More companies join HD-DVD/Blu-ray peace talks

Giving us slightly more hope that we're actually going to pull back from the abyss that would be a next-gen DVD format war, more manufacturers are joining Sony and Toshiba's peace talks over how to fuse Blu-ray and HD-DVD into a single standard. Now that fellow heavyweights Matsushita and Philips are in there it sounds like Sony and Toshiba are finally getting past all the fronting and posturing and starting to hammer out the serious details of a unified format, and are even beginning to brief the big movie studios about the details of a possible new format. There are a lot of reasons why things might not work (besides all the ego stuff, there are technical reasons for why

combining Blu-ray and HD-DVD would prove difficult), but we can't help but be optimistic, you know? Everyone forgets that back in 1995 there were two competing formats for the original DVD, but Sony and Toshiba managed sort things out back then, so it's not like they've never figured out how to compromise before (though you'd think they would have learned from the past).