LG Electronics on Thursday said it will offer a high-definition DVD player that can play both competing formats of blue-laser DVDs.

The South Korean company said it will announce details of the world's first dual format DVD player, which will play rival HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs, at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The event runs Jan. 8 to 11.

LG said the new device will be launched in the United States this year.

"LG expects this technological breakthrough to end the confusion and inconvenience of competing high-definition disc formats for both content producers and consumers," the company said in a written statement.

An LG official privately told CBC News Online in August 2006 that the company was ready to produce a dual-format player but was unlikely to do so on its own. He said if it did make the device, it would likely do so on contract for another consumer electronics company and it would be sold under that firm's brand rather than LG's.

The high-definition DVD format fight pits Blu-ray discs backed by a group led by Sony Corp., against HD-DVD discs being promoted by an alliance that includes Toshiba Corp. and Microsoft Corp.

The incompatible formats, introduced in 2006, use a blue laser to store more information than a standard definition disc, which employs a red laser. The additional storage capacity can translate into better, more detailed picture quality and allows movie studios to include more features on a single disc.

The format war harks back to the 1980s home videocassette battle between Sony's Betamax tapes and the competing VHS standard. Sony lost that fight.

Some analysts have said that the contest could be decided by competition in the video game console market. Sony includes a Blu-ray disc reader in its PlayStation 3 video game console launched in November 2006, and Microsoft offers an add-on HD-DVD drive made by Toshiba for the Xbox 360 console that launched in November 2005.

Industry watchers have said that consumers would wait on the sidelines until a clear winner emerges in the high-definition DVD battle, a scenario that would draw out the war.