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Taiwan Joining Chinese Royalty-free Video Disk Effort
BeardStreet writes "In an attempt to stop the flow of royalties to the various DVD licensing bodies (e.g. DVD6C, MPEG-LA, etc.), 19 Taiwanese companies have come up with a royalty-free DVD format called EVD which is compatible with a similar effort going on in China, called AVD. Capacity is about 1 GB higher. Their goal is to avoid having to shell out US $15 to $20 per-player royalties. EVD/AVD players will still be able to play traditional DVD disks but will not have the official DVD logo on them, thus avoiding the licensing fees. It's a political issue as well, in that China needs to balance the flow of royalty money going out of their country, especially with DVD players falling rapidly in price."
Let's get some US and European support in on this one and take over the market! But seriously, this is a really good thing we need to support these open standards to avoid the Information Nazi's.
Later,
Phil
If there are patents on the DVD format and these EVD players can read DVDs, it's hard to imagine how they wouldn't infringe those patents.
OTOH, if the royalties are for a trademark license, they may be able to escape by not using the DVD logo.
China said it was developing a format called Advanced Versatile Disc (AVD) that would be used only in the Greater China region
This format would only be used in China. Makes sense, since there's no way they could sell these players in the US or Europe because it would infringe patents. Even if it doesn't display the logo it still decodes CSS, MPEG, AC3, all of which are patented.
They'll still get exported, from stores like Lik Sang.. but who knows, customs will probably seize them at the border.
... the DVDCCA. And I hope it does.
If EVD is open and unlicensed then it will do one of two things, if not both: A) Expose the region coding for distribution control, or B) isolate the US (and possibly Canada) from getting any of these devices by legislating them illegal.
While we USians may not like the isolation, those who have the gold make the rules. This kind of open format will only help to spread the distribution of films made in other parts of the world, eventually hurting the DVDCCA and MPAA.
There's nothing like having inferior entertainment channels forced upon us by law and greed when we could all share and share alike the distribution method (like PAL and GSM).
Maybe these innovations belongs in the same ranks. Hopefully, the success level will be a considerable amount higher. ;-)
AHHHHHHH! I'm burning with goodness again!
- Reakk, Sluggy Freelance
Is it just me, or is the industry generating too many different media formats in too short a time? I know from a profit standpoint, corporations stand to benefit from releasing newer technologies forcing customers to replace their old technology with newer. And this is to be expected - to a certain degree. It seems, at least to me, that recently the rate at which new media standards are being produced is far higher than it was a few years ago. Not too far back, VHS reigned supreme, and it has been virtually the> standard format for decades. Now DVD technology is in the process of phasing out VHS, but it seems we are bombarded with new and improved formats (like this new extra 1-Gig capacity) that won't benefit the customers to a great extent. It doesn't seem that these new EVD's are going to replace DVD's because it is not a substantial breakthrough in technology. Big deal.. an extra 30 min. of "behind the scenes" on your typical DVD movie. Is it worth introducting new media formats to simply avoid licencing fees?
free ipod? yeah.
Several industry sources confirmed that emerging EVD or AVD players will be capable of playing back both EVD/AVD disks and DVD disks.
But other industry sources in Japan acknowledged that if players bear no official DVD logo, it would be difficult for the 6C or 3C groups to go after them.
It's sad that some companies in Asia are going to get away with making their own DVD players for the sole purpose of cheating the DVD patent holders while some poor European kid who writes DeCSS so that he can play his legally purchased DVDs on Linux gets crucified to the fullest extent of the law.
GMD
watch this
Emphasis mine.
`proven' wrong? Haven't read too many economics textbooks, have you? Never mind actual work in the field...
Of course, you give the game away when you quote Chomsky, who is a holocaust-denier, a general anti-American bigot, and a blithering ideologue whose fantastic claims (7 million dead in Afghanistan? Really? Even the anti-war left only claims a few thousand...) have caused him to lose credibility even on the left. Even his work on linguistics (as opposed to abstract syntax) is generally considered way off base in the field.
For more on Mr. Chomsky, see here or here. For more on his absurd claims about Afghanistan, see here.
Now, to refer to your original claim, why do you think America leads the world in invention, while the old Soviet Union couldn't even keep up with manufacturing stolen technology, never mind inventing new technologies?
The difference that the move from MSFT centralises power and control in the hands of a corporation, while the move in Asia hands rights and restriction-free capabilities out to a whide variety of groups.
Centralisation and disemmination of power are very different things.
I don't suppose it has occured to you that China (Hong Kong included) has a thriving film and entertainment industry if its own and people there would like to watch their own country's films and see no point in having to pay a technology tax if they can develop their own standard. China *is* a big market and growing rapidly (~6.5% in Q1 2002)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It's sad that some companies in Asia are going to get away with making their own DVD players for the sole purpose of cheating the DVD patent holders while some European kid who writes DeCSS so that he can play his legally purchased DVDs on Linux gets crucified to the fullest extent of the law.
Edit mine.
Good grief, cut the crap. The reality is that these companies MAY get away with it, whereas I couldn't get a DVD player for Linux for love or money legally for a long long time.
Really, though, this is capitalism at its best, IMHO. It can be done cheaper, and in a way consumers actually want - it WILL be done.
when can i get a royalty free burner? when can i get a component that'll play divx? when can i get blue ray capacity on an optical disk? when are white LED's gonna be put in LCD projectors lowering the price to under $100? when can i then replace every tv and crt in my house?
when are corporations going to do ANYTHING good for humanity at their own expense?
when is our government going to be run for by and of the people instead of said corporations?
my guess the answer to all of these is NEVER. because somebody somewhere would "loose" money that they had never MADE yet.
rhy
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
What would happen if their approach was to release empty hardware overseas with not DVD support whatsoever and only support for AVD? And even not support for MPEG/AC3/etc? Then they can put up a Firmware (unofficially ;-) on the net in China and people (uh... resellers) can flash the systems to enable the DVD capability?
As you say, Turing proved that the halting problem is undecidable; to be more precise, there is no general algorithm to decide whether a program will halt, that will provide an answer in finite time for any program.
That's okay. Detecting whether a DVD menu program is trying to die, the vast majority of the time, only involves special cases about which the halting theorem is silent. For instance, if the program halts by exuting the HALT machine instruction, you simply search for that instruction and replace it with your own code. If you don't trust the program not to modify its own code, you can run it in an emulator that constantly checks whether it is about to execute a HALT instruction. Consider that this is roughly what any modern CPU does in order to enforce memory protection.
Detecting infinite loops is a bit harder, and while you can search for trivial LOOP: GOTO LOOP constructs, you really need to run the program in emulation to get anywhere. You can, for instance, take a snapshot of the code and virtual machine state from time to time; if both ever return to the exact same state, you must be in an infinite loop (assuming you don't have interrupt-driven code to worry about -- if you do, expand the code under analysis to include the interrupt handlers, and repeat).
Moral of the story: not allowing the menu to die doesn't require knowing whether the menu program will ever halt, only whether it is about to. And that, far from being a theoretical impossibility, is a fundamental technique of virtual machine design.
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.