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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."
Could the Chinese government wind up providing the solution to DRM, through the production of a DRM machine? Now that they control the manufacturing process, it's not hard to imagine them controlling the design process as well, and implementing whatever they darn well please. No doubt the USA would make importation of EVD illegal, but hopefully Canadians would be able to get their hands on them, and create a non-black market for technology people really want.
Oh You POS
""Is this the future and the effective end of DRM -- to be taken and co-opted by nation-states?""
No. This is an economic end-run around the DVD forum.
This EVD concept sounds cool at I like the fact that it is royalty free. At the same time I'm weary of anything proposed by such a huge human rights abuser. I also wonder if the loss of chinease DVD market will affect our cheap 20$ Wal-Mart DVD players?
Haier is a fairly arrogant company to start with. I once found a critical safety defect in one of their refrigerators, yet they wouldn't accept it until I'd sent them a video demonstrating the obvious defect. That was a few years ago when I was inexperienced at dealing with Chinese companies.
What I didn't know back then was that Chinese businessmen will often make bold statements knowing full well that it's bullshit. He knows that YOU know it's bullshit too - yet it's considered rude to call him on it.
I think there's an element of that in the statement about using their own DVD format. It's just a spot of chest beating IMO. Many Chinese business people that I've spoken to seem to think that pretty much all disc formats will be dead in a few years anyway.
In my case, the dear old DVD is merely a way of transporting the movie from the store to my hard drive. Once it's on there I never open the DVD case again. As hard drives get bigger and cheaper it's easy to imagine more people storing/viewing their movies this way.
My main question is, is there an open source EVD codec available anywhere? A 'Royalty free codec' with the goal of fast widespread adaptation should be accompanied by such a thing, shouldn't it?
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
[sarcasm]That's right... that's why I can't buy satellite signals from Direct TV complete with HBO[/sarcasm] (both of which outshine any Canadian offering). The Canadian government won't let Canadians buy American TV services directly and there is an outright ban on HBO (they don't want to put pressure on Canadian companies and TV stations to force them to finally offer a good products for a good price).
You see we're all about a competitive market up here. Same reason we're only now starting to see cell phone number portability being implemented at phone companies, and why I have to wait up to 8 months for an MRI even though the one at the local hospital isn't being used more than 8 or 10 hours a day because they can't afford to pay the staff to run it... while not allowing private companies to use the machines who are willing to PAY to for the privilege of giving their customers faster access. BTW, the government frowns and disallows companies from buying their own machines and offering these services. One of the reasons the only health care system in the G8 that we are above is the U.S. health care system... which is on the bottom. Don't brag about shit if it is not all as true as you make it out to be.
That said, I agree that Canada is WAY more capitalistic than almost every American thinks. Just because we have a failing single insurer health care system and believe in paying for safe injection houses instead of water filtration plants (Vancouver's 2 weeks of boil water advisory because a rainstorm screwed up the water system for 2 MILLION people) doesn't mean we don't like capitalism. It just means we don't want to sell American products to Canadians because that would make us uncomfortable when we were America bashing. Meanwhile, we would rather have a 60 billion dollar trade deficit with China who will sell us anything and won't buy a damn thing from us except lumber and oil (if we would sell it... which the liberals here would be OK with because they have no problem with the trade deficit or China's human rights abuses since they are trying so/too hard to be understanding of their values while forgetting our own). Yeah yeah and a few other token things they buy... 60 Billion dollar trade deficit. People here don't want to get on China's bad side because we don't want to lose out on that big potential market. But so far all it has us is 60 billion dollars deeper in debt every year... and that is just from Canada. Time for some equalization. Starting to rant against idiotic notions that trade with China is all good... must stop now.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
I can't believe that the EVD is going anywhere. In Beijing, at least, there are DVD hawkers on every corner, and 2 or more DVD stores in most neighborhoods. It could be that my own precious Chinese made DVD player (which plays everything- any region DVD, VCD, CD, DivX, MPEG-2 and 4...) also plays EVD. But considering that the main source of DVDs on the market are foreign films, pirated as bit-to-bit copies off the original DVDs, I doubt that many new films will appear in the new format. (Actually, you can also get original DVDs meant for the Korean, American or Japanese Market that have failed their quality control, and get routed to the Chinese stores. But they usually start skipping at some point...)
There are factions within the Chinese government who want to force industry to follow international copyright law. But there are also nationalist factions that consider it a loss of face, or a waste of perfectly good source material. I would guess that it was the nationalists who were touting EVD over DVD, as a way of neutralizing the issue, and possibly as a way of reducing foreign cultural and economic influence.
The long and short of it is, if the government (the guys that matter) actually decides to do this, it will happen, overnight. If only some faction within the government is pushing it, it will only amount to propaganda.
The high level economic talks with the US and china which are going on right now are down the shitter, bad. I know this news from the past couple days barely registers with the "gaming" crowd here, but the adults who watch things can verify what I am alleging, at least the signs are there. There is NO happy news coming out of those talks now, none, because china has everyone by the short and curlies now-something they didn't 20 years ago but DO now. china is sitting on over a trillion bucks which *they don't freekin want anymore* because they don't trust it anymore. Everyday they sit on it it drops in value, a huge amount, and no one outside a few fed governors knows how much realistically. And to top it off the dimocraps are making huge noises in public about slapping huge tariffs on everything from china in the new year (20 years too damn late to make any sort of difference at all now because they already shipped the factories and machine tools out. Do people understand that yet? Gone, out the door, buh bye!Idiots.) The buck is gonna tank next week, start a much bigger fall, as china divests into precious metals and tangibles like energy supplies, weapons, food, raw materials-anything they can get their hands on to get rid of that stuff. The wall street pirate shills and the Fed will go secret double overtime printing up more IOUs and propping up the phony stock market with worthless paper purchases, like they have been doing, post all sorts of feel good soothing sounding articles. Morons. Did you catch the latest all the really big guys are bailing out of the market? Only putting back one dollar for every 63 they are pulling out? CLUE TIME.
Me, dumping more Fed notes (mostly the rest of my stash) into PMs as soon as I can monday when my broker opens. Probably gonna restock the pantry and score some more ammo too, just because. I have seen humans in emergency OH SHIT THIS SUCKS situations, the veneer of civilization is quite thin. Quite. I may try to lock in a price tomorrow, watching the news tonight late for some more clues. I bet the canuckistanian dinar tanks along with the fednote, just a smidgen slower because you guys asre sitting on a lot of nice raw materials. Play it smart, canada will be a powerhouse into the next century. go for the fast profit now and you'll go broke and be serfs for your new overlords, the ones who speak english as a second language, and no I don't mean the quebeccers.
Bottom line-Worrying about stupid hollywood movie players is such a *minor* concern right now. It's right up there with wondering who the next "TV Champ" is in big time wrestling. People are going to really need to get their priorities straight as this crash unfolds. If people need to get shipments of electronics or other manufactured items in to keep their businesses running they better do it real soon now.
Just remember that this is all about the manufacturers and not the consumers.
Whatever savings are made in the use of EVD or some such will be digested into a larger profit for the manufacturers.
Not saying its a bad thing, at the moment the market is so competitive that manufacturers make an abysmal profit margin.
Considering a large majority of the players are made in China, its no surprise.
The biggest challenge for China isn't the technology for the politics behind it, with the very powerful corporations who own the rights to DVD will lobby to the governments to stop EVD from becoming anything important. Its all about the content, and the holders of it.
Right. The big evil company that was exploiting everyone, because they were totally evil by definition.
Wait. Wasn't that the company who didn't have an eternal monopoly, but only held huge market share because they kept innovating, because they constantly managed to produce oil for everybody for an ever cheaper price, so that people who previously had to buy expensive candles could buy cheap oil for lamps? And their market share wasn't even 99%. It wasn't a monopoly, because there was competition, and people being free to buy from that competition, just like MS, Apple, Sun, and Linux (I happen to run a Mac, it's my choice).
Yeah, eeeeeevvvvvvilllll.
Only government can create real (i.e. harmful) monopolies, for instance most government agencies (stifling actual competition out there by regulating everything to death; how could you create innovation in flight security, with the government sitting there doing actual crap?), or the AT&T monopoly back in the day (before government started licensing monopolies, there was widespread competition in gas, phone, water, electricity markets).