Audio Video News

The strange and twisting-turning saga of the next-generation optical disc format war just got stranger with reports that China announced plans to develop and launch its own next –generation DVD format in 2008, seemingly placing China's massive manufacturing infrastructure at odds with the emerging Blu-ray and HD DVD standards.

The new standard is reportedly based on the HD DVD spec and red laser technology, but incompatible with the Toshiba-backed format and different enough for Chinese manufacturers to get around licensing fees deemed as exorbitant. Chinese manufacturers claim that 40% of the cost of each manufactured DVD player currently is tied up in licensing fees for the various technologies employed in each player.

Specifics on the Chinese standard were fuzzy, but the Xinhua news agency quoted Lu Da, deputy director of China's government-run National Disc Engineering Center, as stating that the new format would provide "higher definition, better sound and better anti-piracy measures."

Estimates are that China now manufactures between 70-80% of DVD players sold worldwide. Whether that manufacturing might proves strong enough to break-up what Chinese manufacturers refer to as a "foreign monopoly" on current DVD standards, or allows the Chinese format to compete with Blu-ray or HD DVD remains to be seen.

"With such format and related standards," deputy director Lu said, "We could have our own voice in the DVD industry."

But even if China manages to come up with a disc structure, it's unknown how they'd get around paying licensing fees to the companies that have patented technologies that would support such a format. Do they pay to license Dolby and DTS' existing technologies, or do they develop their own digital audio compression algorithm? Do they pay to license technology from Microsoft or MPEG-4, or do they roll their own video compression too? If they license some of these technologies, will they save enough in the long run to make such an uphill battle worth fighting? Will Hollywood license any of its content for release on such a format?

And consider too that should Blu-ray succeed to become the next generation standard in the US and Japan, it has the support of many of the major computer and disc drive manufacturers in the technology industry. Would China want a format completely incompatible with what would be a worldwide computer and entertainment standard?

China's announcement raises more questions than it answers. The only thing that's certain at this point is we haven't yet seen the last unexpected twist the format war is likely to take.