Ever since Toshiba officially surrendered to Sony’s Blu-ray format in February this year, everyone’s been wondering what their next move will be, and if they’ll ever decide to go to the dark side and start manufacturing Blu-ray players.

Toshiba apparently sees a world beyond Blu-ray, and is reportedly working on enhancing DVD players’ image scaling capabilities to a level that is said to rival the Blu-ray performance. The new DVD players are still much of a mystery in terms of the exact technology used, but they are expected to be released later this year.

At the same time, Toshiba appears to be working on another plan to recover the lost ground. On June 11, at the Los Angeles DVD Steering Committee meeting (DVD Forum), the DVD Download Logo received full approval.

This became the starting point for all sorts of speculations, including the possibility to add Internet connectivity to DVD players, but nothing has been confirmed so far. The same forum also approved China’s extension of the HD DVD format (C-HD DVD)

The DVD Forum is an international organization that reunites hardware manufacturers, as well as software, media and content providers that work on ideas about DVD and the HD DVD format. It was initially founded in 1995, when it became known as the DVD consortium.

Since the beginning of this year, many retailers have started swearing allegiance to the Blu-ray format, and Toshiba officially unveiled the decision to stop manufacturing HD DVD players. And as Blu-ray became the sole competitor on the HD DVD market, many began to wonder what’s going to happen next.

Toshiba is pretty shy when it comes to confirming some of its future plans, but if the Blu-ray is doomed to fail, they might be the first to get the benefits. So Sony should watch out, as Toshiba waits just around the corner.