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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.
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.
Because they 1) Dont want to pay royalties 2) Want more pie from this market 3) Because they can Since it's goverment funded, quite simple would be to raise custom fees for imported DVD, and force foreign companies to produce movies in new format for new market. Then companies will try to sale same EVD disks in other markets, just to cut some expenses, and we will get another pain in ass trying to make a rip from new media :)
China licensed VP5 and VP6 for use in the EVD standard, at least according to On2 themselves. However, Ogg Theora is based on VP3 but is not perfectly compatible.
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.
Billy Joel's "Songs in the Attic" was the first album ever released on CD, way back in 1981. One could argue that CD's didn't really catch on until 10 years later.
DVD's were supposed to flood the market for Christmas 1996, but didn't quite make it in time. That's right, kids, 1996. The titles were originally released in Japan: Blade Runner, The Assassin, The Fugitive, and Eraser. (yechhh) Then the first ones in the US were on March 19, 1997, and were IMAX remakes. Batman and Space Jam came next.
Seven years ago. I think it's fair to say DVDs have taken a strong hold in a pretty short period of time.
"Diplomacy is something you do until you find a rock." --Richard Pound
I would imagine tapes went quicker; there were very few cars manufactured eight track players, and probably none with LP's.
Actually...
Seems like a disaster in the making to me, but people gotta have their tunes!
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
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
Have you ever actually done that? VHS cassettes consist of a few big pieces of plastic that snap together. Drop that on concrete and there is a good chance it'll break apart. Drop a small, light piece of plastic, nothing happens. Maybe a few scratches, but so long as you don't throw it on the concrete there won't be any major damage.
Mandarin can distinguish between L and R. Cantonese is similar to Japanese in that it doesn't distinguish between the two - actually it's more like it just doesn't have 'r' - go to a Cantonese-English dictionary, you'll see that when they list the words romanised in alphabetical order, there are no words listed as starting with 'r'. Go look in a Mandarin-English dictionary and you'll see plenty of words starting with 'r' and 'l'. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that Cantonese is the Chinese language that most closely resembles late Tang dynasty Chinese, which is also when some of the heaviest language importation from China to Japan occurred. Mandarin developed later, I think around the time the Mongolians ruled China. Southern Chinese languages tend to be older in general than Northern Chinese languages. Everytime there's a barbarian invasion, everyone flees south :)
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
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
Yep, nobody really cares about the previous Chinese-government backed video formats VCD and SVCD, do they?
Worse, the light would hit the media at an angle. The reflected beam from the surface would then bounce off at an equal angle (pointed away from the source). In order to pick up the reflected beam you would then have to do a 2D raster scan with the detector. Unless you are prepared to do that scan over an area twice as wide as the actual CS, the detector has to be closer to the surface than the source is. This can be worked out but you will lose some storage area in the middle of the surface due to the need to avoid having the detector block the beam from the source.
It's a lot simpler to mount the source and detector together such that the beams are perpendicular to the surface and the surface spins underneath. The technology for this is well established and mature so there is no need to reinvent the wheel.
I'm not sure what you mean by saying "it's a Taiwanese movie". It was shot mostly in China, the director, Ang Lee was born in Taiwan but he's been around the world pretty much, the Wu Xia genre is equally popular in Taiwan and China, James Schamus is from California, Michelle Yeoh is Malaysian, Chow Yun Fat is from Hong Kong, Ziyi Zhang was born in Beijing, Chen Chang was indeed born in Taiwan but if you look at his filmogrpahy you'll notice it's pretty international too. So there.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
...CD's were around since (I think) the late 1970's
According to Encyclopedia Britannica: "... Coinvented by Philips Electronics N.V. and Sony Corporation in 1980,Hero is a great movie. I didn't understand the movie until my Asian fiancee explained it to me. Here is a page:
:)
http://www.hero-movie.jp
(probably not official page, I think it was made in HK -- but you get the idea).
I really liked it after my fiancee explained it.