China to get its own version of HD DVD, incompatible with the world standard
In a bid to stop piracy and to provide a lower cost system and discs for the Chinese population, it has been confirmed by the DVD Forum that China will get its own HD DVD format which will be incompatible with the standard the rest of the world has adopted.
The only difference is the modulation scheme. The Chinese version will use Four to Six Modulation instead of Eight to Twelve Modulation.
The financial motivation is that China's consumers have lower purchasing power compared to those in the US and Europe. Supposedly the anti-piracy measures will primarily stop trade of counterfeit discs between China and the rest of the world, as 'internal piracy' could still continue whatever format is adopted.
It's an interesting move. Whether it will have a dramatic effect on piracy or not remains to be seen. At the moment it just sounds like breaking up a standard - as if we don't have enough problems between HD DVD and Blu-ray already. May not affect us much, though.
Maybe folks remember the dvd-forum announced the possibility to incorporate region-coding (like Blu-ray)? One of the 2 main reasons for this is Chinese politics (comparable with Google's "China-only" software over there). Because the forum actually doesn't want to repeat the region-coding terror, they have a solution: hd-dvd China-only ...
By the way, Blu-ray's 3 regions are: NTSC (America's), PAL (Europe, etc) and China (and Russia)... Makes sense?
Posted by: gekke henkie | November 26, 2006 12:58 AM