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."

Comments

Patent Policy Bites U.S.?

[Michael_Burton]

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.

Probably Nationalism

[Phoenix666]

You see, everything the CCP does is aimed at reaffirming their legitimacy as the one and ruling party. There is a Chinese space program to go to the moon. There is a program to build a navy to rival the US's. There was their version of linux, and now there's this project.

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.