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China To Develop Its Own DVD Format
An anonymous reader wrote to mention an MSNBC story covering a move by the Chinese entertainment industry to create their own DVD standard, the second such announcement in two years. From the article: "If successful, the move could add a new wrinkle to the battle between HD DVD and the competing Blu-ray Disc formats over which will become the dominant new DVD standard. The official Xinhua News Agency said the new standard will be based on but incompatible with HD DVD, which is being promoted by Toshiba Corp. and Universal Studios, as well as Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp., the leading suppliers of chips and software for most of the world's personal computers."
"based on but incompatible with HD DVD"
I'm wondering how they're going to avoid the patents involved (after all, their stated reason for doing this is to avoid the licensing fees).
That it is HD-DVD but without DRM. I fully support this effort!
Is because they put it in their Xbox360s. MS couldn't license or didn't want to pay to license the Sony Blue-Ray, so they had to go with HD-DVD to give more room for the programmers to give game content. If Blue-Ray becomes the standard, then the Xboxes that are coming out will only be game consoles, not home entertainment pieces. They would be forced out of the living room since DVDs would be Blue-Ray only, and wouldn't play though their Xbox consoles. This is why HD-DVD is so important to them, not because its better format.
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China is the only country to make decent DVD players. Their players don't force you to watch commercials, they don't force macrovision on you, and they don't enforce region coding.
Please sir may I have some more? I am really getting sick of these format wars every couple of years. What really needs to happen is for nobody to get any money out of these format incriments. No royalties, no advertising money, nothing. THEN maybe they can all agree on a single low cost high compression format that can be universally accepted.
This would work because everyone would sell more, movies, games, data discs, whatever. I'm tired of big electronics bickering amongst themselves, and the only ones being left out are the consumers. I say let the cream rise to the top and pick that format. When money concerns get involved with engineering concerns is when things get futzzed up.
I couldn't fail to disagree with you any less.
My first thought when i read this is "Great Firewall".
Picture this:
1) China develops its incompatible format and patents it.
2) They won't provide licenses to anyone they don't want to.
3) They forbid the use of the DVD standard, so people won't be able to buy or copy DVD's.
4) They copy the DVD's and release them (censored of course) in their own format.
5) ???
6) Total Control!
Or maybe I'm too paranoid? Perhaps they only want economical gains from this, so 6) Profit!!
I really don't know.
As in, the Chinese mfgs will be expected to pay some kind of licensing/royalty fee for the other formats and not for the PRC-developed one.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
How long before manufactures just make players and writers detect and support all formats?
I first thought this was about EVD, and an ancient dupe, but after RTFA, it sounds like this is YET another one?? They aren't even done with the EVD's...
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
To move away from the high tech answers you're already getting I bought a student violin this year, made in China, two hundred bucks. Violin, bow and case. I wanted something I could bang around, take camping or to the beach and not worry about overmuch. Should be junk, right?
It is a better made, and with a little tweaking has turned out to be a better instrument, than my vintage and antique European and American instruments of considerably higher "value." As it plays in it just keeps getting better and better. I'm so impressed I'm planning to add a cello of the same model to my collection.
At a gig a friend asked if he could try it. When he picked it up and started to play his first comment was, "Niiiiiiiice bow!"
Perhaps you have to be a violin player to understand the ramifications of that comment.
It was not too long ago, in historical terms, that China and Japan were known as the source of the finest handmade items in the world. Europeans didn't risk their necks and their investments going all the way to China for junk. Made in China was not merely a mark of something being exotic, but a mark of quality absolutely unobtainable from anywhere else. Quality that you could see and feel.
Japan spent about a century getting beat up. They got over it. China spent about two centuries getting beat up, and beat up rather worse. They're finally starting to get over it.
It's a biiiiiiiiig frickin' dragon that's awakening; and it wants its reputation back.
KFG
It would, of course, be gauche to say "ME TOO!".
This begins to complete a package for the Great Wall: get the offshore search engines to "private label" Internet search, so no nasty ProtestorTankPic.jpg can be found, so that Chinese bloggers/reporters can be turned in, and hardware-based media (DVD) can be private labeled for "safe" domestic distribution in China.
Look: its bad enough that the Wal*Marts have changed the content of CDs and what's on their magazine racks. This is a nation state, a growing and strong nation state, that is not exactly fighting the good fight.
So the above poster's onto a theme there: it's not about copyright or piracy, it's a control game. They may be fighting against entropy and innovation, but it is still a control of information game.
Ok. Time for decaf.
Verizon: Latin for "poor rural service".
Funny you mention that actually. I ordered an iPod Nano just a few weeks ago. When apple sent me the tracking number, I looked it up. It was shipped directly from China. I have to agree that quality is just what you want it.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
at least as far as I understand it. RTFA and it mentions the liscensing fees.
Current DVD players (most made in China) need to buy the "rights" to decode/play the region specific DVD encodings. This liscensing cost makes up somewhere between 40%-50% (TFA says 40%) of the entire production cost per player.
With their own format, production costs drop by nearly 50%... units can be sold for less while making a larger profit... consumers buy more... company makes tons more money. (assuming that consumers do buy into the new format.)
I don't see how this is a bad thing, really. Sure, it might be a new format that noone can currently play at home, but that's the same thing with HD DVD and BlueRay. Also, DVDs are region encoded so that you can't always (easily) play them all as is (without hacking the player.)
It looks like the Chinese format won't be encumbered by DRM crap, but is geared towards anti-piracy. (not the same thing, right?)
My computer was built here by me, teh parts are quite varied. Processor is from Ireland, motherboard from Taiwan of US parts, memory is Germany, disks Malaysia, monitor Japan. My mixer and amp are from the US, speakers Great Britan. My TV is a Japanese maker (Toshiba), but made in the US by dBx. That's probably the extent of the electronics I'd call high-quality. I do have a number of things made in China, but none of it rates up there on my quality scale.
I personally don't check country of origin for determining quality, however it seems when I've found a part I consider to be quality, it usually isn't Chinese in origin.
Nice racist touch there. Funny thing is, people used to say that about Japanese goods a few decades ago (not to mention Taiwan and Korea). Now look at who makes high-end electronics.
Hmm, I dunno. Seriously, people have been predicting the domination of China for literally a thousand years. They certainly *could* do it, but they are a very insulated culture.
As you say, Japan certainly did, but of course that took destroying their national psyche and rebuilding it in Western terms. And even so, they still don't have much of an entrepreneurial culture compared to the US (which is our great strength). I can't see China having any sort of entrepreurism any time soon.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
At first glance, this strikes the average person as being another bizarre action of their evil autocratic censoring and repressing government, not to mention it can appear to be gesture to the world that China is not starving to get a better foothold in the global economy. But those people will get over it and it will ultimately help themselves and I would not be surprised if they continue to make extreme decisions similar to this.
On this subject, what I don't get is why the FCC is giving cable companies an ultimatum to phase in high def in broadcast signals.
Yes... Because we all know that the chinese all buy there DVDs from Amazon. Do you really think that the ones making copies right now won't be able to backup a DVD to the chinese format ?
It's not about control, it's about royalties.
Few Westerners know the difference, sadly.
One of the guys I see often at my climbing gym is from Taiwan. A few days ago, he came in with a T-shirt that had the Red Bull logo on it, and a bunch of stuff in Thai. So, I asked him if he picked up his Thai Red Bull shirt here, and he was stunned that I even recognized the language.
Apparently, a few people had asked him if it was Italian. Some thought French. One guy asked if it was German.
Goes to show how little some people know.
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I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
And as for management and know-how? I've been living in China for 2 years doing business here. The Chinese don't know their ass from their elbow. Good engineers, but they don't know how to run a business unless someone wrote the procedure in a manual. They also have a very well-deserved reputation for double dealing and outright fraud. My company was burned by defective products twice, and that's why I'm here, to keep an eye on things. I check everything. I have a friend who spends his days inspecting every single piece of furniture that goes out of his company's factory. If we didn't do this, we'd get burned. The Chinese will happily take your money and screw you.
And as far as the Japanese economy after WWII, they did produce crap. It took them decades to make quality goods for export. Maybe if you knocked off the knee-jerk slurs against Americans and either did some exporting or read some history, you wouldn't sound so ignorant in front of such a wide audience.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!