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

Re:Black Market

[theshowmecanuck]

It's sad that "socialist", "liberal" Canada embraces capitalism and free trade so much more fully than Americans.

[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.