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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."
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++.