Just when you thought a week had gone by without another High Definition format introduction, the fine people at Sony and Matushita (Panasonic) are proud to announce AVCHD. AVCHD, or Advanced Video Coding High Definition, is yet another standard for hardware manufacturers to use and pay royalties on.

AVCHD uses 8cm mini-DVD discs specifically for recording using a proprietary codec. Sony/Panasonic claims this codec is based on MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 for video which is capable of encoding at 480i, 720p, and 1080i/p. The codec also supports Dolby Digital 5.1 channel AC-3 or linear PCM 7.1 channel audio compression with the right hardware. The company did not comment on whether or not the miniDVD would require a caddy, however, mini-DVD discs are currently available for purchase at your local optical media retailer without them.

The AVCHD mini-DVDs can fit about 20 minutes of HD video content on a single disc, but when dual sided and dual layer discs are introduced, that capacity should jump up to over an hour. Without the AVCHD codec, typical mini-DVDs can usually fit about 30 minutes of 480i content.

Sony’s current HD video cameras use MiniDV cartridges to record content, but the company press release announced that both Panasonic and Sony are already developing devices capable of recording with the new codec on mini-DVD media. At this time optical media distributors, such as Verbatim, are selling mini-DVD media for about $1 per single sided disc which can accomodate the 20 minutes of video proposed by Sony and Panasonic. Some say 20 minutes of video can last a life time but I’ll stick to MiniDV for now.