Plextor will ship its first Blu-ray Disc drive in September, the storage specialist has said. The PX-B900A is an internal unit for PCs and will support both single- and dual-layer recordable and rewriteable media.

Toshiba has once again said it’s open to the development of a single, unified next-generation optical disc format to end the battle between the HD DVD format it backs and the Sony-led Blu-ray Disc camp.

I guess it is current. My translation: “Shit, this isn’t working, we’re going to get stomped like a narc at a biker rally. Think we can get them to adopt some of out IP for a ‘unified format’?”

With hardware rolling out now it seems less likely than ever that things will change. Once the PS3 goes into production, forget it, that sets BD in stone. Sony has too much at stake there to introduce incompatibilities later. Software changes I can see – adding iHD for example. Since all BD systems also support DVD I could even see supporting advanced codecs on red-laser DVD. DVD physical structure, just using the codecs normally used by BD. But changing the physical structure of BD discs seems highly unlikely, as does making machines more complex and costly by adding support for the HD-DVD media format. And just supporting two formats in one drive is not a ‘unified format’.

Toshiba said Tuesday it would still like to develop a unified format for advanced optical DVD discs, but two competing–and incompatible–products are likely to hit the market at first.

Weird, this article sounds like it fell through a time warp from earlier in the year. See ‘likely to hit the market first’ – they have hit the market.