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."

Comments

Re:Can't play standard DVD media

[Royster]

The royalties aren't for the use of the DVD trademark (well, the bulk of them, anyway). They're for the use of patents.

What patents? CSS? Not patented, a trade secret. MPEG? Playback isn't patented, encoding is. Dolby Digital Sound is patented, but they don't have to implement the DDS parts to play DVDs.