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China to Promote Own Alternative to DVDs, EVD
supermanksu writes "Seeking to compete on its own terms in the lucrative entertainment industry, China announced a government-funded project Tuesday to promote an alternative to DVDs and 'attack the market share' of the global video format." This has been an ongoing project.
First we have region encoded dvds so we can't watch dvds from out of our country or "zone" ... and now we won't even be able to fall back on "reverse engineering" our dvd players to play these things! Ugh. Just what we need, more complexity in an already needlessly complex market.
The anti-salmon
I don't think it's wise to force everyone into a new, irrelevant (unless you own an HDTV) format just to avoid paying American royalty fees. It took forever for people to fully embrace DVDs, even with all the benefits over VHS. This is not a great enough leap forward to be successful anywhere.
Also, the acronym EVD ("enhanced versatile disc") seems extremely contrived to sound just like 'DVD'.
How are they going to stop us from bootlegging
kung-fu movies?
Why attack the format? Finally, after so much work, we get a format that's capable of being used internationally, and now China just wants to get rid of it?
Producing content is one thing, but what the heck is wrong with having a shared format? Do they want their own version of the Internet, too?
Oh well, I'll just have to do without all those great movies made in China.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
So, China will have its own proprietary format, with no-one outside the country really caring much - the global market is far larger than the chinese one. Seems to me this is just another control mechanism over the media and modern culture...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Americans can start selling home-made $3 Chinese EVDs! Turnabout, etc.
i heard yesterday that 20% of their gross national product is counterfeit goods including american DVD rips and software titles.
if they take out DVD in china, will they still rip american DVDs to their new format? if so, WHAT THE FUCK HAVE THEY GAINED?
as the CFO of my company put it, china needs to wake up if they want to play with the big boys in the global economy.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
So are they talking about a new video compression format on already existing storage mediums, or mpeg 1 or 2 on something other than a dvd - like a vcd/svcd?
Everything will be taken away from you.
Lets do our own format with everything so nothing works together!
Yeah, lets do that...
Speaking at Defcon 12 - Credit Card Networks Revisted: Pen
I see this is just bad. I hope it dies a horable death.
Pretty Pictures!
Since these video disc players are not DVD licensed, do they have the right to use DVD keys to decrypt existing DVDs? These keys, I imagine, are licensed along with the patent and royalty agreements. This will work great in non-DMCA countries, the USA, however, will likely stop them at customs after some mild lobbying from various patent owners and trade groups. It's very likely that these are destined for the huge chinese market, but they are probably hoping to skirt around the law and get these into the US as well.
Or, they may be more interested in distributing content without a licensing fee than in distributing players without paying a licensing fee. To produce a DVD, a license fee must be paid per disk. If they produce a disk using their new format, there is no fee. (This is a win for independent producers of content, as well as for countries keen on reducing cash transfersto the DVD consortium).
To make a player that plays just this new protocol, there is no license fee involved (I presme). The players they'll probably make will be APEX-like, playing DVDs, CDs, MP3s, and will probably pay a DVD licensing fee. At least, auditable units, or units shipped to the west will pay fees. Who knows about grey-market ones.
Ripped right out of Yahoo! News, way to be relevant Slashdot Editors!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
This has been an ongoing project. Newspeak for "Yeah, this is a dupe, I know it, but gosh darn it I'm gonna post it anyway!"
When life gives you crap, Make Crapade.
Sluggy Freelance.
Other formats that China has backed in the past include things like VCD, SVCD, CVD (China Video Disc, an SVCD-like format in NTSC resolution), and others. These tend to be no-nonsense unencrypted formats that are easier to write software to produce (look how much more free software exists to burn VCD/SVCD/CVD than DVD), and are supported by most Chinese DVD players (APEX, for example).
This will help keep the ability to produce and distribute content within reach of everyone, instead of just the large media companies.
"It was developed by a company called Beijing E-World Technology Co. Ltd. using video-compression technologies licensed by On2 Technologies, an American company."
At quick glance, the license doesn't seem "open" which means you'll end up with another controlling factor one way or another...and someone will have to come up and battle with a different version of deCSS. If that is the case, it can't be good.
Secondly, DVD has a heck of a market share. I suppose if anything has a population to take a chunk out of market share, it would be China. However, from observation, it would be difficult to budge the hold that DVD currently has.
I'm thinking along the lines of Ogg Vorbis vs. MP3 -- with Ogg being free (though I'm not sure the EVD will be a free format) and MP3 having the market share. Ogg may have crept up in terms of getting hardware/software support, but it's still not dislodging the majority of MP3 users even though it's of a higher technical quality.
I suppose any disruptive technology to run interference on DVD would be a Good Thing(TM)
Haven't they been attacking DVD's by pirating the living hell out of them for some time now?
I do security
. . . calls on President Bush for a preemptive nuclear strike.
"This isn't about marketing dominance or intellectual property rights," said the movie industry mogul, "They hate our freedom!"
China has a serious "Not Invented Here" problem... Half of their "innovation" pet projects are the brainchild of some bureaucratic PHB, which i'm guessing are worse than the standard garden variety PHB.
that is a nasty link to Butt Fish
does this mean that it'll be even CHEAPER to buy pirated movies over there?
MY SECRET DIARIES
Will it support region encoding? What copy protection will it have? Will studios be able to force you to watch previews? Is the media radically different or just the encoding? Would I be able to play it on a DVD-ROM?
This article has more words but less info than the "G5 powerbook is coming!" one.
My first thought was "I hope they are going to use Ogg Theora for this." Then in the article text it said that they have been "developed... using video-compression technologies licensed by On2 Technologies". Folks, Ogg Theora is based on the On2 compression technologies!
The Chinese market is huge. Many DVD players are made in China. It seems very likely to me that the EVD standard will at least carve out a niche for itself. Potentially, it will have sufficient impact that all future DVD players will be made EVD-compatible. It ought to just be a matter of putting some more stuff in the ROM of the DVD player. It this really is based on Ogg Theora, there will be no fees or royalties to pay.
Of course, the MPAA will probably drag their heels about releasing Hollywood movies in EVD format. But I would love it if there was a widespread standard based on Ogg Theora, so I could burn my own discs using nothing but free software and know that my friends have players that can watch the discs.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
All i know is i want one, the unmarked DVD aspect will surely make it a good buy because it wount adhere to any of the MPAAs bull shit - ie fast forwarding and region encoding which is something the general public can grasp, so hopefully these things will sell around the world and introduce a new format while not making people have to update their collections :P
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I don't see EVD being much of a issue outside of China because it does not offer any advantage to consumers (DVD has HDTV plans too). Unless China wants to spend $100 million (or more) marketing the new format to Western consumers, they aren't going to get any market share here. Even in China, it will be an uphill battle. I don't see why Chinese consumers would buy the more expensive format, unless they are Patriotic and have money to burn. Also, I'd bet that media production has reached critical mass for DVD. How will China convince pressing plants to adapt to EVD?
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
A spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
They probably had to get a couple of people in to help them off the floor after they fell out of their chair laughing.
To know that you know what you know, and that you do not know what you do not know, that is true wisdom. --Scooby Doo
This is getting really stupid. How many 'standard' media formats can we handle?
It will all end up a big unuseable jumble if this trend isnt stopped...
While im not for 'one vendor' ideas, 'one standard' IS good.... ( oh, and make that standard open.. )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Something new to add to my spam filter.
Think about it: having their own format allows China to prohibit the sale of DVD players to their citizens, and thus to control what people in China get to watch.
Are DVD's good or bad, isn't CSS supposed to stand for all that is wrong with the DMCA and this new format AFAIK is unencrypted so why are people bashing it?
I welcome our Chinese EVD Overlords (sorry, had to say it)
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
EVD. Maybe too little too late. Instead copying DVD , how about getting ahead of the market and make something alot of us videophiles really want . Recordable hdtv.
Are these easier to pirate than dvds or something?
Or at least with minor moving parts like a tiny mirror or such?
IMHO following the "disk" trend is a mistake. CD and DVD could have been made i.e. rectangular, with drive that would just sweep the laser ray over immobile surface. Cheaper, faster, less error-prone... and less resembling a vinyl record, so Sony decided it should be round and rotate instead, so people would prefer to buy it.
I still hope some next generation media won't follow dumb marketing trends and prefer efficiency over "legacy looks", but it seems China failed my hopes this time.
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China, at 1.3 billion people, is 20% of the world's 6.4 billion.
That's enough to sustain their own format, and to attract interest from foreign media providers.
If India was to team up on the EVD, they'd have 35%!
Reading Slashdot is ruining my spelling and grammar.
If they don't, I'm all for them.
If they do, I don't care at all.
DVD player royalties is approximately US$5 to $10, depending if you are part of MPEG LA, 3C or 5C consortium. China manufacturers pump out more than 30 million DVD players a year, so imagine the massive outflow of cash to US companies holding the DVD patents.
EVD uses the same media format as DVD (ie. two 0.6mm polycarbonate discs with reflective layers read out using a coherent light source), so they still have to pay royalties to Time-Warner, Philips, Sony, Matsushita, Thomson-RCA, Toshiba etc for the disc patents.
Death is a pause between lives
You need get out a bit more, maybe talk to people.
I didn't realize that On2 had other, improved codecs. VP3 (which Ogg Theora is based on) is an older one. VP5 and VP6 are newer ones.
Oh, well. I can still hope that the EVD standard will play Ogg Theora as a bonus. Most DVD players can play VCD, so that isn't too unlikely.
Thanks for the correction.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
just to avoid paying American royalty fees
Let me try to explain it here. Avoiding paying royaties to US and EU is a major component of any sensible comercial or industrial policy in a developing country. in market the size of China's any cent not leaving the country is a cent to be invested in a million of important things to the Chinese population.
Incidentally that is also one of the major reasons for countries like Brazil, India and China to be seriously looking at Open/Free Software - in the medium and long term, the savings in royalties not send abroad usually justify any short-term problems that may arise.
I looked into this a bit. Apparently Chinese manufacturers are starting to balk at the ~$350M going out to Japanese DVD patent holders, and the government is listening.
Remember -- fifty years ago, Japan tried to colonize Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia is still pissed.
Anyway, the video codec appears to be On2's VP5 and VP6 -- which, being much newer codecs than MPEG-2, support HDTV resolutions and DVD bitrates -- supposedly with quality as good, if not better, than Microsoft's solution. (Caveat: I was not impressed with VP3, the algorithm open sources by On2 and being tweaked heavily into Ogg Theora.) Not said is what's being used for the audio codec. While audio compression and video compression are two very different things, it's problematic when the two are grown utterly separate from one another. DVD has this problem -- MPEG-2 and AC3 (Dolby Digital) have slightly different frame sizes, making it much more awkward to edit accurately.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
I bet the Chinese government will somehow find a way to crack down on EVD player manufacturers that don't pay their license fees.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
What surprised me most was the URL of the story!
I remember using Excite as my search of choice for full-text searches, back before Yahoo! started charging for everything, including directory listings. Then, there was Webcrawler, once the home of the canonical robots.txt standard.
I even remember back in the day, when not all AltaVistas were created equal.
Then came Google's PigeonRank system, and it's been downhill (or uphill, whichever you see as a positive metaphor) ever since.
So the Excite.com link was a trip down memory lane. Not that I'm expecting the Good Old Days to return; when I tried to access the home page with my Opera browser, I got an error message: "The browser you're using is not allowing you to sign in to Excite." Don't worry, Excite.com... I won't be trying again.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
In communist China, DVD makers pay you...
Ok, sorry.
Finally! Something we can crack and pirate stuff from them!
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
If China wants to make DVD players, TVs, and so on that don't try to strip my fair use rights away from me in some vain and nebulous "fight the pirates" scheme, I'm all for it.
Hollywood and their bullshit can go jump in a lake.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Hey at least they had the taste not to call it "XVD".
"A man can do as he will, but not will as he will." --Schopenhauer
It stands for EEEEET's-uh VEEEEDEO DEEEEESK-uh!!! HARRO!!!
If China is willing to be less anal about encryption/protection/etc than the US, then there are too things I foresee:
a) It can be happily embraced by the linux/open-source/etc community, and anyone who doesn't want to get sued for actually trying to do something with their disc that wasn't in the "box" the creators intended
b) The movie companies will hate it, and probably not use it, for the reason in (a)
Didn't see a whole lot about the encryption/etc on the disc, perhaps I just overlooked it though. How about capacity too?
Please don't do this, China.
Focus on your emerging space program instead...
for the Chinese to do would be to hire Bill Clinton as a fashion model! And like that would ever happen!
Ahhh yes, the golden sales period... when carolers go from house to house singing the praises of Chairman Mao.
Makes me feel all nostalgic and sentimental.
Is this just more of China's will to become completely self-dependant and cut off from the wider world?
Comment: Yes I realise the username 'fuckfuck101' makes me sound intelligent, no you cannot buy it from me.
Dude, you got the link wrong. His post was a copy of this post (from 6 months ago) with this other post tacked onto the end.
Only in Asian countries, where there is true technological freedom, can one hope to innovate to such a degree and blow open a new market. It is too bad that the US and EU, in their anti-innovation and pro-corporate protection mindset, is closed to new ideas.
Am I being thick, or does this mean a possibility of a scenario where a reader/burner is:
:(
DVD, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW, EVD, EVD-R, EVD-RW, EVD+R, EVD+RW?
Unlikely perhaps, but not impossible. Fragmentation of a so-called 'standard' is a bad thing IMO
Try getting salesmen at PC World (UK) to try and explain *that* drive!
real project name PDVD -- People's Democratic Video Disk
*duck*
EVD can display hdtv which dvd can not. The picture quality is 5 times better !
I think this is a good thing. If Hollywood doesn't support it then maybe independents producers might. A HDTV recordable version using blue lasers would be very cool.
As you can see I don't care about my karma.
to quote carlin:
/sarcasm
Well, isnt that fucking enlightening?
How many DVDs have you watched where, if you paused it (and sometimes without even doing that) you could see encoding artifacts?
Like you, I see artifacts in all DVDs and digital cable -- fast-moving scenes, jaggies around edges, pixelation during jump cuts, MPEG grain in dark scenes, yuck, yuck, yuck!. People fawn over "digital pictures" but I see all the compression artifacts. Where people got the idea that real images are composed of little squares of sinusoids is beyond me (FFTs or DCTs may be easy to compute, but that doesn't make them good). Sadly, you and I are in the minority and will have to put up with media products geared toward less disciminating visual systems.
Regarding your other good points, I have a feeling that the MPAA might have much to say over the adoption of EVD. Perhaps internal marketshare in China might be driven by govt incentives, but I remain skeptical that most people have a enough problems with MPEG or region codes to switch to EVD.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Step 1: Reinvent the wheel.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit!
ymmv
let them have their own technology.
seriously, how much influence on the world does china have except manufacturing 99 cent children's toys and other low budget items?
We dont have to use EVD's.. if they want to use them fine, let them. It's not like they mass produce movies for the whole like, say, the US does?
this is just a response to how many people are going on about how china's going to disrupt the international dvd format, etc.. we necessarily dont have to apply to their standards, it's mainly for their own nation and to those nations who find it useful.
I'm fine using VHS still. VHS doesnt jam up if it has a scratch in it (though it can jam up if you have a badly manufactured tape, but I've run into that like, once.)
dvd's are an alternative IMHO. they're around to try to prevent piracy (yeah, that really worked well)
just my two cents on the situation, I dont see why people here are threatened by this.
Even better! This can even show This!
Because of technical peculiarities, the EVD format will not support the proper R/RW profiles for recordable versions of the media. Under pressure from the Motion Picture Association of America, China has announced that it will only support EVD-W and EVD+W formats.
The difference between R, RW and W is that with R and RW you can Record and ReWrite the disc, respectively. But with an EVD-W disc you can ONLY write to the disc. Once the disc has been written, you can never read from it again.
Copy protection, hell. You can't copy what you can't read!
What's the difference between +R and -R anyway?
I completely agree with G4from128k - on a very good TV system, MPEG-Artifacts make viewing much less satisfying than watching on VHS. It's nothing to do with the resolution or colour depth, just that there are huge, glaring, obvious, ugly blocks of flickering colour appearing all over the place (especially in shadows.) All of the time, regardless of scene. So in, what I would argue is the most important way, watchability, DVD picture quality is worse than VHS. That is of course, providing that you measure quality in terms of how watchable an image is, rather than how hi-resolution it is. Please tell me I'm not the only one's in the world who gets severely annoyed by MPEG-Artifacts and often thumps the table in rage, during the home-viewing of a motion picture at home on ones DVD-Disc.
And some $30/drive.
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The "E" stands for "Evil empire".
and mod down the "this is a bad thing" (with no reason given) trollish crap
Er, sounds good, but you actually don't really know what you're talking about.
A well encoded DVD has very high quality, certainly on par with Betacam SP, the high end analog broadcast production format before digital took over. A well encoded disc won't show significant artifacts.
HDTV resolution goes up to 1920x1080, which is about 6.5x the pixels of DVD (720x480). How high do you want to go? The cheapest displays that can meaningfully do more than 1920 lines wide on a largish screen are awesomely expensive.
Today's displays are crappy? Compared to what? A tapestry? IMAX? We're really at the beginning of a golden age for consumer video technologies. The quality you can buy for $5000 is vastly improved in the last three years, let alone the last 30. Most people don't have eyes good enough to appreciate anything beyond a good 1920x1080.
Lastly, fractals are really the Grassy Knoll of video compression. Yes, Iterated was created to make products on them. No, fractals didn't work. I spent a lot of the mid-late 90's working with Iterated's stuff in different forms. Bitrate scalability was interesting (you could truncate the file at any point, and the more bits you grabbed, the better an image you got). Compression ratios were somewhat better than JPEG. They scaled pretty well. But the net gains were too small to overcome the market share advantages of lowly JPEG.
Iterated simply couldn't make a business around fractal compression. They sold their stuff to AltaMira, who still are selling their fractal compression stuff. Iterated morphed into a company providing image management solutions for the prepress industry. There was still some fractalish stuff underneath, but that wasn't where the value was really added.
The big thing about "fractal" compression is that it wasn't really fractal - its ability to take advantage of self-symmetry was very limited. Heck, even with today's computer power, a "true" fully automatic fractal compressor would take unbelievable amounts of CPU power - many orders of magnitude beyond what realistic video codecs do today. You're basically extending motion search into so many axes.
The only fractal video codec was ClearVideo, which was interesting I suppose, but was roundly stomped by both DCT H.263 derived codecs, and VQ derived codecs like Sorenson Video 1.
Almost everything good about fractals has been inherited by wavelets. And wavelets have also inherited fractal's difficulty in handling motion estimation. That's why DCT and DCT-derived codecs still rule the roost today. Wavelets are great for still image, but no one has come close to devising a really competitive wavelet motion codec.
Maybe someday we'll have a revolution in codecs, but DCT-based codecs like WMV9 and AVC keep on trucking in providing excellent compression efficiency, scalability, and decoder performance.
My video compression blog
No dis on VP3/4/6, but MPEG-2 does HD fine just well. US HD TV broadcasts are all MPEG-2 (1920x1080 or 1280x720). I'm sitting next to two computers encoding HD MPEG-2 RIGHT NOW for a Kiosk application.
While MPEG-2 doesn't have cutting edge compression efficiency anymore, it isn't bad, and decoder chips are dirt cheap. And you can actually play back 1920x1080 60i MPEG-2 on a fast P4.
My video compression blog
China is actually progressing quite nicely towards capitalism. There's tons of privately owned companines. I actually visited factories and busnesses owned by real living people and not the government the last time I was there. Once in a while, I thought they might be too hands off, some of the factories are pretty nasty. Multinationals are doing pretty well too, the the KFCs and McDonalds were always totally packed whenever I paid a visit. Yeah, China still has a ways to go, but at least the standard of living has been steadily improving since (in spite of?) the Great Leap Forward.
I agree, Communism doesn't work. That's why they're moving to good 'ol capitalism.
But IANAE(I am not an economist).
1)Usability.
I could have my laser disk player play either the theater release or directors cut. I just pressed a button on the interface, and off it went.
I could tell it to skip certain scenes.
There were a bunch of options that DVDs were supposed to be able to do, any tme now that never semed to make it.
2)less artifactings. You never say 'pixilation' with a laser disk.
If the DVD compainies used decent compression, and didn't worry about security, this problem would probably go away.
3) No region encoding.
At least with DVDs, we get a few lines we can't see, and a small format.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Eh?
First off, VCD isn't really any better quality wise than VHS. VCD is digital, so you don't get analog errors and wear, but it has only half the temporal and vertical resolution.
VCD didn't fail in the states for any reason other than that it didn't provide any better customer value than VHS. VCD won in Asia since it's a cheaper medium to counterfeit. In general, Asian audiences also seem more willing than US audiences to accept lower quality for lower price for video. Have you looked at many of those audience-shot Hong Kong bootlegs? Awful.
DVD is way better than VHS, and so won in the US.
And the DVD Forum is hard at work on a next generation HD DVD standard, and US companies are part of the Forum.
China might be trying an end run around this format, but the US-Japan-Europe industry axis will have their own format coming.
My video compression blog
Simple strategy: sell it cheaper! Put EVD drives in dirt cheap machines, charge more for DVD drives. Ten euros in a 100 euros machine---now, how big incentive is that for you, when you make less thatn 300 a month? Amazingly, this strategy almost always works! Go figure. And since China manufactures most electronics nowadays and has a market share growing like fungus, how much of the world market could they infulence? A mere 90% 100%?
``L'imagination au povoir.''
Perhaps in the year 2015, Shanghaiese will trek down to USiatown when they need a pirated copy of the latest EVD....
Now consider China, having a different dvd format could be a good way of slowing down pirating from an export/import point of view. We know they are hungry to join the international markets, perhaps this policy is seen as helpful in this respect.
Best laugh I've had all day!!
:-)
Kudos to you, bsDaemon
I am artificially intelligent.
"Problem with the Chinese strategy is that they don't have any content."
It can still succeed because the MPAA and DVD consortium has left a huge hole in the market.
That is, what is a way to record HDTV content in a relatively open format that allows easy copying? Nothing. All the planned formats and technologies have DRM basic to their nature.
EVD can word as the recording medium of choice, and get a foothold everywhere. All you need is the ability to manufacture consumer units, PC units, and drivers for Windows/Mac/Linux so the filesystem can be read by PC's.
All it needs is a big country willing to take the initial hit by buying marketshare.
Seriously, this could work.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I want to be on the record that I submitted this story on Sunday, but for some unkown reason it was rejected. Yeah, ok guys. Why is it suddenly news now? Maybe slashdot should add some mechanism whereby you can find out why your story submission was rejected. Arbitrary.
Sour grapes, me?
100 REM PISS OFF CODE FASCISTS 200 GOTO 100
By the time Return of the Jedi came out, it was the early 80's. No one would put a record player in a car at that point because 8-tracks were common, and cassette was getting common.
So if you wanted to listen to music, there would be *absolutely no reason" to have a "record player" in the car.
Perhaps you meant Laser Disk? But they are not called "record players"
Blu-Ray and EVD on the same dead end road.
America has the world's leading
holographic research going on with Inphase,
Aprilisc, Plasmon, and Colossal Storage.
Holographic Storage will hold thousands of
Blu-Ray & EVD's.
China and others will need to pay royalties
in the End.
they can blame problems on one of 1 billion chins in the phonebook
Yeah, considering its age, MPEG-2 scales remarkably well. And the MIPS per pixel required are a lot lower than more modern codecs. Of course, if bandwidth is at a premium, MPEG-2 isn't a good option. If you want to get a 1080p 2.5 hour movie onto DVD-9 media, Windows Media Video 9 can handle the compression without breaking a sweat, while MPEG-2 wouldn't look that good even with the best encoder. While you might spend more on an ASIC for decoding the WMV9, that could be more than made up for by being able to use conventional media
As in all things, it really depends on what is your limiting factor.
My video compression blog
China is run like Microsoft.
China, a fascist military dicatorship, does not want any external dependencies, and is constantly trying to move everything 'in-house,' while using their massive 'market-share' to bully others into extremely unfair trade agreements.
What is so scary is that China has 1.3 BILLION employees who can't quit, operates under no law other than what it makes for itself, and has the world's largest massive military. In fact, the whole country is run by and for the military.
Don't you see what is happening? They are consolidating their position, just like Japan in the 1940s, getting ready to pounce. God help the world when they do.
"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." - Andrew S. Tanenbaum. Which has been condensed by popular usage into "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from." (So close, Dr. Tanenbaum, yet so far. ;-) )
---
Doing my part to educate future generations
China wants to manufacture DVD players, without having to pay $17 for every one it manufactures. So they invent their own system, EVD, which is similar to DVD but uses completely different file formats, video/audio encoding algorithms, etc, so no-one can complain they're infringing patents. Maybe they also have a capability to interface with a computer, for data transfer. They then get loads of films released in EVD format - this'll mostly be Chinese-language films for the China and Taiwan markets. (There might be films for other Asian markets: Japan, Korea, India, etc). Maybe there will be some USA or European films as well.
The main people buying EVD players will be in Asia, and diaspora Asian communities in Europe and the USA. The DVD manufacturers can't complain, since it isn't infringing their IP. Nor can Holywood. Then, as if from nowhere, REOM images appear on the Internet that when downloaded and put into an EVD player, make it able to play DVDs. Of course, the EVD manufacturers make public noises about how naughty it is to download these ROM images, and illegally play DVDs...
I've no idea how accurate this scenario is, it's just a guess.
because we have very large penis and theirs is so so small.
China's domestic A/V markets is estimated to be US$20 billions this year but, in reality, it's only $2 billions due to the pirating. Fighting pirating is difficult in China while pirated CD sales are providing the mean to feed large group of people in a country with 250M unemployed.
Realizing cracking down the pirating is not possible in short term, the large medias companies such as Disney has been pricing their products closed to the pirated copies. A legit Disney DVD costs about $3 while the pirated costs about $1.
Waving out the royalty fee for DVD would help the media companies to close the cost gap between legit copies and pirated copies.
Moreover, Chinese manufecture about 50% or more of DVD players for export. They haven't complaining about paying royalty on that but they want EVD to be used domestically to avoid paying DVD royalty for domestic market.
Posted by icup
In a move to fight anything promoted by the West, China has revealed plans to create it's own air.
"Western air is just too... western" says Director of Foreign Affairs Kim Woo. "Chinese air should have a more traditional feeling to it."
Kim Woo continues "China has more people any any other country, we can do whatever we want without taking orders from Western influence, including making Chinese air."
"I like the idea," said one Chinese citizen, "I live in China, so I should breath Chinese air, right?"
Although no details have been revealed about the distribution system of the new Chinese air, inside sources say it will be bottled like water and priced at roughly $1 USD per quart. Bottling is likely to take place in the US.
Plans are also in the works for Chinese water.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Most dvd players themselves are made in china.
I bet that my new DVD player in a couple of years time will be capable of playing these disks and that they will become commonplace...
SCIREV.NET - fanfics,reviews & more
'r'-'l' substitution happens with Japanese speakers, not Chinese speakers, silly.
Vaya con huevos, my darling.
Maybe they wanna promote WindowsMediaPlayer Comatose!
cause I am going to Thailand soon and want to stock up on cheaper DVDs. $0.50 per dvd there. Yes. I am going to get 200. wicked. plus PS2 games and cds. long live piracy!!!!
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
Screw EVD's. Why don't they just call 'em BVD's and be done with it? No one will want their new Beta Video Discs...
/. How many of you guys refuse to give up your Beta VCR's?
Oh, wait, this is
If they aren't, it could actually doom the project. DVD recorders are expected to drop below $300 next year. If the pace continues, we might even see sub-$200 DVD recorders.
With DVD recordable getting so cheap, doesn't another format incompatible with recordable DVD and without its own recording capability sound like a lost cause?
Way to go People's Republic of China! Even after revisionism and "market socialism", this reaffirms China's commitment of distancing itself from finance capital. I believe that China's "market experiment" (market socialism, China is NOT a capitalist state entirely) is merely an efficient way to build up industry to a level where a planned economy would be more efficient. China's diverse population, the majority of whom are still peasants, makes a rigid planned economy hard to implement.
Allow me to change that sentence to "Avoiding paying royaties to the developed countries is a major component of any sensible comercial or industrial policy in a developing country".
When I wrote it I was thinking more about software, hardware and pharmacological drugs in general than about DVD specifically.
If you imagine all a country like China does with its money is more weapons you are being very simplistic. They make weapons, allright, because they will never accept Iraq's fate in the hands of the West (not that I liked Saddam in any way, mind you, but I don't blame China for doing what they can to defend themselves). But China is a very large and poor country, with a population who needs a thousand of things you take for granted in the US - simple things like sewage, electricity and transportation are not yet available everywhere in China.
it was called a zip-drive \:
isn't this doomed to go out like betamax?
Wont the rest of the west object?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
The people who make xvid doesn't even have enough confidence in their software to offer it for download(as binaries)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
The EU doesn't care about fair competition (or they would have dismissed the region coding of DVD's)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Why am I against it? Easy, it is all just a huge money scam. Developers say "Hey, lets create this new technology, call it 'cutting edge' and have three million tech heads buy it up within a few weeks....what could go wrong?" I think the new "EVD" idea is crazy. They are simply taking the same technology used for DVD's and plugging a small toy for people to use in with it. All that I forsee happening is, users all across the world are now getting over the region lock outs on DVDs, now they are going to have to go out and get a new player to support a new idea, not even in widespread use. I think that is crazy!
That's a good way to make sure your effords will never be popular and forever be used by a nerdish minority.
(Note to you: That you and your 2 friends like it, is not popular)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Please tell me I'm not the only one's in the world who gets severely annoyed by MPEG-Artifacts
We all do, but it's important to realize it's not usually MPEG's fault, it's the studio's.
They crank up the compression ratio so they can put out single-layer single-sided discs with a full movie on it. Why? It's cheaper.
You can run MPEG-2 so that it's nearly indiscernable from laserdisc, but aside from the Criterion Collection, good luck.
I was watching Miss Lucy's Pecans episode the other night, and they had a spot on how pecans are harvested. Well, a special tractor grabs the tree trunk and shakes the pecans off. The video of the pecan tree, with thousands of tiny leaves shaking broke up into a blob of MPEG artifacts each time they shook the tree. But that's because Dish Network probably allocates its lowest bitrate to RFDTV. They can probably fit 4x as many channels on a transponder at a low bitrate than they can at a full bitrate, and most of the time it's not important. I guess VBR is too hard to do on satellite.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I completely agree with what Bill says. And this has great cultural implications, because once again we watch the corporations reduce the quality of our culture, which they stole from us many years ago and are now selling back to us, with more and more contempt for us. It's a chilling thought that in less that one-hundred years, we have allowed corporations to almost entirely dictate our culture. Just look around you. And, as when you get a monopoly with any product, it's bad for the market. In this case, it means that our culture is being sapped of any relevance to our every-day lives - instead it merely reflects the what corporations *thing* we're going through. How can we change this?
I don't know what the licensing fees are for a DVD player, I would guess only a dollar or two, but I would like to comment about the $40 DVD player. That $40 does not need to cover manufacturing, shipping, and floor space. You may be surprised at the number of items sold at a loss by the larger stores.
I used to run a Hi Fi store; it was pretty depressing to see how little mark up is available on the most popular items. Yes, right in the wholesale catalog, in black and white, some of the lower cost items actually cost me more than the suggested selling price! Note that you will not find the $40 DVD player at a mom and pop shop - they can't afford to sell them. Circuit City makes more on the fancy cable they talked you into buying than they do on the DVD player you will plug it into. I don't fully understand it either (I closed my store after finding most people only wanted installation for what they bought at Best Buy and Circuit City), but I can assure you the "loss leader" market is alive and well.