Does the world need another video format? Well, if it’s portable…

The Universal Media Disc (UMD), a tiny optical disc cartridge of about 65W x 64L x 4.2H mm., is the bullet that you chamber into Sony’s popular PlayStation Portable. It holds 1.8 gigabytes of data, which is plenty of juice for games.

Or for movies.

Apparently, Sony is quietly planning to eventually saturate the market with enough UMD movies to turn this into a de facto standard for portable videos. Aside from Spiderman, which was bundled with PSPs in the United States, Sony has just released a slew of movies for video rental in Japan: Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid, Charlie’s Angels, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hellboy, Kung-Fu Hustle, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Spider-Man 2, SWAT, The Punisher, Thirteen Ghosts, and You Got Served.

Which shouldn’t be surprising. Sony does, after all, own Sony Pictures. But Universal Studios is also releasing UMD titles this month, including Assault on Precinct 13, The Rundown, Van Helsing, Dawn of the Dead: Unrated Director’s Cut, The Chronicles of Riddick: Unrated Director’s Cut and The Fast and the Furious.

And, not to be left behind, Fox is also releasing five titles, including I, Robot, Napoleon Dynamite, and Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story.

So what does all of this mean? Well, Sony is on the verge of successfully dominating a new optical medium, something that cannot yet be said about its precariously perched Blueray technology for DVD Part II. And all thanks to the popularity of the Playstation Portable.

Next question: Will Nintendo launch movies on their popular Nintendo DS devices? Rumor says so. But this will happen only if the market will bear with movies that have been compressed enough to fit a measly 128MB memory card. More likely, the DS can be used to play back MPEG-4 home video recordings (an adapter is already available in Japan). Other than that, looks like if you want to play legitimate, palm-sized movies on the go, then you’ll have to go PSP.

Or just wait for DS 2.

Note:
Word last month is that the UMD format has been cracked, allowing hackers to make ISO copies of UMD contents, which can then be stored on regular CD or DVD blanks. This news may give many studios second thoughts about releasing more movies on this supposedly secure format.