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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."
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.
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.
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