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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."
its called VCD :P
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
Are you kidding man? You can't compare it with high-end uber-users stuff, but the 'quality' is up to the level that majority of the world uses it. Check out which piece of electronic in your home is not made in China.
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!!!
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.
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...)
Having friends with factories in China, I can tell you that quality can be adjusted any way you want.
You want cheap products, they can make it cheap, they skimp on QA to save dollars. However, if you want them to produce high quality goods, they can do that too, just add some extra $$$ to the bottom line and they can make it to whatever quality standard you want.
It's all about how much you want to spend.
Live forever, or die trying.
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
I honestly don't understand what China thinks it will accomplish. You don't become an economic juggernaut by taking steps to cut yourself off from the rest of the world. If China wants the economic benefits of creating standards rather than just using them, they need to create a standard that the rest of the world will adopt. That way *they* can control the standard and ensure its success.
Instead they're merely making an incompatible version of someone else's standard. Something which they have no real economic power to force. They can force it politically, but that would simply piss off "The People of China" that much more when they can't import any foreign entertainment. (Certainly, a big import/export for any first world country.)
The only thing I can say is that it's probably again about control. They aren't looking at the economic implications, they're looking at preventing ideas like "freedom", "democracy", and "Dallas" (I'm only half-way joking here) from being imported.
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