Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.")
... 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,
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
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.
If CSS is simply trade-secret, and not patented, then all these newcommers have to do is use DECSS in their players (and possibly include a copy of the source code with every player!!! :-)
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
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.
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?
Open standard? Who said anything about an open standard? The article mentions that the companies involved are trying to secure patents for things related to their new standard. I suspect the "royalty-free" phrase that's being thrown about applies only to the 19 companies that're working on producing the standard. To draw a computer analogy, this isn't like the BSD software developers vs. Microsoft or the GPL software developers vs. Microsoft, but more like Oracle vs. Microsoft.