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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."
Because an hour later, they'll have a new one.
Not to sound jingoistic by any means, but 'made in China' and 'quality product' rarely appear in the same paragraph (with the exception of this one...)
WHY? What's wrong with uniform standards for the whole world? Why can't I just buy stuff from where I want to buy it?
"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).
its called VCD :P
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
That it is HD-DVD but without DRM. I fully support this effort!
Then where will Americans get their $2 bootleg DVDs?
Good luck getting anyone to care. If it were Japan with Sony's backing, then ok.
But China....um, no.
*flips over a DVD (from the future)* "Made in China"
Unlikely
HIGHLY Unlikely
The Chinese government will certainly benefit from this. If the hardware sold in China is no longer capable of playing foreign discs, then the Chinese government will have absolute control of what can be viewed by most of the Chinese people.
If the Chinese government doesn't like a political documentary, they can simply refuse to release it domestically. The Great Firewall will prevent you from downloading a copy, and smuggling a foreign copy in will no longer be an option. You won't be able to play it, after all.
Do you like German cars?
Do they really need a new format just to support Engrish subtitles?
It's only a model.
... the rest of the world probably doesn't care. While China may be on the same physical planet as the rest of us, they arent playing on the same logical field. In terms of copywrite and intellectual property, we are completely seperate worlds, and I doubt either really cares about the other.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
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.
Now we can:
* Bootleg Chinese DVDs to sell on every market corner in the US
* Make a US region and sell unlocked US-made DVD players in China
* Terribly mispell Chinese words in our manual
* Make badly lip-synced English voice overs on the DVDs
* Open Caucasian-run DVD stores in China with thousands of bootlegs, and canned American food
3. ???
4. Profit!!!
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.
hmmm, is it some kinda company?! like Sony or Toshiba or even Cuba?
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
""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. "
If successful, the could also heavily regulate what their populace is allowed to view given their complete control over this specialized format that nobody else will ever use. Yeah, color me a tad paranoid, but I nearly always assume that the Chinese government has ulterior motive beyond the headlines. Of course, they could be doing it for pure profit and control of an industry standard, but lets face it, they're starting a bit late in the game and offering little in the way of innovation to actually have any sort of leverage. But saying 'yay' or 'nay' as to which movies (and ideas) get pressed for their populace to view? Yeah, I can see that.
That's not to say I think it'll work in either senario. The standards are too entrenched either way and their competition already has a head start and mass marketing experience.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
They probably don't want to pay technology license fees to the west. I don't blame them.
Now, in America, it's the Chinese who are seen to be a bungling satellite economy dependent upon American management and good old American know how. And how did that turn out last time around with the japanese?
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
electronics factory in china, employed in the production of THOUSANDS of DVD players for export to the US, suddenly grows incredibly profitable, while at the same time recording a much higher than thought possible component/device failure rate in production....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Beijing (AP) - In a move that has surprised the world, China has announched today that its new DVD format will be 100% Freedom-Free. "We want to make sure terrorists cannot attack the pride of the People's Republic of China," said President Hu Jintao. "China will not be hindered by other formats that could possibly include Freedom protocols," he concluded.
"We were just trying to stop those damned file sharers," said Mitch Bainwol, Chairman and CEO of the RIAA. "This time, China has gone too far. They can't expect to attack freedom and get away with it. Besides, how are we supposed to be the bad guys when China shows us up with this? We have an image to maintain."
Following the announcement, the RIAA is expected to respond later today with a Data-Free DVD format. "You can't steal what you can't see," said Bainwol.
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!
DUPE!
Yeah, go slashdot... =p
decide that they should be in charge of DVD formats? :)
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.
...they gain amazing market leverage. They aren't cutting themselves off, they are guaranteeing profits and not even have to even think about exporting cash. Explanation: they have the industrial capacity to still EXPORT any and all formats,in any quantity, anywhere, to anyone, so they don't care about "formats" except it's a market. But, who will want to try and make a chinese standard disk and try to import it INTO china and expect to make a profit? Answer, no one. See, they cover their humongous domestic market, plus the rest of the planet. Win/Win for them, and guaranted to most always keep their rapidly expanding internal markets domesticaly driven. Yes, they import, and they mostly import machine tools to go ahead and setup more factories to build stuff, when it comes to durable goods, that or prototypes they can either license legally and clone or just heck with it, clone anyway. It's only taken them 25 or so years to go from a marginal player with a huge population to the worlds leading manufacturing nation, and all the indicators say this will continue until they are also the highest GDP.
They are long term strategic thinkers, they don't fool much with this quarters profit mentality. That's why they are out there signing 20 year energy deals or outright buying up the sources, along with strategic minerals.
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!
If they had support for high definition without copy protection, this should hopefully become the worldwide standard.