By AppleInsider Staff

The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) today announced that Apple will become a member of the consortium’s Board of Directors. Apple has been a leader in driving consumer adoption of DVD authoring since January 2001, with the introduction of its SuperDrive, the industry’s first high-volume CD- and DVD-burning drive, and its iDVD and DVD Studio Pro software applications. Apple is also helping bring High Definition (HD) to market with a complete line of HD content creation tools for consumers and professionals alike including iMovie HD, Final Cut Express HD and Final Cut Pro HD editing software. Additionally, QuickTime 7, expected for release alongside Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger," will feature the MPEG developed H.264 Advanced Video Codec (AVC) which has been adopted for high definition DVDs. The BDA was created to broaden support for Blu-ray Disc—the next generation optical disc for storing High Definition movies, photos and other digital content. Blu-ray Discs will have five times larger capacity than today's DVDs, with a single-layer Blu-ray Disc holding up to 25 gigabytes of data and a double-layer Blu-ray Disc holding up to 50 gigabytes of data. Current DVDs hold 4.7 gigabytes on single-layer discs and 8.5 gigabytes on dual-layer discs.