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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."
translated link
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
Why not just use ogg video?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
According to China Population Information and Research (CPIRC), the total population in Mainland China is 1,289,646,742.
According to the Yahoo article it's not royalty-free, "Chinese manufacturers licensing that technology would pay fees in the order of one yuan ($1=CNY8.28) per device, much lower than those for MPEG, the report said. If it becomes a national standard, products of foreign companies sold in China could also have to use AVS."
No, it won't. Mainland China is now separated into its own region (region 6, region 3 is used in Hong Kong, South Korea, and some other Southeast Asian countries). Anyone who is making bootleg video isn't going to play by the rules; they want to maximize the number of people they can sell to. So if you go on ebay to buy those bootleg copies of Star Wars IV - VI you won't find that they say "Region 6. Only playable in China!" It'll be the same way with this AVS format. It also assumes this technology would replace DVDs in China, which seems a bit far-stretched at this point.
Xiph.org isn't only developing Ogg Vorbis, but also Ogg Theora. It's still in alpha stages though. The technology used in Theora is based on the vp3 codec which is covered by patents, but Xiph.org has negotiated an "irrevocable free license to the vp3 codec for any purpose imaginable on behalf of the public".
Xiph.org is also developing the experimental wavelet-based "Tarkin" codec. As I understand it, it's more written from "scratch", much like Ogg Vorbis, but is even further ahead in the future than Ogg Theora, which they are focusing on right now.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
Isn't this the reason why many bootleg DVDs from Hong Kong and China are "region-less" and why "region-free" DVD players also come from the same place? (By the way, do these actually work or is that just a myth/scam of some sort?)
Yes, all bootleg DVDs are region-free to allow the most number of people to use them. That is not to say many legitimate DVDs aren't region-free, in China, Hong Kong, and elsewhere (while most DVDs from the US are region 1, you will find many that have no region restrictions built-in).
DVD players that can be modified to be region-free (usually through a remote hack) work excellently. The Nerd-out forums and dvdrhelp's player hack list are both very helpful in finding a region-free player or finding out if your current player is region-free. But basically, once you have a region-free player, you can watch DVDs from anywhere. Especially if you have one that does proper PAL -> NTSC conversion, allowing you to play anamorphic widescreen DVDs from Europe and any other PAL countries (CyberHome and Malata are two brands to look at with this feature).
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.).
You can buy a VCD player here in Beijing for $25 USD, and a regionless (*cough*) DVD/MP3/VCD combo for under $50. Since the average annual income is about $3000 USD, that's equivalent to someone making $24,000/year buying a $200 machine. Factor in VCD rentals at $0.20/day and DVD/VCDs on sale for between $1 and $1.50... its easy to see why owning this stuff is becoming pretty common.
Total population figure is irrelevant though. Even if people in rural Fujian aren't making enough money to buy a lot of DVDs, there are 16 million people in Beijing and several million more in the Yantze river delta. And when the population of just a few Chinese cities starts to rival countries like Germany... it makes a huge difference for international standards competition.