Picture's fuzzy for DvD

[kxy]

An intersting article on EE Times...

http://www.eet.com/sys/news/OEG20020301S0091

.... Looking to avoid what they say would be a costly shift to blue-laser technology, steering committee member Warner Bros. and other content-production companies are behind the new DVD Forum proposal, which uses low-bit-rate encoding technology such as MPEG-4 to cram 9 Gbytes of high-definition video content onto a two-layer DVD. Blu- ray uses MPEG-2 compression, as does the current DVD standard. A single-sided 12-cm Blu-ray Disc would store 27 Gbytes of computer data, record 13 hours of broadcast TV or hold two hours' worth of high-definition video....

[theReal]

What is the benefit of "cram[ming] 9GB of high-definition video content onto a two-layer DVD" ???

Are movies getting longer? Or will the quality be higher as the quality of normal DVD movies?

I understand that a 27GB disc would offer much higher quality than what DVD's can offer now - but will a 7GB mpeg4 movie offer higher quality as well?

At least we can hope for hardware mpeg4 capable players, if I understand that correctly :-)