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

People's *VDs

[Doc Ruby]

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.

Black Market

[Mark_MF-WN]

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.

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.

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++.