standard that cannot be that easily cracked like the CSS. At some point, the HD-DVD was even thinking about the possibility to introduce a new protection scheme: Burst Curring Area, which consisted of a bar code printed on the HD-DVD.

On the other side, Blu-Ray hasn't decided yet whether it will adopt the Advanced Access Content System or its own protection scheme, which is rather unknown to the public.

Fox Entertainment was convinced by the Blu-Ray format that it can be much better than HD-DVD's protection scheme and they've even mentioned it in their press release. Immediately after it was issued, the supporters of the HD-DVD say that the protection scheme has some stability and safety issues.

Since neither of the formats is not on the market yet, we still have a lot to wait until we see who's got the best protection.