Hewlett-Packard on Wednesday raised the stakes in a battle between high-definition DVD formats by urging a group led by Sony to include features important to PC makers and users.

An expansion of the brief mention yesterday. Intel already de facto backed this request since, days after announcing support for HD-DVD, they waffled and said they’d support BD too – if only they’d add mandatory managed copy. I could see Dell and Apple, both in the BD camp, backing this request too. I tend to think that this will happen – most likely managed copy, and perhaps less likely iHD.

Sony’s Blu-ray format for next-generation DVD drives will win over Toshiba’s rival HD DVD format, analyst firm Forrester predicted Wednesday–but it won’t be a quick victory.

Another report on this – but this one has some more info that is interesting:

Also on Wednesday, Blu-ray backer Hewlett-Packard said it has appealed to the group to incorporate two HD DVD features: mandatory “managed copy,” which will mean consumers will always be allowed to copy movies to their computers’ hard drives, and iHD, a Microsoft-designed technology for interactive features.

“Managed Copy” is one of the features of AACS, that both BD and HD-DVD use. But it seems the difference is HD-DVD has made it mandatory for all content, while it is optional for BD. This is the biggest reason MS and Intel backed HD-DVD – it allows copying content off the disc onto a hard drive to use on a media server, etc. Of course they have a vested interest – and PC makers, like HP, would benefit too. I think mandatory managed copy would actually be a good thing.

iHD seems more like a sop to MS, and perhaps Toshiba. Since they developed iHD (yay, another new platform, just what we needed) and it is part of HD-DVD, adding managed copy and iHD to BD would make MS happy, and probably get their official backing. And it might help convince Toshiba to drop HD-DVD since it’d give them some intellectual property in BD. Of course, it would complicate all BD systems by having to support BD-Java and iHD.

Forrester Research on Wednesday declared Blu-ray, a new DVD format backed by a group led by Sony, as the winner in the increasingly heated battle over next-generation DVD technology.

While I agree that Blu-ray looks like it’ll win in the end, I don’t know if it is really time to call the winner just yet.