Petteri Pyyny
29 May 2002 14:09
Nineteen Taiwanese electronics companies have quietly decided to develop their own DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) standard, dubbed as EVD (Enhanced Versatile Disc). The new format will be compatible with similiar Chinese effort called AVD (Advanced Versatile Disc), but EVD's storage would be appx. 1GB higher for dual-layer discs.
Both standards' players would play regular DVD discs and would use similiar red-laser technology what DVD currently uses (instead of blue laser technology what upcoming Japanese Blu-Ray uses). Analysts estimate that Taiwanese and Chinese efforts will eventually merge as one competing standard to current DVD standard.
The reason behind the whole process is very simple -- money. Chinese DVD player manufacturers are refusing to pay licensing fees for their players to companies who own patents on DVD technology (which include Japanese Sony, Japanese Pioneer, European Philips, Dolby Labs, Thomson Multimedia, etc). Licensing fees are currently appx. 20 to 25 percent for $100 DVD player. Same thing happened in early 1990s, when companies who developed VideoCD format (Sony, Pioneer and Philips) which became an instant success in Far East, tried to get Chinese player manufacturers to pay for the patents -- Chinese government simply organized a joint venture which eventually developed royalty-free SuperVideoCD format.
It is still unclear what differences the new format(s) will have. Some are saying that the video will be stored in HD format with some other than MPEG-2 compression format.
Interesting -- I'm fairly certain that these discs wont have CSS or Macrovision copy-protection :-)
Full article from EETimes