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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
Way to go! - This belongs in the same ranks at the (Ogg) Vorbis Project.
If the Chinese and Taiwanese want to bypass the DVD tax then lets hope they don't mind annoying the studios as well and make their players region-free.
Can the studios detect these players and make sure their disks won't play on them? They did that super-new region coding thing a while back didn't they?
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.
Despite what the article says, these players will either owe royalties, or they won't be able to play the standard DVD media.
The royalties aren't for the use of the DVD trademark (well, the bulk of them, anyway). They're for the use of patents.
Now if they're really clever, they might be able to implement alternative techniques that, while producing the same results, don't use the means that the patents cover. Considering the number of DVD patents involved, this seems unlikely. (Sure, you could avoid the Macrovision and region-coding patents easily enough--don't include those "features.")
Pirated cheaper EVD/AVDs being sold around the world, making the movie industry see even more red than before.
If I were the guys who own DVD (Phillips and friends), I would demand that the fee is paid in the store, when someone buys the player.
This doesn't sound like a step towards a better movie format for everyone, this sounds like VHS/Betamax all over again.
I could be wrong though;) We'll just have to see what happens.
... 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).
Bunch of different, theoretically compatible standards - international patent law called into play, with those Damned Communists trying to avoid paying their patent fees....
:-)
You know, if they keep this shit up, they might just distract the MPAA from the Internet long enough for me to finish building my archive
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
I don't think this will replace DVD format, however I hope this become the replacement for VCD format. VCD has always been nice in that, a lot of DVD players support it, plus you can make VCD yourself. No region lock out. If in the future, most DVD players also support this much like they support VCD playback, this will allow consumers to be able to make their own media that plays back in standard DVD players
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
We'll never see these players in the US.
The MPAA will see to it that customs holds these at the border, and the parties hoping to receive the shipment will be tossed in the slammer.
Basically, these will be considered controlled substances like drugs and whoever's trying to get ahold of one will be treated as a narcotics dealer/user.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
The following movies will not be released for EVD or AVD:
Elizabeth
The Last Emperor
The Madness of King George
Get it? Royalty-free? Get it?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Emphasis mine.
Okay well that's all well and good, but are they going to be able to support CSS decryption? Seems to me that their ability to play DVD's is almost useless if they can't decrypt CSS, seeing as most discs require it. So they still end up having to pay royalties and having to enforce region encoding.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
And the fact that all DVD players sold in China come bundled with Episode 2 just goes to show you the level of dedication the Chinese market brings to the consumer. They go that extra mile you just don't see in larger American stores like BestBuy.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
The MPAA will see to it that customs holds these at the border
If they try to do this the logical counter move is to file a complaint with the World Trade Organization stating the case that the Regional Settings is a deliberate and unlawful inpediment to free trade. The risk of this being declared illegal combined with suits for Punitive damages subsequently filed in the US courts is high.
MPAA will give in long before that as the down side grossly outweighs the alternative.
NB: Write your representative in the country you are in and complain about Regional Settings. Its amazing it has survived so long.
Help fight continental drift.
It's Distraction by Bruce Sterling:
It's the year 2044, and America has gone to hell. A disenfranchised U.S. Air Force base has turned to highway robbery in order to pay the bills. Vast chunks of the population live nomadic lives fueled by cheap transportation and even cheaper computer power. Warfare has shifted from the battlefield to the global networks, and China holds the information edge over all comers. Global warming is raising sea level, which in turn is drowning coastal cities. And the U.S. government has become nearly meaningless. This is the world that Oscar Valparaiso would have been born into, if he'd actually been born instead of being grown in vitro by black market baby dealers. Oscar's bizarre genetic history (even he's not sure how much of him is actually human) hasn't prevented him from running one of the most successful senatorial races in history, getting his man elected by a whopping majority. But Oscar has put himself out of a job, since he'd only be a liability to his boss in Washington due to his problematic background. Instead, Oscar finds himself shuffled off to the Collaboratory, a Big Science pork barrel project that's run half by corruption and half by scientific breakthroughs. At first it seems to be a lose-lose proposition for Oscar, but soon he has his "krewe" whipped into shape and ready to take control of events. Now if only he can straighten out his love life and solve a worldwide crisis that no one else knows exists
DVD has always been light on capacity (and certain features could have been implemented better). In particular, one of the big advantages to DVD over VHS is being able to use multiple scriptable audio and text tracks, thus allowing you to subtitle and/or overdub for multiple languages. Not something we think of much here in the US, but in China/Taiwan, pretty much every release should have Mandarin, Cantonese, English, and if necessary whatever language it was originally recorded in. At least. The problem is even worse in Europe because with so many languages to cover, they're forced to skimp on audio and video quality, to say nothing of the bells and whistles we're accustomed to here. The "subtitle" tracks are not text but actually pictures of text to accomodate any font, but are limited to only four colors (two of which are are black and clear) and only to a certain sector of the screen. And there's no way to use post-press modifications(such as fan translations not available on the original).
Beyond that, DVD quality is way below that of HDTV (not that there's much of that yet). So, we really could use more space - a LOT more (FMDs and FMCs sounded promising). And a much more flexible format (allowing simple outside scripting and track replacement/overlays as well as modern compression algorithms and file formats like MPEG-4) with smarter options (like a real UTF-8 text track coupled to an on-disk vector-type font library, and full-color compressed RGB-alpha sprite/video overlay tracks). But even a 10% or so increase in capacity could make a big difference in much of the world.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
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
CSS used to be a trade secret. It is not and never was patented, and if they try to get a patent on it now there is plenty of "prior art," include deCSS itself. :-)
Then some rather intelligent youths in Europe figured out how to break the profoundly weak algorithm used to encrypt DVDs and restrict their playback (but not bit-for-bit copies, as most DVD-Rs were capable of doing back then, before the deCSS case and their wholesale redesign).
CSS isn't a secret anymore, indeed there are T-Shirts, songs, and 7 line perl scripts that can algorithmicly crack the code without any keys whatsoever.
The Taiwainese or Chinese can use any of this widely and publicly available information to make DVD playback devices capable of decrypting and playing DVDs and, I suspect, under the rules of the WTO, there is absolutely nothing the Copyright and Media Cartels can do about it.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
What, exactly, does the RIAA have to do with any of this? Other than a few DVD Audio discs (both of them) and DVD Music Videos, the honoured members of the RIAA have little or no involvement in DVDs, and almost certainly don't care what the Chinese and Taiwanese do to the format.
KMSMA (WWBD?)
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.