China Proposes Rival Video Format

Richard Finney writes "Yahoo News is reporting that the Chinese government is supporting an effort to develop a homegrown standard, called 'AVS,' for compressing digital audio and video in order to avoid paying royalties on proprietary compression schemes. The AVS groups website is online but in Chinese."

1.2 billion

[qwertme]

The population is closer to 1.2 billion I think.

fish translation

[Simon (S2)]

translated link [altavista.com]

Not Invented Here syndrome

[Rogerborg]

Why not just use ogg video [slashdot.org]?

Re:1.2 billion

[Fuyu]

According to China Population Information and Research (CPIRC) [cpirc.org.cn], the total population in Mainland China is 1,289,646,742.

Re:Go China!

[Fuyu]

According to the Yahoo article [yahoo.com] it's not royalty-free, "Chinese manufacturers licensing that technology would pay fees in the order of one yuan ($1=CNY8.28) per device, much lower than those for MPEG, the report said. If it becomes a national standard, products of foreign companies sold in China could also have to use AVS."

Re:Go China!

[gowen]

Yeah, it's pretty hard to imagine a regime so brutal [geocities.com] it would have troops [wikipedia.org] open fire [kent.edu] on defenseless student protestors [kent.edu]

Re:Piracy?

[iluvpr0n]

No, it won't. Mainland China is now separated into its own region (region 6, region 3 is used in Hong Kong, South Korea, and some other Southeast Asian countries). Anyone who is making bootleg video isn't going to play by the rules; they want to maximize the number of people they can sell to. So if you go on ebay to buy those bootleg copies of Star Wars IV - VI you won't find that they say "Region 6. Only playable in China!" It'll be the same way with this AVS format. It also assumes this technology would replace DVDs in China, which seems a bit far-stretched at this point.

Re:Not Invented Here syndrome

[Anonymous Coward]

because its patent encumbered. its just that the patent holder said to not protect them as he released the video codec source code under an open source license.

Re:Yet another proprietary codec...

[Jugalator]

Xiph.org [xiph.org] isn't only developing Ogg Vorbis, but also Ogg Theora [theora.org]. It's still in alpha stages though. The technology used in Theora is based on the vp3 codec [on2.com] which is covered by patents, but Xiph.org has negotiated an "irrevocable free license to the vp3 codec for any purpose imaginable on behalf of the public".

Xiph.org is also developing the experimental wavelet-based "Tarkin" codec. As I understand it, it's more written from "scratch", much like Ogg Vorbis, but is even further ahead in the future than Ogg Theora, which they are focusing on right now.

Re:1.2 billion

[Fuyu]

According to this Associated Press article [myinky.com], "The number of Internet users in China grew by 15 percent over the past six months to 68 million, while the number of Web sites surged by 28 percent, the government said." "China has the world's second-largest online population, but is far behind the United States, with more than 165 million."

Re:Go China!

[Anonymous Coward]

Opening fire with rubber bullets is a LITTLE different than running over your population with tanks.

The bullets were not rubber, 4 defenseless students died, 1 was permanently paralized. Many many more were injured.

At least with a tank coming at you, you have a chance to run, verses being in a field surrounded by a fence, and having over 60 bullets fired into the crowd in a matter of seconds.

As opposed to

[Epeeist]

As opposed to American publishers who infuriated Charles Dickens by publishing his books without acknowledging his copyright.

And now of course we have American publishers who want to extend copyright in perpetuity to stop people having fair use of characters in the likes of Rudyard Kipling's books.

Re:Go China!

[jez_f]

Trying to argue that China is a nice friendly government and China is great place to live is only going to make you look like (more of) an idiot.

OK they are not a friendly goverment. But I have met a couple of people who work there and they like it.

Seing as so much IT work is starting to go to India and China I am seriously considering a move in the next couple of years.

The Chinease goverment is slowly getting better and the western goverments are getting more authorotarian. So I don't think it will make much differance in a few years

With so many people it makes sense for China to research and make home grown products, they have their dragon chip, own linux distro and this is just part of that. They have their own space program too. Basicaly china seems to be going through a pahse of massive tecnolgical growth right now.

Re:Yet another proprietary codec...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the current Tarkin source has been written long ago, and although it works, it's more of a resource project than anything. There is also W3D in Tarkin CVS, which is written by Holger Waechtler and somewhat further developed than Tarkin, although also far from complete and usable. Traffic on the tarkin-dev mailinglist has been negligible for a while. If you want to do open video codec development, just send mail there and see people crawl out of the woodwork :-).

Xiph.org is focusing its efforts on Theora right now, which amongst others requires a new libogg that can do non-degenerate Ogg streams (Vorbis I only uses degenerate Ogg streams, which can only hold one data stream. For Theora you need both VP3 video and Vorbis audio, and hence full-featured Ogg streams). VP3 is proven technology so the chances of that working in the near future are much better than those of Tarkin, even if Tarkin may be more interesting from a technical point of view.

Lourens Veen

Re:Piracy?

[iluvpr0n]

Isn't this the reason why many bootleg DVDs from Hong Kong and China are "region-less" and why "region-free" DVD players also come from the same place? (By the way, do these actually work or is that just a myth/scam of some sort?)

Yes, all bootleg DVDs are region-free to allow the most number of people to use them. That is not to say many legitimate DVDs aren't region-free, in China, Hong Kong, and elsewhere (while most DVDs from the US are region 1, you will find many that have no region restrictions built-in).

DVD players that can be modified to be region-free (usually through a remote hack) work excellently. The Nerd-out forums [nerd-out.com] and dvdrhelp's player hack list [dvdrhelp.com] are both very helpful in finding a region-free player or finding out if your current player is region-free. But basically, once you have a region-free player, you can watch DVDs from anywhere. Especially if you have one that does proper PAL -> NTSC conversion, allowing you to play anamorphic widescreen DVDs from Europe and any other PAL countries (CyberHome and Malata are two brands to look at with this feature).

They want to OWN patents

[r6144]

Yes, it is NIH syndrome. Besides, the word "Intellectual Property" has become a buzzword here in government-speak. The government strongly encourages companies to develop new IP, new standards (even if they are neither better or freer than others) and patent everything possible. They just don't care about free software at all, actually it is required that IP from government-sponsored projects are "sufficiently protected" (which mostly means "patented").

It is true that paying royalties to domestic companies is much better than paying foreigners (we all remember the DVD player fiasco), and it doesn't matter much whether ship-making (etc.) technologies are open or closed, but I don't think the current policies are suitable for software and related technologies. Mandating domestic proprietary (and sometimes incompatible) standards over existing free (as in freedom) ones may create more GDP in royalties, and possibly give domestic companies some advantage in competition (unlikely), but ordinary people actually loses.

Being a Chinese citizen, I think the situation here is similar to that in the US in 1970s as described by RMS. Basically most people are not aware of IP, and those who are getting to know it rush to "protect" it, few have yet to get the notion of free software(information, knowledge, etc.).

SVCD was created for the same reasons

[Rescate]

The linked article doesn't mention it, but the SVCD (Super Video CD) format was created in 1998 for the same reasons. Here is a good overview of why and how SVCD was created [uwasa.fi] (some excerpts follow...)

Super Video CD (aka SVCD, Super VCD or Chaoji VCD) is an enhancement to Video CD that was developed by a Chinese government-backed committee of manufacturers and researchers, partly to sidestep DVD technology royalties and partly to create pressure for lower DVD player and disc prices in China. The final SVCD spec, set by the China National Committee of Recording Standards, was announced in September 1998, winning out over C-Cube's China Video Disc (CVD) and HQ-VCD (from the developers of the original Video CD).

As always, the background story is a bit more complicated than how it appears in brief summaries like the above. First of all, why was there such a big interest in creating a new CD-based video disc format for China, at the time when the rest of the world was already preparing to accept DVD as the "next generation" digital video delivery format?

It all comes down to the following three reasons:

• The prevailing success of the original (White Book) Video CD format...
• The political objectives of the Chinese government...
• The "luxury" status of DVD...

Re:Probably Nationalism

[Rogerborg]

They've failed as a communist party

India. [cia.gov] Government type: federal republic. Population: 1,045,845,226. GDP per capita: $2,540. Literacy: 52%. Life expectancy: 62.2 years.

China. [cia.gov] Government type: Communist state. Population: 1,284,303,705. GDP per capita: $4,600. Literacy: 81.5%. Life expectancy: 71.86 years.

Don't get me wrong, China sucks wang, but I'd hardly call it a failure.

Re:Ermmm...

[Vainglorious Coward]

United States...the largest foreign aid contributor in the world

Untrue

The US is fourth in absolute terms of overseas aid given (behind Japan Germany and France). In terms of percentage national income, the US at 0.12 per cent, ranks below Uganda.

Re:6 billion people

[cyberon22]

You can buy a VCD player here in Beijing for $25 USD, and a regionless (*cough*) DVD/MP3/VCD combo for under $50. Since the average annual income is about $3000 USD, that's equivalent to someone making $24,000/year buying a $200 machine. Factor in VCD rentals at $0.20/day and DVD/VCDs on sale for between $1 and $1.50... its easy to see why owning this stuff is becoming pretty common.

Total population figure is irrelevant though. Even if people in rural Fujian aren't making enough money to buy a lot of DVDs, there are 16 million people in Beijing and several million more in the Yantze river delta. And when the population of just a few Chinese cities starts to rival countries like Germany... it makes a huge difference for international standards competition.