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The movie studio unveiled Total HD in January, saying that several leading US retailers had agreed to stock the format.

The hybrid discs, it was said, would play in both HD DVD and Blu-ray players and would be available in the second half of this year. That deadline moved to 2008 until this week, when Jim Noonan, senior vice president of strategic promotion and communication for Warner Home Entertainment Group, revealed Total HD was on hold.

"We're the only studio producing content in both formats," he explains. "If we were to put out Total HD with just our titles, it wouldn't really provide the solution to our retail

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partners that it was intended to provide. If anything, at this point, it would further complicate their life, because there would be another product looking for shelf space. Our job is not to further complicate the lives of our retailers."

But he denies the project has been scrapped altogether. "Total HD was something that we offered up to the industry as a solution that would address buyer hesitancy, and the concern a consumer might have about the possible obsolesence of the hardware they were buying. It was offered purely as an industry solution - and it is still a good and viable solution that has no expiration date," he says.

Warner is now the only major Hollywood studio to issue movies on both Blu-ray and HD DVD discs, after Paramount decided to back HD DVD exclusively. Of the others, three back Blu-ray, one opted for its rival. Both camps have claimed that they have taken an early lead in player and disc sales.

The alternative is hybrid players. Broadcom has developed a dual-format decoder and system-on-chip and both Samsung and LG have introduced boxes capable of playing both formats. But most manufacturers appear reluctant to go down this road, not least because consumers are certain to be reluctant to pay the $500 premium that LG is asking for its hybrid player, the BH100, pictured.