Slashdot Mirror
China Proposes Rival Video Format
Richard Finney writes "Yahoo News is reporting that
the Chinese government is supporting an effort to develop a homegrown standard, called 'AVS,' for compressing digital audio and video in order to avoid paying royalties
on proprietary compression schemes.
The AVS groups website is online but in Chinese."
With 6 Billion people, a little bit of money saved on royalties will make a huge difference.
Plus, with other players wanting to enter the market, the Chinese will probably make some money on royalties as well.
Amazing magic tricks
will this new format make any difference in quality/compression I wonder?
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
I wonder if this would cut down on media piracy worldwide. Since Videos/DVDs on the black market in China would be in AVS Format, no other country could play them.
Just a thought.
In case anybody else hasn't noticed, China is turning out to be -- in fact, already is, simply by its sheer size -- the world's largest booster of open source and royalty-free hardware and software in the world. Open Source and Free Software movements couldn't ask for a more powerful force to have on their side, and they are consistently expanding and improving what they offer -- first Red Flag Linux, then the dragon chip, and now this. Woo!
The population is closer to 1.2 billion I think.
You just can't say "seeming oven trench" without "Chinese Government"...
translated link
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
This is probably a good idea economically for China, but it smacks a little of France's banning of the word "e-mail" to me for some reason. Are there any royalty-free video standards out there? I'm not a video guy, so I don't pay much attention to that part of the world, but I know there are plenty of open/royalty-free audio codecs...
This flies in the face of science.
...that there's so many to choose from.
:)
(I don't remember who said that but that's daamn right
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Why not use Ogg Vorbis
It is not free, after all?
Why not just use ogg video?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
China never really has gotten over that "we are the center of the earth" mentality have they? Royalties have nothing to do with it - you're talking about the largest exporter of pirated digital media in the universe. Royalties mean nothing. This is really about continuing China's history of trying to advance their civilization without using parts of anybody else's.
why don't they support http://www.theora.org/ instead of building their own from scratch?
The Chinese seem determined to avoid patent issues by developing their own chips, and now their own video formats.
The intellectual property laws that were supposed to guarantee our technology a dominant position may, in practice, be shutting U.S. companies out of future marketplaces, as tech customers seek a way around excessive royalties and restrictions.
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
Slashdot : Today's SCO news - Darl McBride wakes up, brushes teeth, SCOX down 10 cents.
China : So? We've got RedFlag Linux, we don't bother about US Copyright laws.
Slashdot: Intel settles with Via, latter not to make pin-compatible CPUs after 3 years... blah,blah,blah..
China: Here's the Dragon CPU. Forget Intel, forget Via.
Slashdot: CDMA and GSM are the top technologies for mobile phones.
China: We've developed SCDMA totally in-house. We don't pay royalties for that.
And now...
Slashdot: GIF is out of patent. Some image formats still remain in copyright and patents mess.
China: Here's our video format.
Slashdot: XBox can be hacked to run Linux.
China: Dragon CPU runs Midori Linux. We don't need any damn XBoxes..
And so on.. Slashdotters makes noise, China makes progress.
-
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Communism may not be a good fit with physical goods and commodities and stuff like that, but I think China is setting a good example with intangible, non-rivalrous goods (IP). Once they design a chip, or a video compression scheme, no one can exhaust its usefulness. This is a good thing.
Now don't think I'm going so far out there. We have similar ideas here, and we at least pretend to practice them. That's the idea behind University research and stuff like that (at least before universities had the right to own the products of their research).
Here in America, I think we need more research done for the public benefit, paid with public money. There are so many intricacies to the vision I have, and I can anticipate many objections, but I'm not going to write a whole long post here. I'm just making a positive suggestion here.
...who produce useful tools for data visualisation? Advanced Visual Systems
I can't see them being pleased with a different meaning for the AVS acronym...
"we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"
The last thing I want to do is sound pedantic or trollish, but if you're referring to the amount of people in China, I'm pretty sure the number of people is a little closer to 1 billion.
But does everyone in China have a credit card?
Hmm but .AVS files are already used for Intel's old video compression format.
link.
This isn't going to cause confusion oh noooo. Can't see intel being too happy about their use of the AVS name for their standard either.
The Chinese GOVERNMENT might make money, but I'd bet my left testicle that none of it would find its way to the people. That's not how communism works.
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
The US is losing its place as computer technology innovator. China and eastern Europe will become the new Silicon Valleys thanks to two factors:
1. Open source and free software has decimated any barriers to entry for software professionals. This is having the effect that anybody can write code, which is often of much lower quality. Now that there is no incentive to pay for any software, the software that is available will decrease in quality over time until everyone will have to write all of their own code out of necessity. Serious high-quality developers want to be paid, and when they can't make money, they will find something else to do (and maybe work on code in their "spare time"). Linux Torvalds is a rare exception; don't expect everyone to keep his kind of schedule.
2. The rate of permanent job export in this country and the accompanying lack of concern about this from business and political leaders can only be described best as "shock and awe". The loss of well-paying positions that have good potential to result in tomorrow's innovations that keep the economy moving forward will retard our leadership position. You can call me a xenophobic snob for claiming that only America can innovate, but look at history. Where have the vast majority of innovations occurred in the recent past? OSes (Linux is *not* innovation), programming languages, hardware, networking, etc. China? India? Europe? Nope. America, my friend. We built the field and now we are giving it away without a care.
I recently switched from Linux to Windows partly because of these views and partly because of low quality and lack of imagination in the Linux world. My observation was that Linux users and developers were not any better than my Windows programming friends (in fact, the best programmer I know is a hardcore Windows user.) You guys are just cheap! You don't want to pay for anything!
My views, but they're probably true.
A common pool of research and market for close to 2 billion peoples, all sharing in some way a low tech - low money environment...
Open Source is the only way to go if they want to avoid royalties...
when you have one billion inhabitant, anything can become a huge problem...
I remember my economy eacher telling us why coffee was badly seen as a morning drink in china. Because if only 1/2 of your population takes one cup coffee in the day, it amounts to 50 tons a day in purely imports...
And, also, if their standard is proposed as is in all future media players (say, how many DVD players are not made in China ?) this standard could become the worlds standards...
And the whole world will have to pay royalties to China...
Ahhhn Anticipation ! 8)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
- from Real Networks:
- For Movies: http://www.xvid.org
- for Streaming : http://www.theora.org/
either they did not do enough research, or they like reinvinting thw wheeli think instead of china paying royalties to outside companies, outside companies will now be paying china royalties to basically sell their devices their. so china will probably be making some cash out of this as well.
...you cheer on a country with such a horrid human rights record simply because its software ideals appear to align with your own.
Replacing one proprietary standard with another proprietary standard doesn't sound like "boosting open-source and royalty-free hardware". Sounds more like they'd want their own royalties from the hardware.
Dragon chips aren't free either. They don't distribute synthesisable VHDL/verilog sources or anything. It's just their custom CPU (albeit it looks a bit like MIPS R4k) which they sell without paying license fees to anyone else.)
And does the world need yet another incompatable video format?
I admire their technical prowess, but they're not doing it with the good of humanity in mind. It's all about proving that they're not trapped in luohouzhuyi, literally "fall-behind-ism." They've failed as a communist party, so now the only thing keeping them in power is trying to prove that they're making China strong enough to resist foreign interference. That's what this project feels like to me.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
the Chinese government is supporting an effort to develop a homegrown standard, called 'AVS,' for compressing digital audio and video in order to avoid paying royalties on proprietary compression schemes.
Yeah, saving money on royalties on pirated movies...
about those Adult Verification Systems is that you pay for them to confirm you are adult, they claim it's not for profit but for protecting children and the sum you pay would suffice to cover costs of holding your record in their database for millenia, but after a few months or a year you suddenly stop being adult and need to renew your adulthood confirmation.
Just in case somebody invents elixir of youth and becomes a kid?
This is why we need to support Open-Source lobbying efforts. Right now, sending a native Chinese lobbyist to push China to adopt the work of the Ogg team as their official standards would be a great coup for the Open Source movement.
There is actually a pr0n company called AVS which stands for Adult Video Systems. I wonder if they will use the format? ~me
Speaking at Defcon 12 - Credit Card Networks Revisted: Pen
Here's to China having a clue.
You know what happens when you rely on parts of everybody else's?
You're sucked into bullshit in South America and the Middle East, because you need their oil.
China was the center of the earth for quite some time in terms of technology and civilization. So, they've been in a slump - Communism didn't help out much there.
However, they've the manpower and availible resources to thrash anyone else if they ever decided to get rid of the Communist craziness.
And they seem to be slowly moving in that direction. That should scare the shit out of every other first world nation on the planet.
> ...you cheer on a country with such a horrid human rights record simply because its software ideals appear to align with your own.
:-/
Well, *that* explains why conservative Republicans are so adamant on protecting Saudi Arabia, aka the "big fish of September 11".
I thought that turncoat behavior was about corruption of the GOP... but I guess it is about protecting conservative ideals. God Bless Oil!
Why does everybody keep saying 6 billion people? The population of China is 1.2 billion, unless they've taken over the rest of the world.
And the l33t shall inherit the 34r7h.
As opposed to American publishers who infuriated Charles Dickens by publishing his books without acknowledging his copyright.
And now of course we have American publishers who want to extend copyright in perpetuity to stop people having fair use of characters in the likes of Rudyard Kipling's books.
My knowledge of Chinese is minimal, to say the least, but doesn't their document "(AVS-CFP-Video Coding) (1.0)" show the contact person to be one Feng Wu at the Microsoft Asia Research Institute's Network Multimedia Group? Author is Wang Ping of Microsoft.
What's the intellectual property status of the AVS standard? The article mentions "royalty payments" for China. Do those only apply to products used/distributed in China, or do they apply worldwide? Has China taken out foreign patents related to the AVS standard? Or does AVS infringe on patents in the US or Europe and therefore cannot be used in the US or Europe?
.. files if they should have the same extension .. avisynth files are not video files .. but script files for video transparent pos-processing (filtering, etc) with Avisynth . They could have named it something else
I fuse with Mercer every single day...
In Soviet^H^H^H^H^H^HCapitalist China, Open Source frees you...
America!!! Long live jingoism!!!
haven't these guys heard of ogg and theora?
It is true that paying royalties to domestic companies is much better than paying foreigners (we all remember the DVD player fiasco), and it doesn't matter much whether ship-making (etc.) technologies are open or closed, but I don't think the current policies are suitable for software and related technologies. Mandating domestic proprietary (and sometimes incompatible) standards over existing free (as in freedom) ones may create more GDP in royalties, and possibly give domestic companies some advantage in competition (unlikely), but ordinary people actually loses.
Being a Chinese citizen, I think the situation here is similar to that in the US in 1970s as described by RMS. Basically most people are not aware of IP, and those who are getting to know it rush to "protect" it, few have yet to get the notion of free software(information, knowledge, etc.).
A propretary video format allows ONLY the playing of that format within it's borders. Since the Chinese also don't like the idea of "foreign ideologies" (blocked CNN, blocked Western websites) streaming into the country, proprietary video is a way to only allow the masses to view what the government deems is "safe."
Hey, if you're amazed by this insightful moderation, just check out this interesting and informative comment: a +5 Insteresting, and it's shock full of goatse links!
I got a chance to review the format, and it looks like they need some more work on the audio / video syncing issues.
In the clip I saw, a martial artist was moving his mouth extremely rapidly, but the audio was just a slow voice intoning in English:
"So, my young sabretooth, it appears the student has now become the master."
The general level of commentary on this story has reached a new low for slashdot.
China is a *totalitarian* regime. Doh!
Patents? Good thing? Open Source Boosters ?
rotflmao
Lenin coined the term "useful idiots". Look in the mirror folks.
--GH.
Democratic Capitalism states it's aim as using human work to generate value. The people who do the work vote for a government that pools a portion of that for investing the the community with 'public works'.
Taxation of profit is the promise that the government makes to the people.
Tax collectors have the most powerful range of search and siezure laws on their side.
Here in the UK a VAT collector can, with reasonable cause, turn up and any hour of the day or night and provided he is accompanied by two police officers he can enter your premises even if that means breaking in. No warrant, no judge, sieze first - ask questions later.
So why is it just that the world's most profitable companies avoid paying fair taxation?
If you believe in Democracy you believe in taxation, that's the deal.
It is not good enough to set up "the Foundation" and do public work. The will of the people is that you pay the government and we'll take care of it from there, thank you very much.
It is in this way that monopolies should not threaten their customers. Taxation is one of the checks and balances against run-away profiteering. If you had to pay 90% tax on the top end of the balance sheet then diminishing returns act as a disincentive.
The stagnant two party system that has gripped the major democracies is anti-freedom.
Dynasties are broken by internal power struggles spilling out into civil war or barbarian hordes.
Demonizing the "others", one nation under god.
But break they will and break they must.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Traditionally, China is the Middle Kingdom. Middle of what, you ask? Well, there is Heaven; there is Earth; between the two is China.
So, saying they think they're the center of the Earth is actually an understatement.
That's much lower compared to the MPEG2 royalties.
I see a lot of people complaining (in essence, or literally) about this being YET ANOTHER video codec. Am I missing something? Is this, competition that is, a GOOD thing? Who gives a rat's ass if there's five, fifty or a hundred codecs out there in common use. Ok, so they can't all be standards and most will be flash-in-the-pan technologies, but at least there's competition.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
What's wrong with using an open-source codec? Or are there any good ones out yet? It'd be nice if the Chinese gov simply paid some coders to work on OSS video codecs. I mean not to troll or anything but OSS is compatible with the communist ethic...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Anyone managed to get some information about how it actually works? Is it DCT based, wavelets?
So China will have continued supply of cheap labor as long as they can maintain domestic tranquility somehow. They might have to acquire the odd country (Tibet) or continent (Australia watch out) to do this though.
Don't confuse economic quantity for economic quality. Someone rich once said, "I'd rather earn 1% of the efforts of 100 men then 100% of my own efforts"*. China will have a lot of rich people but not all of them will be rich. Kind of the way the US is going but from the other direction.
* this quote seems to be a favorite of MLM schemes if you google it.
... glass houses, stones, etc...
/.r who pointed out that whilst China's gov is slowly getting better, ours is quite quickly getting worse.
Let's just say that your local media is more likely to tell you that another country is Bad(tm) then tell you about the stuff your own country is up to.
I'm not condoning any form of human rights abuse, I'd really like to live in a nice, happy, peaceful world, but let's face it; the west is not exactly utopia either. I saw a post around here the other day from a chinese
Warning: May contain nuts
The linked article doesn't mention it, but the SVCD (Super Video CD) format was created in 1998 for the same reasons. Here is a good overview of why and how SVCD was created (some excerpts follow...)
Super Video CD (aka SVCD, Super VCD or Chaoji VCD) is an enhancement to Video CD that was developed by a Chinese government-backed committee of manufacturers and researchers, partly to sidestep DVD technology royalties and partly to create pressure for lower DVD player and disc prices in China. The final SVCD spec, set by the China National Committee of Recording Standards, was announced in September 1998, winning out over C-Cube's China Video Disc (CVD) and HQ-VCD (from the developers of the original Video CD).
As always, the background story is a bit more complicated than how it appears in brief summaries like the above. First of all, why was there such a big interest in creating a new CD-based video disc format for China, at the time when the rest of the world was already preparing to accept DVD as the "next generation" digital video delivery format?
It all comes down to the following three reasons:
It's nice to say "these movements from China will benefit the open source/world markets/IT/IP/whatnot". But a lot of people seem to forget we're talking about China, for God's sake. Remember, the Red giant still going strong with communism, censorship, human rights trampling right into the 21st century?
Wouldn't it make more sense to presume they're developing technology from scratch in order to fill it up with the equivalent of the Palladium? The rest of the world gets their panties up in a bunch when Palladium and the likes are mentioned. But not in China: they're putting together a CPU, an operating system and various standards of their own.
Hello, this is the government that tried to close up all Internet connections to outside the country and make their own little censorship-ridden Internet, remember? The ones that are monitoring most Chinese ISP's and Internet Cafe's? The ones that banned news sites out of China alltogether so the Chinese people wouldn't get a whiff of anything else except gov propaganda?
They're gonna close up most external sources of technology and tell the Chinese people to use the in-house products or else rot in prisons, and the gov will finally be able to be all over their asses in the darkest cyber-punk distopia style.
Palladium? Carnivore? DRM? Ha ha. The US gov never even dreamed of the level of digital privacy invasion that the Chinese are cooking up.
Wake up, people, this is not China opening up to the warmth of Open Source, this is the tortionists updating their tools to match the digital age.
As state industries continue to close down and more private companies take their place, it becomes more of a misnomer to refer to China as "Communist", just because the government there is called the "Communist" party.
His homepage is here),
Although I could not find it on his homepage, as far as I know, the quote goes:
"The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from; furthermore, if you do not like any of them, you can just wait for next year's model."
Apparently it is from his book, Computer Networks.
SCO to Hell
I wonder if the BORG will use the new AVS video format. Sure they will assimlate it.. but will they "REALLY" recieve all the advantages of the avs standard.
How is a ridiculous comparison of the governments that perpetrated Kent State and Tianemen Square informative or relevant to 'China Proposes Rival Video Format'??
Do you moderators understand or care what your mod points are supposed to be for? It's certainly not to push up 'U.S. is evil' comments, though thats what it seems to be in recent months. It's totally irrelevant, offtopic, and flamebait'ish.
I think the moderators who abused their privileges should be blackmailed from ever modding again.
Will the BORG Adapt to this new "format" and since the BORG is all about destroying human kind, how will it get new updates for this format if there is no one to Create new versions of AVS video.
... but I do with they'd picked a different format name. AVS is also the name of an ancient video format from the early 1990s, supported by Intel's ActionMedia II boards. Back in the day, it rocked all over AVI and Quacktime.
You may have to pay 12c per device that plays, but that's not really whats important. What can make this big news is if you can release media for free.
The problem with licensing fees for distribution formats is that you cant give away what you have made. Not too many ppl out there giving away DVD players. Software players might get stuck in the middle though....
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Is it just me, or does anyone else think it's kind of weird that everytime someone mentions China's human right record(note: China, not US's oil ally Saudi Arabia), they get mod up instantly.
This must be an old trick to get modded...
For god's sake, all of us know China's human right record. Your daily TV newsprogram mentions it once every week just to make sure no one is missing that particular dose of history(and they would also add China is a communist nation, but they would never mention the actual definition of communism).
For a change, how about tell us something we don't already know, like the progress they are making?
Or we could talk about something you might not be too familiar with, like our own human rights record. Don't forget, we used to be a segregated society, and look how long it took us to get out of that system.
Why are they concerned about a royalty-free video compression scheme when it will be used mainly for pirated movies?
Toon toon! Black and white army!
MPEG has pretty much saturated the market. Existing DVD players are not compatable with AVS. AVS will not only have to be cheaper and better, it will have to be cheaper and better enough to justify its being different.
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
big enough to do what ever they want. Even with only 10% saturation of the population, they will rival the entire Japanese population.
As for media being made in MPEG formats. It doesn't matter, they will re-encode and master the products for their market anyway, so being a large customer for Media, they can choose whatever format they want.
one of the perks of being a huge country.
http://www.ohlssonvox.com
Well said!
Mod parent up, I've already used all my points for today.
Talk is cheap. All you can do in Washington were talk and talk. Later on, millions of Iraqi got killed. And this Mr. Bush wanted to be immunity from war crime court. Did he do anything wrong?
How embarassing!
To someone like you, the concept of collateral damage is alien. You would intentionally attack civilians, and can't imagine agonizing over the balance between cleaning up the bad guys and unavoidably hurting some of the innocent people the bad guys are hiding behind.
Who in WWII, to make it harder for defending troops to deploy, targeted civilian towns to create mass panicked exodus and clog the roads.
Who subjugated the Vietnamese and so brutalized them that a communist dictator could gather loyalty?
Who attacked the defenseless Chinese (and the rest of eastern Asia), kidnapped women for prostitution (comfort women), and committed such unspeakable atrocities as binding the knees of women in labor so that they and their babies died in agony.
Who cleaned up (or in one case, tried and failed) these messes?
Even when it's unpleasant and thankless, if not us, who? If not now, when? You little pissants can afford to pretend that evil people are just misunderstood, and we're using them as an excuse to take over the world. You can keep up the moral masturbation because we'll take care of the problem.
I highly recommend C.S. Lewis' "Perelandra" (and "Out of the Silent Planet", and "That Hideous Strength", and "The Screwtape Letters", and "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe", etc.). One of these days, all countries will be good and strong, and we'll all understand that "A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do".
If you believe in Democracy you believe in taxation, that's the deal.
Democrats may or may not believe in taxation but capitalists certainly don't. If you understand the underlying principles of capitalism, you'll realize that taxes are not supported by capitalists. They consider taxes to be inefficient and harm free markets (similar to how duties, tariffs, floors (eg. min wage), ceilings (eg. rent control) all harm free market). Most capitalists really want NO TAXES, and until they get that, they want FLAT TAXES.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
"Democratic Capitalism" there ain't no such thing in the USA. We got's a "Capitalist Republic" promoting reduced living standards for US and EU (us & you) as an expected business benefit equivalent to a tax-cut.
Anyway, I don't see allot of democracy for US or EU, but I still love the USA Constitution even when it is devalued by creative political skullduggery. I mean some good wag-the-dog stuff.
OldHawk777
Reality is a self-induced hallucination.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
So, why did the Chinese develop a new compression standard? The reason is fascism, which is nationalism based on race. Consider the following.
The only effective way for the West to combat Chinese fascism is to acknowledge it and to fight it. Currently, the United States of America (USA) has a policy of giving China an immigration quota of 60,000, which is divided evenly among Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China. We should immediately slash that quota down to 20,000, which is the allotment given to all other countries (like Canada, Japan, etc.) We should consider reducing that quota even further -- down to 10,000.
Still, since the Chinese claim that fascism is so wonderful, then there is no reason for them to flee from China to the USA. Therein, we can justify reducing the immigration quota to zero.
You are not paying attention if you think red china has ANY "idiological enemy"s.
Their ONLY ideology these days is sheer PRAGMATISM - whatever works - in the words of Dung "It doesn't matter if the cat is black or white - it only matters if it catches mice or not."
In any system, work generates value. There is no need for a particular economic system to "aim" for that. A bird gathering food for its chicks generates value.
Also keep in mind that large powerful countries are ripe for control by hawks, elitists and various other pro-war people. Smaller countries on the other hand are generally controlled by doves...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Who mods this junk up anyway? Sure China is all "evil", but the previous poster was just pointing out that the US is "bad" and getting worse, while China is getting less "evil", and implying that pretty soon the USA is bound to cross that line to "evil", while China may possible cross over to "bad" in time. I hope that translation into you simple language will help you to understand.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
The Mongols conquered most of the Chinese in the 1200's. In spite of that, the written and spoken languages survived intact. ...as did most works of Chinese literature. ...as did their knowledge of science and especially engineering. ...pottery and sculpture, architecture. ...Confucianism, Taoism. All of the above also survived Manchu and Turkish conquest and rule. Continuous blood lineage was not relevant, or particularly necessary in the case of the Chinese.
I think your analysis is very self centered and based on prejudice rather than looking at the real cause. This was begging to happen for a long time. With all manufacturing jobs and now technology jobs being shipped outside the USA, only the business people need to be blamed for this. When you become the mass manufacturer for the worl, do you really think the Chinese would keep paying royalties to the western companies? I dont think so. I think this is the begining of a trend where the Chinese have realized that they have the manufacturing prowess, the technological prowess, so why pay royalties to some one else? And they are right... Intel and Microsoft showed us that crap produced on a mass scale and given away for cheap will set standards... and now the Chinese have realized they can mass produce everything that the world depends on, and if they set the standards, the rest will have to adapt. We may even have to pay royalties to the Chinese in a few years now, because the new standards come from them as they are the worlds mass producers.
The big, bad, greedy companies that shipped our jobs overseas to save a few bucks really begged for this to happen in exchange for short term profits.
Now if only China would start making some good music...
Didn't get that, must be a bad connection.
Toon toon! Black and white army!
What the "French-too, French-first" laws endeavor to do is make sure that even in areas that do not speak French locally, products must include French. These laws do not similarly mandate and enforce the use of English. It's this hypocracy that irks me.
Now, if the Francophiles made a law that required every C programmer to publish in Pascal too, but not the other way round, well, I might just move to Paris...
(1) Why on earth should the Chinese speak English at their own press conferences?
(2) The language spoken in both Taipei and Beijing is putonghua, or standard mandarin. What language was this Taiwanese student supposed to be speaking?
(3) The phrase "capitalism with Chinese characteristics" was coined by Deng Xiaoping as part of the opening-up revolution that started with the 3rd Plenum of the 11th Party Congress in 1978. It refers to the expansion of the commercial sphere in China not its suppression.
A troll is a troll is a troll....
- Chinese version of capitalism
- Chinese version of human rights
- Chinese version of coding/decoding
The Chinese now insist on the last item in the above list even though most Chinese and their businesses have not, do not now, and will not ever pay royalies on intellectual property. China (which includes Taiwan and Hong Kong) is the piracy capital of the world. Even though DVD's and CD's may have movies or music encoded in a royalty-required encoding format, the Chinese simply do not pay the royalties. They freely pirate the whole DVD or CD.As for speaking Taiwanese or Mandarin, the tragedy in Taiwan began with the 228 massacre and lasted for 40 years of white terror. If any Taiwanese spoke Taiwanese in the halls of the school or on the schoolyard, the Chinese would beat him and slap him. The Chinese bystanders would not care.
In the United States of America, a child has been free to speak Spanish in the halls of the school or on the schoolyard.
In my experience the USA has the same problem at times.
Arrogance maybe, but I think you'd be hard pressed to say that the U.S. is isolationist. The difference between the U.S. "thinking it's at the center of the earth" and China beliving in Chinese cultural supremecy is that the U.S. has no problems with co-opting other cultures' ideas, technology, entertainment, and what have you.
The Chinese way is much different, and much more odious to me. I feel that the Chinese are akin to the French, in terms of xenophobia. When you see the U.S. passing laws about how many foreign words per hour may be broadcast, then I might agree the U.S. has a problem...
Invisible Agent
This post is a mirror; when a monkey stares in, no hacker gazes out.
So what matters more to you? How much actual dough (read: "resources") a country contributes to the world in the form of foreign aid, or how much as a percentage of national income?
Rhetorical question, of course. You're so fucking dumb you think that Uganda contributes more to the world than the U.S. does.
Invisible Agent
This post is a mirror; when a monkey stares in, no hacker gazes out.
I am rather mystified by people always complaining that there are no free video codecs.
First of all we all know about MPEG-1 video and audio (MPEG-1 Layer 2). I know the patents have expired in the US, so why does nobody use it? I think MPEG-1 got a bad name because of VCDs (and MPEG-2 ironically).
I say it got a bad name because MPEG-1 is surprisingly close to the same quality as MPEG-4 at similar bitrates. It's single draw-back is that it just wasn't made to produce the sharpest pictures, so details are smoothed over, but conversely, it has the wonderful advantage of having much nicer artifacts than almost any other codec. While MPEG-2/4 get blocky, broken, have stair-stepped lines, etc, MPEG-1 blurs instead... That means the MPEG-1 videos are much easier to watch, and look like the analog video that people know.
VCD gave MPEG-1 a bad name, because they used such a horrendously low bitrate and resolution for the format, and they had to do that because they used up a huge number of bits for audio. Now, if I was paid to write a next gen VCD standard using something like MP3/Vorbis audio, it would rival the Divx CDs floating around, and since it doesn't suffer from the terrible distracting artifacts, most people would think it looked better than MPEG-4.
I say that MPEG-2 also gave MPEG-1 a bad name because MPEG-2 may provide a good picture, but it requires very high bitrates to do so, and it looks like utter crap if you attempt to use it at lower bitrates. People just assume that MPEG-2 must be better than MPEG-1, and discount it completely from their experience with MPEG-2. It's quite ironic that MPEG-4 went back to the MPEG-1 roots as it were, and was a much lower bitrate codec... I'd say if you bring back MPEG-1 with improved encoders, and name it MPEG-6, people will quickly be saying how wonderful it is. Then again, since the most recent codec was low-bitrate like MPEG-1, the next one should be high-bitrate like MPEG-2...
For those that are skeptical, I would like to encourage you all to try encoding a DVD or other high-quality source of material to MPEG-4, and MPEG-1, using MPlayer/Mencoder... You will be surprised.
Also, VP3.2 has been patent free for some time now, and frankly it beats the crap out of MPEG-4 at low bitrates (can't comment on high bitrates). If anyone says that VP3 is more fuzzy/blury than MPEG-4, I will track you down and hit you over the head for being an idiot, and believing everything your read from some schmoe on the internet that thinks he can do a good codec review...
Yes, I will admit that I am anxiously awaiting Theora, but only because it will be the first open source Unix VP3 encoder.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
If you have any suggestion and/or opinion to the AVS standard, please email yongqin.zeng@philips.com
Both English and Chinese emails are welcome.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I think you've mis-read my comments. But thanks for your, er, useful contribution to the thread.
I have to say that some work destroys value, and not all work creates value, otherwise, we could have half the population dig holes and the other half fill them in. There is plenty of land, so we could get 0% unemployment. Vote me president and I will guarentee that everyone gets a job and they can work as many hours as they want digging OR filling The Holes!!! Since work generates value, we will be a country so rich we will just buy all the other countries of the world!!
Well, I guess that depends on what you consider valuable, perhaps all the other countries of the world will sell themselves to us for our effort, because surely there has been some value generated from all that work.
um.. actually that won't work will it? Well vote for me anyway. =)
-Evil Lord Drewcifer
Only rich countries can afford to get negative import balance, because they have the money to assume the unbalanced situation...
In other words YOU HAVE TO BE RICH TO LOAN MONEY
and, in other news, nobody know what happens to poor people with to many credit/loans, except that they usually go bankrupt and derelict.
And I seem to remember that countries also have the same problem... I mean USA is the richest country, and has the most massive of debts...
I can't wait until someone buys all their debt back and starts blackmailing them into submission (Japan, UAE,...)
China did the wise move not authorizing coffe, cause they would have become bankrupt in no time and would have had to accept the money (and obligations) from our Western friends.
I just love economy, the place where they explain you that a single cup of Joe in the morning can become a problem when it's repeated bu 500 000 000 peoples each day...
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
I like you sig btw
:
On eof the most influencial books I ever read was this one
The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge
Peter L. Berger
Thomas Luckmann
here
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
The stagnant two party system that has gripped the major democracies is anti-freedom.
You must be an American, because otherwise you might have had a clue about the rest of the world and would not have made such a statement.
The majority of the world's democracies, and almost all which anyone might consider "major", are multi-party.
The United States' bizarre two-party tradition is the exception, not the rule.
-deane
The two party state is a mature democracy and almost inevitable.
The rise of extremism is a consequence but the middle ground is an attractor.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Could we have a statistical translation of that web page please? Thanks. :-)