Holding your breath for the winner in the Blu-ray vs HD DVD War? Hold it a little longer. The next-gen DVD format war has been reset to sometime 2007 due to the shortage of blue laser diodes needed by the optical drives for both systems.

According to DigiTimes sources, manufacturers of the blue laser diodes admitted they are way behind. This prompted Sony to suspend shipping its own blue laser diodes to other customers. Instead, it is diverting them to its PS3 production line. Sony pledged to ship 4 million (or 2 million, depending on who's doing the PR circuit) PS3 units by the end of this year.

Philips, Sony, Matsushita, Hitachi, Ben-Q and other CE players already announced their HD DVD or Blu-ray drives, but according to DigiTimes only Pioneer, Plextor and possibly Toshiba are likely to meet their roll out dates.

Despite consumer demands, the race for the next-gen DVD format is still doing warm-up rounds for now and until blue laser diodes supply pick up around first quarter 2007.

If you're thinking of getting the jump on the Blu-Ray bandwagon, then you might consider checking out Plextor's new PX-B900A Blu-Ray Disc drive, the first Plextor burner to support the next generation of optical data storage technology. This new multi-function drive comes bundled with a rewritable 25GB BD-RE media disc and a complete software package, including Ulead VideoStudio 10 and Intervideo WinDVD BD. The drive features an ATA (ATAPI) interface and is designed for easy compatibility with Windows-based PCs.

"Distributors, retailers, and end users have all been clamoring for a Plextor-branded Blu-ray Disc drive, so we are pleased to announce that we will begin shipping this device in early October,” said Michael Arbisi, vice president of channel sales for Plextor. “This multi-function drive offers exceptional recording performance, broad-based PC compatibility, and unsurpassed data storage capacity in a disc no larger than a standard CD."

This announcement from Plextor could be the herald for a wave of new Blu-Ray burners from drive manufacturers all over the world. And of course, we shouldn't forget the inevitable rise of the HD-DVD burners. These babies will burn a hole in your pocket as well.

Plextor's PX-B900A Blu-Ray Disc drive carries a manufacturer's suggested retail price of $999.99 USD and will ship to distributors in North and South America in October.

Some of you might value an update from Geremia (remember our article about the Geremia patch for the Birdy Hitachi-LG Friendly Flasher v2.1 7-in-1 with Xtreme v2.0?). So even though it's tough to blog when the news is only a few lines at most (and it's worse when there's no download file to go with it), we had to share what Geremia had to say.

A few things about the Hitachi Mediacheck Patch v2_47 (sorry, no download available): All in all, it's a better mediatype recognition patch. According to Geremia, it works on Samsung (there have been reports of it working with a Plextor unbootable burned backup and one from an LG burner), although there are still problems with a COD2 disk that goes directly to video.

This is good news for those of you who backup your valuable original disks to avoid sullying them, only to find out that you have problems when you try to play the backup.