Back in 1999, China began working on an alternative to DVD known as Enhanced Versatile Disc (EVD) in order to free Chinese player manufacturers of the royalty charges required to support DVD. In the past year the EVD format has moved on enough to the point where EVD players are becoming widely available in China. Now the EVD format has been formally declared as the national standard for digital video discs, according to China's Ministry of Information Industry (MII).
EVD's physical specifications are like that of a DVD with a 12cm disc diameter, same UDF file system and disc capacity of around 8.5GB. In fact an EVD can even be read in a PC's DVD-ROM drive. However to cut back on royalty charges, EVD uses On2 Technologies' VP5 and VP6 codecs for its Video and EAC (Enhanced Audio Codec) 2.0 for its audio.
By using these alternative codec's, the overall royalty charges per EVD player are less than one-fifth of that than for each DVD player. Besides different codec's, the EVD format supports HDTV due to ON2's much more efficient video compression compared with MPEG2 as used on DVD. The EAC audio format supports 1, 2 and 6 (5.1) channel configurations. Finally, by using their own format, they are no longer dependant on foreign technologies. pipemanid submitted the following news via our news submit :
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Work began on EVD in 1999, with funding from China's State Trade and Economic Commission and MII, with a view to creating an alternative to DVD. Crucially, EVD frees Chinese player makers from the licence fees that must be paid to make DVD-branded machines. More to the point, perhaps, China doesn't want this part of its blooming consumer electronics industry to be in hock to overseas companies. The format will allow domestic manufacturers to "shake off their previous dependence on foreign technologies", as the Communist Party newspaper, the People's Daily, put it at the time. Like DVD, EVD video data is compressed, but according to the format's developers, Beijing-based E-World and US digital video technology company On2, it is capable of displaying HDTV images, a feat currently not possible with the established standard. |
While China has now standardised their disc format, it will be interesting to see how many movie industries will offer their movies in this disc format. Unlike DVD or even the upcoming HD-DVD and Blu-Ray technologies, EVD does not appear to have any sign of anti-piracy measures and the last thing any movie industry would like to see is a HDTV version of their movie being wide open to copying and piracy.
On the other hand, it will be interesting to see how long it will be before either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray become standard. However unlike EVD, these two upcoming formats feature much higher capacity, a blue laser as well as very strong anti-piracy measures. Then again, EVD does have the advantage of being compatible with existing DVD-ROM drives.
Feel free to discuss about HDTV, EVD and upcoming optical disc formats on our Satellite, HD-TV, Blu-ray and HD-DVD Forum.
Source: The Register
