Taiwan joins Chinese effort on proprietary DVD format



To try to stop the royalities flow from China and Taiwan to for e.g. the USA, 19 Taiwanese companies have come up with a royalty-free DVD format called EVD which is compatible with a similar effort going on in China, called AVD.

This way the companies should not have to pay about 20$ - 30$, and the players should still be able to playback normal DVD's, altough they are not allowed to use the DVD logo.

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The consensus here is that with the help of Taiwan, China will attempt to repeat an earlier effort in which it developed Super Video CD (SVCD) as a foil to the Video CD format, allowing manufacturers to duck royalty payments to Philips, JVC, Sony and Matsushita. "Mainland China is hoping for a breakthrough," said Wang Shyh-Yeu,the R&D director at disk maker Ritek Corp., which is part of the newly formed EVD consortium. "We hope we can create some patents through this standard but, to be honest, it is very difficult. The compression part is dominated by U.S. and Japanese companies."

An Acer Labs spokesman said, "It is reasonable to believe the Chinese are looking for a way around the patents," but he declined to say whether Acer is working on EVD. Taiwan's largest supplier of DVD chip sets, MediaTek Inc., could not be reached for comment.

Although China represents a small share of DVD player sales, it is growing in prominence. Global DVD player shipments last year rose to 30 million units from 19 million in 2000, according to Cahners In-Stat Group. About 3.5 million were sold in China, where Video CD players are still mainstream. The projection for 2002 DVD player shipments is 50 million units, with about 8 million going to China.

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It's very intresting to see how they try to get rid of the royalities and it seems only to be good for consumers. Read the entire article here.

Source: EEtimes.com

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