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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
Oh well, I'll just have to do without all those great movies made in China.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
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.
"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)
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?
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.
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
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
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.
Yeah, the domestic Chinese market is only 1/4 the world market, or 4 times larger than the American domestic market.
How on earth do they expect this to fly with a highly patriotic and semi captive market of only a billion or so people?
It's madness.
And certainly no one here on Slashdot would feel inclined to adopt the standard if the Chinese choose to make it competitive by releasing it as an open standard ala the CD.
We just love attempts to "DVDize" the Compact Disc.
What would be wrong about taking the format out of the hands of the MPAA and DVD Consortium? Just the fact that it comes from China?
Like the compass, silk, lacquer, gunpowder and noodles?
A good idea is a good idea. I think an open video format is a good idea. If that's what the Chinese are up to I'll go at least one round of The East is Red with them.
KFG
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.
real project name PDVD -- People's Democratic Video Disk
*duck*
Absolutely, in fact this is almost certainly the plan these manufacturers have in mind.
The pirates are always happy to pursue any moneymaking opportunity they can find; within a few months of their introduction, pirated DVD's were already almost as widely available as VCD's, and no doubt once people start buying EVD players the same thing will happen.
Then, once people have EVD players and widely available disks, legitimate movie companies will have no choice but to adopt EVD; otherwise, they'll have a base of millions and millions of consumers who have no choice but to buy pirated EVD's. And considering the pragmatic-to-a-fault attitude of the Chinese courts and legislators towards such matters, I suspect that they'll give the studios a hard time about cracking down on pirated EVD's until legitimate alternatives are available. Yes, since they're not well-protected those EVD's can then be easily pirated as well, but since that's already true about DVD's it hardly makes a difference at this point (and will probably translate to further cost savings since there's less sophisticated decoding hardware required, perhaps even allowing them to use older and cheaper processes for chip fabrication etc).
So this could be a real coup for the Chinese - single-handedly force the studios to adopt a poorly-secured, proprietary video format just to stay in the market.
Don't look for these to show up in the US, though; DVD players are already way too common, so they'll never show up officially, and considering eBay's sheer and utter spinelessness towards MPAA legal threats it's doubtful we'll see them show up there either.
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
"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."
your CFO is an idioty and doesn't understand China's policy at long term stratagy. pretty scary for a CFO.
Why should China play with 'the Big boys'?
'The Big Boys' are pissing off a lot of the people that buy there goods. If china comes up with a format that DVD manufatures can play, and is cheaper to press, and it gives consumers what they want, then they will win.
Keep in mind, China has longterm goals in mind, while 'The Big Boys' are having a problem seeing past the next quarter.
'The Big Boys' had better start thinking long term, put money into things that are required for a good foundation for there respective countries, and stop pissing people off. Otherwise they will loose.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.