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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."
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!
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 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.
According to China Population Information and Research (CPIRC), the total population in Mainland China is 1,289,646,742.
But does everyone in China have a credit card?
Well, according to the RIAA the population in China is the equivalent of 900 million people, since the chinese are a bit shorter.
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 wheel...you cheer on a country with such a horrid human rights record simply because its software ideals appear to align with your own.
According to this Associated Press article, "The number of Internet users in China grew by 15 percent over the past six months to 68 million, while the number of Web sites surged by 28 percent, the government said." "China has the world's second-largest online population, but is far behind the United States, with more than 165 million."
No, but you bullshit the world, and pretend you're all one big free democratic nation.
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.
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
Not that a democratic governments making money guarantees that *all* the people will get their fair share. If you believe yours does, you live in cloud cuckoo land.
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.
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."
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."
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
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
Now I know many people's definition of "fair share" vary, and I'm not going to pretentiously claim what the Founding Fathers would have wanted, but it seems that an increasing number of people believe that simply existing inside our borders entitles them to a share of the country's collective wealth.
There used to be a time when people relied upon hard work, innovation, and ambition to achieve success, rather than expect it to be handed to them. Both corporations and individuals are prone to this new entitlement mentality, and it's the working stiffs that are getting screwed.
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.
Ok, there are 6 billion people on the planet, but 90% of them cant afford to use a vcr or dvd player, so you cant market to them.
... 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:
You say that as if the purpose of government is to make money for it's citizens. Not only has that ideology, when put into practice, failed repeatedly, but a truly free society has a government that simply allows its citizens to create their own success.
"The Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself." -Benjamin Franklin
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Coincidentally, the amount of spam coming from China has increased 28% in the past 6 months. According to one Chinese offical "We have the world's second-largest online population, but our super efficiency allows us to spam the entire United States' 165 million online users quite successfully"
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
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.
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
Government and the people are the same thing. This is especially true in something like Communism. Sure, there is corruption and the party members may benefit more than others. But how many Chinese politicans became billionaries or millionaries through the govt? Far less than under capitalistic countries... For instance, George Bush probably gained half a million (over a 10 year period) simply by his tax cuts which will help the wealthy class (which he belongs to)...
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.
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.