New Chinese DVD Format

[oldandinthe way]

A consortium of Chinese manufacturers have announced the EVD format and their intention to discontinue production of DVD players.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061206/ap_on_hi_te/china_new_dvd_3

[classfour]

Oh Well: I guess I'll start looking at DVD Players like I do DVD recorders: If it says m\"made in japan" on the back, I'll buy it.

If everybody is going to quit making DVD players - better stock up on those $29 ones now - $87 sounds waaaayyy too high for Chinese stuff to me.

[satviewer2000]

What ever happened to "Made in USA"?

[ron spencer]

What ever happened to "Made in USA"?

contrated out like everything else...no American will work for 50 cents and hour

[MOVIEGEEK]

This means nothing for quality because the manufacturing will be moved to Taiwan.
I think this is stupid for China(mainland) and great news for Taiwan.

[jman98]

This is old news and to make it worse, the Yahoo version quoted above is misleading, perhaps through ignorance. EVD players do support DVD too, so it would be more accurate to say that Chinese manufacturers aren't going to make DVD ONLY players in the future.

This may or may not work out as planned. Everything China plans doesn't necessary work out as they hope. They tried to replace VCD with SVCD or CVD some years ago and which format is STILL with us for commercial discs? Yep, VCD. This is just another attempt to avoid paying royalties to foreign companies over DVD just as the push to replace VCD was over royalties.

EVD uses DVD sized discs but uses more efficient video and audio codecs to save space. I would not expect such discs to be as good as BluRay or HD-DVD, but they should, in theory, be better than current DVD.

Taiwan might step up and start building DVD only players for foreign markets since neither EVD nor FVD (the Taiwanese HD disc format) are likely to catch on outside of those markets.

[MOVIEGEEK]

[xxiangg]

This is old news and to make it worse, the Yahoo version quoted above is misleading, perhaps through ignorance. EVD players do support DVD too, so it would be more accurate to say that Chinese manufacturers aren't going to make DVD ONLY players in the future.

This may or may not work out as planned. Everything China plans doesn't necessary work out as they hope. They tried to replace VCD with SVCD or CVD some years ago and which format is STILL with us for commercial discs? Yep, VCD. This is just another attempt to avoid paying royalties to foreign companies over DVD just as the push to replace VCD was over royalties.

EVD uses DVD sized discs but uses more efficient video and audio codecs to save space. I would not expect such discs to be as good as BluRay or HD-DVD, but they should, in theory, be better than current DVD.

Taiwan might step up and start building DVD only players for foreign markets since neither EVD nor FVD (the Taiwanese HD disc format) are likely to catch on outside of those markets.

I heard the same thing. First, EVD player will play regular DVD. Then, EVD player will
play its own format in "HD". I do not know how good is its HD. But it should be much
better than DVD. Although I would not bet that it is as good as BR or HD-DVD. If you
remember SVCD in the past, you know they are doing it again. Although SVCD has
never been popular outside of China. Other than it limits for its contents to 38min per
disk, it is quite acceptable if it is viewed on regular TV. This is the reason that I only
buy SVCD capable players in the past and made many SVCD if the contents is short.
HDTV is getting popular and SVCD is no longer good. Who knows how good is for EVD.
It may be a cheap alternative to get HD. If EVD is available here, I may give it a try.

[Conquest10]

$87 for an hd player is really good. I buy a lot of imports from Asia so evd sounds good to me. Its no hd-dvd but I'd rather have an hd Infernal Affairs than an hd The Departed.

[oldandinthe way]

It started this thread without commenting. After some thought the following is my take on this.

EVD will not read today's DVDs - if it would, the Chinese would not be able to avoid the licensing fees. DVD compatiblity was part of the earlier failed effort.

EVD can be as good as Blu-ray or HD-DVD to the extent that it has enough storage capacity to encode hi-def images at the level of fidelity as those HD media. It is possible to encode HD images on today's DVDs but you won't get an entire movie in HD.

EVD will not offer as much capacity as Blu-Ray or HD-DVD - limits of the physical capacity of DVD. But there certainly are potentials to get the same increases that HDD makers received with radial encoding. And questions as to just how much of the capacity of Blu-ray or HD-DVD are actually used by HD movies.

As for sending business to Taiwan, China has been buying up consumer companies inclduing Thomson/RCA. They won't be buying Taiwanese DVD players.

I think a 2-hour HD movie on dual-layer EVD is probable at a cost comparable to today's DVD prices and Blu-ray and HD-DVD may be on life support. If even half of the 20 or so Chinese vendors offer their models worldwide, there will be more EVD choices than either Blu-ray of HD. And apparently the hardware exists for it to happen.

This is a exciting development.

[jman98]

It started this thread without commenting. After some thought the following is my take on this.

EVD will not read today's DVDs - if it would, the Chinese would not be able to avoid the licensing fees. DVD compatiblity was part of the earlier failed effort.

EVD can be as good as Blu-ray or HD-DVD to the extent that it has enough storage capacity to encode hi-def images at the level of fidelity as those HD media. It is possible to encode HD images on today's DVDs but you won't get an entire movie in HD.

EVD will not offer as much capacity as Blu-Ray or HD-DVD - limits of the physical capacity of DVD. But there certainly are potentials to get the same increases that HDD makers received with radial encoding. And questions as to just how much of the capacity of Blu-ray or HD-DVD are actually used by HD movies.

As for sending business to Taiwan, China has been buying up consumer companies inclduing Thomson/RCA. They won't be buying Taiwanese DVD players.

I think a 2-hour HD movie on dual-layer EVD is probable at a cost comparable to today's DVD prices and Blu-ray and HD-DVD may be on life support. If even half of the 20 or so Chinese vendors offer their models worldwide, there will be more EVD choices than either Blu-ray of HD. And apparently the hardware exists for it to happen.

This is a exciting development.

You may be right, but then again considering that China is already paying DVD royalties and other articles on this said that the future EVD players would still play DVDs, I think it is also possible that China just doesn't want to pay royalties on BluRay or HD-DVD.

You seem to have missed my point on Taiwan. I never said or suggested that China would farm this out to Taiwan. My point was that Taiwanese companies MIGHT step in to fill a void, not that China would give them the work to do.

[oldandinthe way]

I didn't miss your point. You missed my point that China is in a position to decide what the products available at retail in other countries are.

[SingSing]

I think their plan is selling EVD only players in Domestic China market, and EVD/DVD players in their export markets.

[oldandinthe way]

I think their plan is to adapt to whatever they can make the studios go along with in the US.

[SatStorm]

This is old news.
IMO, EVD gonna be next to BR/HD-DVD what SVCD is today next to DVD.

[lacywest]

If you remember SVCD in the past, you know they are doing it again. Although SVCD has never been popular outside of China. Other than it limits for its contents to 38min per disk, it is quite acceptable if it is viewed on regular TV. This is the reason that I only buy SVCD capable players in the past and made many SVCD if the contents is short. HDTV is getting popular and SVCD is no longer good. Who knows how good is for EVD. It may be a cheap alternative to get HD. If EVD is available here, I may give it a try.

When I used ... DVD2SVCD ... I set my settings to create 2 CDs for my movies. Quite a few times the movie would be over 2 hours long. That would be over 1 hour on each SVCD disk. I also included a few seconds overlap for the second CD. I used CCE for my mpeg encoder.

[xxiangg]

Here are some technical data for EVD and EVD2.

The first generation of EVD chips supported
4:3 with 960×720p. Some were even lower 720x576p.
There chips found no user.

The second generation of EVD chips are 1280x720p
and 1920x1080i.

Each DVD9 is targetted to save 150 minutes of
EVD contents (with their AVS standard).

The player is to be sold arround $100.

The quality is not as good as either BR or HD-DVD,
but better than regular DVD.

I really think it is not a format they want to
push to market outside of China. It is used to
lower loyality they have to pay for others.
Remember, there are still a significant nubmer
of Japaness products sold in China.

The original information come from (in Chinese)
http://tech.sina.com.cn/e/2006-12-09/14311280302.shtml

[bryantsinger]

Oh Well: I guess I'll start looking at DVD Players like I do DVD recorders: If it says m\"made in japan" on the back, I'll buy it.

If everybody is going to quit making DVD players - better stock up on those $29 ones now - $87 sounds waaaayyy too high for Chinese stuff to me.

always made in japan is equal to made in china

[pchan]

This is old news.
IMO, EVD gonna be next to BR/HD-DVD what SVCD is today next to DVD.

You see it coming.....

[yoda313]

Wow 720p on a dvd type disc?? That's not too bad. Would a properly encoded 720p movie be better than say a regular 480p dvd upconverted with a upconverting player to 720p????

On a side note - I know you can author vcd as a dvd with the audio set to 48khz. Can you do the same with svcd? Can you author svcd as dvd if you convert the audio? Isn't svcd really mpeg2???

[lenti_75]

dust in the wind...

[Cornucopia]

Wow 720p on a dvd type disc?? That's not too bad. Would a properly encoded 720p movie be better than say a regular 480p dvd upconverted with a upconverting player to 720p????

On a side note - I know you can author vcd as a dvd with the audio set to 48khz. Can you do the same with svcd? Can you author svcd as dvd if you convert the audio? Isn't svcd really mpeg2???

1. Yes, it should be better (assuming it's properly encoded)

2. SVCD is MPEG2, but it's 2/3 D1 resolution isn't valid for DVD. You could leave it, or patch it (fake it) to another resolution, but either the authoring apps or the players might have a fit. Only true solution is to re-encode .

Scott

[Conquest10]

Wow 720p on a dvd type disc?? That's not too bad. Would a properly encoded 720p movie be better than say a regular 480p dvd upconverted with a upconverting player to 720p????

Its really nothing new. Terminator 2 has a 2 disc set with a regular DVD movie on one disc and an HD wmv encoded file on the other disc. Properly encoded files, 720p will always look better than 480p upconverted. Remember, you cannot create something that isn't there.

[jolo]

What ever happened to "Made in USA"?

contrated out like everything else...no American will work for 50 cents and hour

Ron,

The myth of offshoring of just about all manufacturing and now the service industries and intellectual talent away from the U.S., is that it is about salaries.
That is totally falseThe truth is that the U.S. workers, especially in technology have been by far the most productive in the world. More that makes up for any salary difference. The demand for well-rounded" skills is not close in offshore nations.
Also the big reason for identity theft and the enormous amount of data loss, is because of moving confidential information offshore where information is easily sold and modified. Remember that these are contractors, not employees working under bad conditions and low wages.

NOW the reason for offshoring is simple. It is about tax evasion and money laundering by executive management. 3 The multinationals PAY NO taxes, and executive management is raking in tax free income that is basically stolen from their corporations, as they exploit the nations that they offshore to. There are many, many companies that are set up to never, ever make a profit. But money can be moved back and forth to a offshore subsidiary.

If anyone wants some details about how this is done in different industries I would be happy to give you some links as well as recommend some books. Recently an executive manager for a pharmaceutical firm wrote how the money laundering works in the pharmaceutical industry.

The latest rage, especially in technology is the outrageous "backdating" of stock options. Jobs at Apple is one of the worst as he has gotten caught with this sleazy operation. For those who don't understand this, hundreds of thousands of shares of stock options are given to Executive Managers as part of their compensation packages. It is a way to hide salary. The stock option becomes worth lots of money, only if the stocks go up, but in most cases with executives, the options are first discounted. Meaning that they get them at a lower price than the actual stock sells for.

So an option is like betting that stock will go up. When purchased, whatever the stock is worth on that day, is the starting value of the option. Like I said, there is a discount given to Executives, so the starting value is actually is lower than what the stock sells for at the moment of purchase.

Then if t he stock goes up, lets say 15 points, since the option was purchased, they can sell their options for whatever that 15 points is worth.

Where the corruption comes in is that Jobs and his CEO peers will get the option "back dated", when they are sold. Not only are the shares discounted for them, but when Jobs or whichever sleazy CEO from the tech field sells their options, that let us say, was for September 10th, they have been allowed to "back date" the actual time of when the options were purchased to whatever date they want. Let us say, March, instead of September, if the stock was selling for a less in March.

Where is the Attorney General of the U.S. to nail these crooks ? Any way, the tax evasion, money laundering, falsifying books, etc, has a major effect on everyone. It is stealing millions from all of our salaries, companies, treasury, GNP, pensions, health care, etc. Even on the rare instance that a CEO and other Executives (with their buddies on their boards all taking care of each other), goes on trial and leaves their position, there is always the "Golden Parachute" that can be worth in the millions that they receive. Just like what occurred with the Airline CEO who got caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

There is no other country that rewards Executive Managers for pulling resources out of the country that they are in. The tax breaks and money laundering options are just too good to pass Agilent employees had their salaries reduced by 10%, so that there wouldn't 't be layoffs, which occurred anyway, check out how much revenue Karly at HP and the former CEO of Compaq during that time.

There is NO reason for U.S. companies to compete anymore. Make sure thinking is well inside the box. Look at all of the mergers. Is there competition anymore? Is there a reason for large investments in talent, R&D, quality control, top customer service anymore ?

Jon

[theewizard]

the chinese gov have been trying to make a new format popular in china for several years, it is more for the mainland market than export, they see it has a way to help control & defeat the influence of forgein movies that are bootlegged in china

[jolo]

From what I understand, and I am pretty sure about this, the Chinese government sent the MPAA packing with their extraordinary fees with the license fees for using the DVD format that is used in most movies.

I really hope it is good enough to use elsewhere. Nothing would be better than the monopoly that was set up with the MPAA and Microsoft, giving Microsoft the only license for creating DVD formatted movies.

China already developed SVCD so that they are not prisoners of monopolistic license fees on DVDs.
Europe and others have been selling movies in VCD format for years to avoid paying the DVD movie format license fees.

It is funny how the media monopoly/oligopolies have done such a good job at making their best customers feel like crooks.

The truth is that is you look at the millions that have been stolen from movie purchasers wallets due to :
1) PAL and NTSC. Before the advent better DVD players (and not the ones with the big names), the willl instantly convert Pal to NTSC and visa-versa, it was an expensive proposition to get a converter . This would be mostly used to allow people see their families home movies as well.

2)The highway robbery of the region codes. Fortunately people in the know, can take care of this fairly easily, but it is a multi-million dollar ripoff.

3) While I am not in favor of people who pirate movies and resell them, the money is a small pimple compared to the stealing from customers of the previous two items. In fact, I can very much understand the industry going after people and stores that make backup copies for resall. I hate it.
But the mult-millions that spent on on putting copy protection that disallows private backups for people as well as making it that multi-media forms can be played on only one device is highway robbery. It is NOT piracy to back a backup, however, it IS piracy to do pay Clear Channel radio stations payola to make sure that only a few artists are played, it is piracy to pay artists so little of what they make on them, it is piracy for companies to consistently reduce the distribution of artists work and it is the work or organized crime pirates to force retail stores to overcharge (price fixing) and this reduce all competition in the market. It is important to know that the artists don't make one single penny more from price fiixing.

Notice how the cost of CDs have been creeping up again ?? Then the insane "import" garbage.

Jon

[adam]

jolo the royalties that China wants to avoid are those paid to Macrovision, CSS, the DVD Consortium, and Mpeg La. Neither the MPAA nor Microsoft have anything directly to do with this.

[alstatr]

This is directed toward the stock options and outsourcing comment. I recently graduated with my BA in Management Information Systems and minor in Investment Finance, so these topics interest me along with discussion of new video formats. We are taught outsourcing and its advantages and disadvantages.

Jon's comments were only part of the picture of outsourcing. Outsourcing is alot about avoiding taxes, period. Whether its ethical or not thats another debate. I personally don't think it is if the object is to avoid taxes. Not fair to all the consumers in the US who buy the company's products. Anyways, the other part of the picture is mainly wages, at least for manufacturing and slightly technology support services. Manufacturing just makes common business sense. If you can pay someone across the ocean less to make the product and ship it over to the US the business will do that. Its the laws of capitalism. The problem is that sometimes it works too well. Technology and services sometimes are convienent because of the time differences, I'm not including all technology and services just some.

Take medical notetaking for example, the doctor dictates into a digital recorder during the day and at night sends it to India where during their work day they type it out and in the morning in the US the doctor as his records typed. If the doctor wanted to pay an american to do the same job the records may not be available soon enough or he'd have to pay extra for the person to want to work at night and sleep during the day.

A bad example of outsourcing is Dell and HP. They outsourced their tech call centers to India and because of the language barrier and thick acentes (I am not saying that India or its workers are bad at their jobs) the customer service went down hill. I interned at a tech firm that used Dell servers and had to spend many times on call to India. After I got used to the acente it was easier but most business customers and consumers are not as understanding.

Sometimes outsourcing pays and other times it doesn't. The manufacturing losses to the US are bad but the world is changing and America needs to pay to its strengths and perhaps let other countries manufacture things. We're just no longer top dog in manufacturing anymore, hard to admit but the truth.

As for the stock options stuff, I just want people to know that stock options aren't always bad when investors play by the rules. I agree, as much as I love apple and its stock, that the backdating crap is just that, crap. I made lots of money off of apple's rise from $25 to $93 but its not fair for the executives to have had an unfair advantage with backdating. But normal stock options are legal and fair because you do have to pay a strike price for the "option" to put(sell) or call(buy) on the stock at a predermined time and hopefully lower price than when the options expire.

If anyone cares about the outsourcing and stock options I just felt that there needed to be some clarification about the other sides of the issue.

And I'm all for the EVD if it allows me to burn EVD to normal DVDs to play in an EVD/DVD player so that I don't need to waste money on BluRAY and HD DVD until the prices come down. Who cares if its from China. America is supposed to be the innovators of the world but if someone can beat us at our own game, do it cheaper, and out sell the competition while still offereing outstanding customer service who's to say that China won't be the innovators in the future? Its pure capitalism, well sort of, minus the government running most of the show in China.

Well, thats enough out of me for awhile... Sorry if I hijacked the thread but Jon did it first.

Kevin

[Wile_E]

So we give China our business by allowing them to make most of our products. We buy their products. Yet they don't want to support us in return by giving our businesses money. What is wrong with this picture? How about we just pull all production out of China and take our business elsewhere. Ban all imports from China. Would they like that? They would be in some serious hard times if that would happen.

[dvdguy4]

So we give China our business by allowing them to make most of our products. We buy their products. Yet they don't want to support us in return by giving our businesses money. What is wrong with this picture? How about we just pull all production out of China and take our business elsewhere. Ban all imports from China. Would they like that? They would be in some serious hard times if that would happen.

I do believe that most American companies use China for cheap labor to help keep prices down. Not if we banned all imports to china how much will products cost if we didnt use them.
If it means a cheaper and better DVD player than so be it.