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China to Promote Own Alternative to DVDs, EVD

Posted by michael on from the play-it-again-chang dept.

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.

21 of 410 comments (clear)

  1. Not good enough by r_glen · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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'.

    1. Re:Not good enough by SuuSt · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Wuh?!

      "It took forever for people to fully embrace DVDs"

      Were you not born until CD's had already replaced casset tapes? The DVD format was the most quickly adopted new media format ever. CD's were around since (I think) the late 1970's, relatively easy to get a hold of by the early-mid 80's, but not really fully adopted until the early 90's. That's around 15 years from invention to full adoption. It took DVD's something like 4 years to do that.

      Then of course there were the superior formats that were never adopted (read: laserdisks).

      Anybody old enough to know how long it took tapes to become common over LP's or eight tracks?

    2. Re:Not good enough by fishbonez · · Score: 4, Interesting
      The market in China is mostly VCDs with pirated DVDs being mostly for tourists and the high-end local consumers. It seems like they are positioning the EVD as a local alternative to DVDs. It'll probably replace VCDs as the local format of choice.

      I suspect the EVD might actually be endorsed by the big US media companies. If the country responsible for a lot of piracy uses a peculiar local format, it essentially makes those discs region encoded. Of course the manufacturers in the US and Europe would also have to agree not to support the format for it to be effective at stemming piracy.

      --
      Frylock: That's not a toy!
      Master Shake: You say that about everything you own. You should own toys. They're fun.
    3. Re:Not good enough by The+Munger · · Score: 1, Interesting

      It took forever for people to fully embrace DVDs, even with all the benefits over VHS.

      I was a reasonably early adopter of DVDs. But it was more for the toy factor. What are these benefits over VHS?
      1. Higher resolution video
      2. Higher resolution, multi-channel sound
      3. Extras

      You know what I think? That's not a huge list. How's this for a list:
      1. I have to pay for all of my old stuff again. Not so bad - it's a new format, someone has to be paid for the conversion
      2. They're fragile. You can drop a VHS cassette onto concrete - don't try this with your DVDs
      3. They still degrade. Not in the same way as VHS, but some of these manufacturers are putting out discs so cheap they're not even lasting as long as VHS
      4. They don't actually hold that much. What's the longest thing you've seen on a single DVD? For any reasonable quality, you only seem to get about 4-5 (maybe 6) hours.
      5. They're not recordable. Yeah, yeah I know - not technically true, but how many people actually have a DVD recorder in front of the TV? It's going to be 10-15 years after the standard has been in place before recording will be an everyday thing.
      6. Layer skips. For anyone else who has digital TV, don't you find you notice it more when there is a sudden little pop of sound than a constant hum? I find the same goes for video and audio. It doesn't annoy me that much, but hell, I'm having a rant :-)

      What do you think? I want more storage, that'll last until the next big thing and presented perfectly. Oh well, I might go some more DVDs.

      --
      Refuse to make a statement in your sig!
    4. Re:Not good enough by F34nor · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It's analouge so you have a wave rather than a bit stream i.e. warmer sound, better seperation, and etc.

      It think the original poster meant better than VHS.

      p.s. Betamax lost becasue Sony wouldn't license the format to Porn. Sounds like the same argument from the Chinese...

    5. Re:Not good enough by Neop2Lemus · · Score: 2, Interesting
      When I was a kid we had friends who had a record player in thier car. They were rich (read doctor).

      I remember it because whenever we'd go on class trips I'd make sure I was in their car. We listened to Star Wars and Return of the Jedi. I still remeber holding the 33 1/3 sleeves in the car.

      --
      Needle Nardle Noo
    6. Re:Not good enough by Simonetta · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Thank you for taking the time to list the good and bad points about DVDs.

      I got a DVD-ROM for my PC about ten months ago and have been getting DVD disks exclusively from the public library since then.

      Here's what I like about DVDs:

      -clear sharp image on PC monitor.
      -ability to copy the movie to hard disk so that I can watch it for 15 or 20 minutes at a time over several days or weeks after returning the DVD to the library.
      -ability to get the text dialog as subtitles from the movie into a text file.
      -ability to play the movie back in French or Spanish, which is great for language learning. In the same area, the ability to view the film in French or Spanish with French or Spanish subtitles would be fantastic for language learning if the foreign language dialog actually matched the subtitles. But it rarely does because usually the movie is translated twice for each language; once by the subtitle writer and again by the voice-over crew.
      -Being able to save the movie in DivX format and giving a copy to a friend on a 20 cent CD.
      -Skipping the endless corporate logos and previews after copying the movie to the hard disk.
      -Fast forwarding 16x or 32x the dull and dumb parts.
      -capturing a screen snapshot as a JPG file image.

      The things that are touted as DVD advantages, such as director's commentary and outtakes, seem to be of little importance.

      Outside of films, the ability to put 4.7 gigabytes on a single $1 disk is certainly going to catch on soon. I once sent an e-mail to the local classic-Rock FM station manager saying that every song that they've played for the past thirty years would fit on a single DVD if all the songs were stored in MP3 format. She actually wrote back with lots of numbers showing that I wasn't correct. But actually I was just trying to say that they should start playing different music instead of the same one cut for every album from that time period.

      Also, I have stopped going to movie theatres since getting a DVD-ROM. The idea of paying $9 to see the same-old-stuff redone over and over (another buddy cop movie anyone?) has just done lost its appeal.

      DVDs are going to paint Hollywood in a corner because their average budget per film is going up much faster than the actual number of people who go to movies. The movies are getting more expensive every year and are being focused on a younger demographic every year. Within about five years, Hollywood will find itself with a whole season of $200 million movies that bring in $100 million each in box-office and $50 million in rentals.

      Hollywood in 2003 is in the same place that the dot-com industry was in 1998. Completely convinced of the inevitability of its continued growth to the point where they believe that they have finally created an industry that transcends basic economic cycles.

      Stay tuned...

    7. Re:Not good enough by WoTG · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'd also toss in the technological differences between the time CD's were launched to the time DVD's were launched. CD's were the first shiny little 5 inch disks to be produced. A whole lot of technology and factories had to be developed to bring the prices down. In contrast, DVD's piggy backed off of a lot of the previous work. It's the same physical size, and the same general stamping technology. At the player end of things, most of the mechanics and a chunk of the firmware is the same.

      Another factor is the use of DVD's in PCs. This second market didn't exist when CD's were first launched. The extra volume helped the price of players come down quickly. Lastly, manufacturing itself is different today, i.e. globalized production and trade.

      All of this led to cheaper players quicker. Which then leads to faster adoption.

      FWIW, DVD's have tradeoffs too, a big one. They don't record! (usually) I suspect that non-recordability is a bigger deal with video than audio, at least it is to me. Oh, and somehow the porn industry is probably a factor... it usually is, when the technology involves video.

  2. Licensing and market share by Eberlin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "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)

  3. Ogg Theora! by steveha · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  4. Solid state? by SharpFang · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    --
    45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
    1. Re:Solid state? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Consider the changing angle from the center of the disk (or rectangle) to the outside. Consider that you need two axes of motion rather than one.

      Moving the media past a stationary sensor may well be easier than remote sensing under varying conditions, or moving the sensor. Hard drives still do it that way, after all. And if you're spinning something, it might as well be round; otherwise, you're just throwing away otherwise accessible storage area.

  5. Re:ugh by Strudelkugel · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Maybe I'm wearing a tin-foil hat, but I sure don't believe China wants open formats. They would rather dominate the market so that they can get all of the royalty fees from other nation's vendors.

    Problem with the Chinese strategy is that they don't have any content. All the major content providers won't release their content in the China-Uber-Alles format if they can't control it. Seems to me China has to depend on indie films to carry this ball, but unlike OSS, it takes more than a few pizzas and caffeine to make a flick, unless the PRC is about to flood the world with Communist pr0n...

    --
    Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
  6. Bravo by bigberk · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  7. EVD sounds superior by zymano · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:EVD sounds superior by Grishnakh · · Score: 2, Interesting

      This sounds like it might end up causing yet another technology rift between the US and Asia, with Asia having better stuff.

      Back in the days before DVD, all we had here in the "advanced" US was VHS. Terrible resolution (much worse than even NTSC is capable of displaying), tape instead of disc, etc. Asia, OTOH, had the VCD, and later the SCVD. But Hollywood didn't like VCD so it never happened here.

      Now, if my prediction is right, we Americans will be stuck with crappy DVD, with region coding, commercials you can't skip, resolution only a little better than NTSC, and patent fees, while Asia will have a format that has HDTV resolution, no region coding, no non-skippable commercials and FBI warnings, and a lower price tag. Since Hollywood won't release movies in it, we won't have it here. Again, we'll be the ones in a the tech backwater.

  8. bah by ShadowRage · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  9. Re:Predicting 0% marketshare for EVD by SharpFang · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Time for you to find education - as opposed to propaganda.

    I'm from "former eastern block" so I know how things are being managed in such places.

    Those who refuse get a bullet in the head.

    For refusing to get EVD? Are you really SO stupid that you believe that?

    Things are very simple. People aren't -forced-. Things just get arranged in such a way, that if they want otherwise, it just doesn't pay - by far.
    In communist countries, big monetary transactions are relatively scarce. You buy food, maybe clothes, maybe some small home equipment. People earn little, but these cost little too. No problem. But if you want luxury goods, they usually cost more than in the west. People just almost never can afford them. But there IS a "window" for them - special government coupons that allow you to purchase a luxury item from limited pool, for very decent price. You get those by communist means: "Everyone gets one", "Those who deserve get one" or by a bribe or friendship or such. The caveat is, the items are of exact specification. So an university may purchase in "internal export network" a CD drive for $50 or use a coupon for EVD for $10. A worker at a factory instead of getting a lousy $50 bonus for really superb job over several years, may get a coupon to buy a brand new, quite decent PC (conforming to government specs, from the pool) that will cost $80. Want to get DVD instead of the EVD inside? Pay $100 from your savings and enjoy! The system works quite well in promoting what the government wants. Of course, you have to be very lucky, or hard working... or have good contacts, to get such a coupon!

    --
    45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
  10. Re:On avoiding paying American royalties fees by Goldsmith · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Oddly enough, you forgot to mention Japanese liscensing fees. It just so happens that it is to Japanese companies that one must pay DVD liscensing to, not American nor European.

  11. Re:China-- (OT) by goat_attack · · Score: 1, Interesting
    I probably shouldn't feed the troll but...

    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).

  12. Re:ugh by jandersen · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "Maybe I'm wearing a tin-foil hat, but I sure don't believe China wants open formats. They would rather dominate the market so that they can get all of the royalty fees from other nation's vendors."

    Yes, you're wearing a tinfoil hat. But as we say - a thief believes every man steals. Being American, you are used to the fact that American companies and the American government want to dominate the world and rake in all the wealth they can get - that what capitalism is all about.

    As for Chinese films - I have seen them, have you? Even the most terrible Chinese B-film (or perhaps that would be 'xia' rather than 'B') isn't worse than the corresponding American type of film.

    China has produced some breathtakingly beautiful films, and the good news for us in The West is that we haven't seen it all before. Different culture, you see.