China Readies Royalty-Free DVD Format

An anonymous reader writes with an InfoWorld article on China's new attempt to introduce a royalty-free format to rival the DVD. The article is not sanguine on China's chances of getting the EVD format used outside of its own borders (they tried once before in 2003). The submitter is more optimistic, asking: "Is this the future and the effective end of DRM — to be taken and co-opted by nation-states?" From the article: "The DVD player makers plan to switch to EVD (enhanced versatile disk) in an attempt to avoid paying patent royalties on the DVD format, according to published reports. The world's largest producers of DVD players, Chinese electronics companies would use the format instead of standards such as MPEG-4. Last week, 20 top manufacturers including Haier announced their plans to switch from DVD to EVD entirely by 2008, according to a report in China Economic News."

Comments

It's the content, stupid!

[Tyler Eaves]

People, by and large, do not care about the DRM or region coding on DVDs. It doesn't effect them. The DRM on DVD's is quite mild compared to much of what is floating around. Unless the major studios and distributors supported this (not likely) this will never gain anything even resembling market success.

Re:It's the content, stupid!

[Jeff DeMaagd]

In Europe, a significant number of DVD players are hacked to allow playing US DVDs. US DVDs are imported because the EU versions are too often inferior quality or delayed from the US release.

I wanted to get an EVD (or was it HVD?) player back when they tried it, but there were less than ten discs in Chinese that I could find online, and I could not find any information on subtitling. At any rate, the JVC D-VHS format was more successful than EVD/HVD.

Re:Open source EVD codec?

[ettlz]

Theora.

EVD vs HD/Blu-ray DVD?

[NekoYasha]

The EVD "hype" has been here (in China, that is) for like, ages.

It is interesting that though the Chinese media has a lot of news about EVD's being better than DVD and being a national pride (as present international standards are mostly made by western countries and companies, China desperately needs its own standards to be more powerful in the intl market), there are seldom any mention about how exactly is EVD better than other formats, i.e. the technical specs. Moreover since EVD is less known outside China (and maybe inside China too - the computer magazines here talks about Vista and Blu-ray and HD but seldom EVD) compared to western Hi-Def formats, I am made curious: how is EVD, and can it do 1080p?

A quick search dug out a quite official-looking site for EVD: (Chinese only... apparently they have an English version, but the database is down. Note I'm not making any assurance that this is indeed the official site).

From several articles on the site we can see that the EVD standard uses DVD discs (format D5 and D9) as media - wow, I didn't know that, no wonder never have I heard the data capacity of EVD -, supports 720p and 1080i (not as much as the western Hi-Def formats), and utilizes MPEG2 and ExAC (custom audio coding standard) as compression algorithms. And there is, indeed, a copy protection scheme.

The site also metioned about a even lesser-known NVD and a Taiwan standard, FVD .

When I first heard that they've made a format called EVD, I thought that "it's just 'DVD++'". Today I know that E officially stands for Enhanced. But to me, it's just DVD++.

Re:Cheap hardware?

[jaymzru]

I hope this is a joke. China is one of he worst offenders against humanity on earth.

Re:Open source EVD codec?

[evilviper]

My main question is, is there an open source EVD codec available anywhere? A 'Royalty free codec' with the goal of fast widespread adaptation

The AVS codec has been available in ffmpeg/libavcodec (and so, any program that uses libavcodec) for quite a while now.

It is NOT, however, royalty free. They intend to keep the fees lower than other codecs, but that's all.

For royalty-free video, you have a few to choose from:

Dirac/Snow: Very impressive codecs at the range of bitrates (slightly better than even h.264), but even more CPU-intensive, and both (sadly) perpetually unfinished.

MPEG-1: actually does quite well with modern encoders like libavcodec... At lower bits/pixel rates (eg. 720x480 @600k) , it often looks better than MPEG-4/Divx. At higher bitrates, MPEG-4 slowly starts looking a little bit better than MPEG-1, but it's still rather competitive. It's only near DVD bitrates that better MPEG-4 encoders look obviously better (sharper details) than MPEG-1 (where MPEG-2 will likely outperform MPEG-4, anyhow).

VP3/Theora: Blocky, distorted mess, in most expert opinions (IMHO, that's slightly harsh). Does okay at very low resolution (320x240) and tiny bitrates (~300k), but not impressively well even then.

MJPEG/NUV: High-speed, but needs extremely high bitrates to be watchable at all. Competitive, perhaps, with MPEG-2 at DVD bitrates.

Royalty-free audio codecs:

MPC/MP+/Musepack: Very good quality, and very fast. Lowest selectable bitrate ~60kbps. Not yet designed to fit in a A/V container with video (not packetized) but can be done in non-standard, non-compatible ways.

Vorbis: CPU-intensive. Mostly good quality, but completely blows-up on certain sounds. Uncommonly supported. Fits in very few containers (Ogg and MKV).

MP2: Supported everywhere. Anything that can play MP3 can play MP2 as well. Pretty good at 128kbps and above. Surpasses MP3 quality when approaching 192kbps.