Petteri Pyyny
28 Oct 2003 12:08
China has planned for years to develop its own alternative to DVD-Video format, in order to avoid paying patent royalties to Western electronics companies. Now it seems that they're finally getting the specs ready.
According to Chinese sources, China's Ministry of Information Industry will announce the final specifications of Enhanced Versatile Disc or EVD in November. Chinese government launched the EVD project in 1999 and the working group includes all major Chinese DVD player manufacturers and various other Chinese technology companies. China plans to submit the specifications to international standards committees as well, in order to get the standard more widely accepted outside China.
The technical specifications currently available are rather vague, but according to them the picture quality will be roughly 5 times better than in DVD-Video. EVD is supposed to be compatible with HDTV specifications and therefore it would make sense that its resolution would be compatible with HDTV resolutions, including those of 1920x1080 (compared to DVD-Video's max of 720x576 in PAL countries and 720x480 in NTSC countries).
If EVD really gets ready within next couple of weeks and manufacturers can start shipping devices in first half of 2004, this might mean interesting times for digital video world, as DVD Forum yesterday managed to cause a disappointment for most of the digital video lovers and Blu-Ray still costing too much (and really only available in Japan), EVD might have its chance for success outside China as well, provided that the players will include DVD compatibility (which, obviously is kinda against the idea of avoiding DVD-Video royalties, but pretty much required anyway).
Source: ChinaDaily