Sharp will start selling next month in Japan the first LCD (liquid crystal display) televisions with built-in Blu-ray Disc recorders, it said Wednesday. The sets should be on sale in the U.S. before the end of this year and launch in Europe in 2009.

The DX-series models (pictured above) will be available in 26- to 52-inch screen sizes and include dual digital tuners, so owners can watch one channel while recording another.

The Blu-ray Disc recorder embedded in the sets also supports the more efficient MPEG4 H.264/AVC digital encoding format, which means up to 5 times more video can be recorded on a standard Blu-ray Disc than with earlier models that support just the MPEG2 format. In the case of a 25G-byte disc almost 11 hours of high-definition (HD) TV can be recorded using the more efficient compression.

Additionally the system records associated metadata that is sent with the TV show.

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