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China ready to finalize EVD specs soon?

Written by Petteri Pyyny @ 28 Oct 2003 12:08 User comments (5)

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

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5 user comments

128.10.2003 17:26
vkem
Inactive

Good luck to China! We could get a new encoding format for free :)

228.10.2003 17:44
fedrive
Inactive

Atomic Holographic Storage to be the World's Number One Storage Technology, Forever.

328.10.2003 22:58

fedrive: Yep, definitely, you mention it every time there's a news article about optical storage and yet no one has ever heard of it. So, please, go away.

429.10.2003 01:03

lol - I've heard of it, but its been in development for so long with no progress it will never happen. None of the big companies are in on it.

529.10.2003 06:19

If you look on the colassal storage site they are actually looking to hire scientists to help with the development, which is a hint as to how far away they still are from making it a reality. but when they do, it will be awesome. 10 terabytes of storage for around $750 would be great (if the info is correct).

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