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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
Even China's "avant garde" attack on formats which don't fill China's mafia government Treasury is behind the vanguard of the Internet. The way to do half of what China is trying is to just release the DRM-free EVD format on the Web. Codec plugins, players, and encoded content (all open source so we can tell the Chinese haven't included any trojans). Even dual DVD/EVD-R HW, so we can backup our DVDs to EVDs, with PC connections so we can move our content across the Net. EVD would quickly dilute DVD, especially if cheap Chinese HW preferred EVD for features like sharing.
The other half, which that strategy wouldn't do, is lock us into some Chinese format instead of DVD. We might not pay Chinese crony corps royalties this generation, but there's no way to stop them from using some lockin on the next gen, like when they increase density for HD-EVD, or some other creepy strategy they learned from the current Euramerican masters of the game. Releasing the format as a data format in open source rather than a HW format (ie. discs only) means that their attempt to upsell would be just another fork, which the rest of the world could ignore in favor of anyone's alternative upgrades.
I think DVD Jon should start giving code to some real "maverick" Chinese manufacturers right away.
--
make install -not war
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?
If the EVD players are sitting on the shelves in ASDA for £24.95, the public will buy EVD players and demand EVD discs. It's just that simple.
Not convinced? Then look at where the el-cheapo DVD players come from now...
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.
TODO: Something witty here...
That's one of the nice things about Canada -- we can freely buy a lot of the things that Americans can't due to retarded embargoes. We have cuban cigars at the store where I work. They're expensive, since they have to be flown in, but we have them.
You know, for a country that spends so much time braying about its love of capitalism, Americans sure do their best to prevent any capitalism from happening. Cubans want to buy and sell their products in American markts? Sorry, no can do. Foreigners want to buy computer chips? Obviously they all just want to make nukes (forget for a moment that the computations are the easiest part of the entire processs, with or without computers...). China makes quality video players that aren't deliberately crippled? That's GOT to be banned -- using a product that you paid money for is supposed to unpleasant. Now China wants to make a quality video player that has even stronger DRM than domestic video players, and isn't encumbered by patent royalties; that's somehow evil as well. Seriously, who are the REAL communists here?
It's sad that "socialist", "liberal" Canada embraces capitalism and free trade so much more fully than Americans, who've been duped into thinking that a "free market" means that you get to choose which state-mandated church you attend while the government works overtime to inhibit competition and international trade.
It's kind of ironic that China should restore free enterprise and free market competition by providing an alternative to the artificial DVD oligopoly.
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.
sans DRM, and not DRM made by a company named Sans.
Oh You POS
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.
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++.
I hope this is a joke. China is one of he worst offenders against humanity on earth.
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.
I think you're confusing free markets with capitalism. Capitalism is all about monopolies, corruption, and destroying the competition. The entire idea is to take everything you can at any cost. Free markets are a different beast, and are a bit closer to what western nations (and even supposedly "communist" nations, these days) strive for. Capitalism is what we used to do back in the days of wondrous events like potato famines and great depressions.
Going to mexico to buy things that are banned in America? Isn't that evidence that things are fucked? And it's not just cigars; we also import resources (nickel and cobalt, apparently) from Cuba, we can travel there on vacation (which a remarkable number of people I know have done), etc. We actually TRADE with Cuba, in a serious sense. America, meanwhile, posts security guards in the American zones of airports to make sure that Americans aren't trying to board flights to Cuba from other countries. Nice control-freak government you've got there. You should be proud that your ancestors died so that your government can decide where you go on vacation. I'm sure they would think that taking a British cannon round to the face was totally worthwhile to guarantee that their descendants would someday be sent to jail for duplicating a DVD (despite it being explicitly permitted in the constitution) or sharing (which the bible explicitly encourages, if you happen to think that the bible warrants anything other than scornful curiosity) artistic works.
There's a list as long as your arm of tariffs imposed by the US to protect American workers from having to actually compete with the rest of the world. A remarkable number of products can't be exported at all, or only to a handful of friendly nations. Many types of software are completely banned in the US (it's interesting how most Linux distros have a "non-US" repository for software that Americans believe will destroy their economy and completely unhinge people's morality).
Canada has some serious issues regarding free markets; but we're nowhere near as schizoid about it as Americans. At the very least we don't run around screaming about the evils of communism, trumpeting ourselves as the saviours of capitalism, and then prohibit people from engaging in basic reasonable forms of trade. The fact that America violates the free trade agreements that the US itself agitated for ... pretty much says it all.
I will believe it is a Royalty-Free, Open standard when I see it.
I have seen some mention of China releasing the spec, but is that to vendors only?
And is there really no DRM?
I will buy an EVD player and some discs if they are HD, and the specs are open, and no effective DRM is used. After all, I want to play the discs in Linux or whatever future device I want.
Otherwise, I'll stick with the last effectively-open standard, DVD.
DRM or private specification is the path of the Laser Disc.
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.