Just because Toshiba has
given up on HD DVD and moved on, doesn't mean the
format war is totally over for red. According to a report by a Japanese TV station, its successor,
China Blue HD is actually leading Blu-ray in marketshare in that country. Of course, based on the article found by our friends at
FormatWarCentral, all we have to go on is a machine translated description of a video in a language we don't speak describing the apparent initial success of the government backed format in a socialist republic. If you need more evidence than that to declare the format war officially restarted, you're probably a communist, but before we drag you in front of the Un-American activities committee check out the video for a peek at the slick new CBHD cases that
The Onion will surely be shipping its videos in very soon.
[Via
FormatWarCentral]
posted Jul 25th 2009 6:03PM
Must they really repeat this stupid war again? Good thing it doesn't affect me.
Cause it's China and they demand attention.
Was that your attempt at humour, Walrus?
No, I'm sure he was being 100% serious.
@Walrus: They're already starting... haven't you heard of the 4G iPhone incident?
coo, coo, cachoo...
China Blue = Blu-Ray for china. Who the hell cares?
@Cash
Yeah but who gonna stick to them for doing the same to other neighboring country.
this is done for the same reason that China has its own 3G standard...it's manufacturers have to give up up to 30 percent of the revenue from selling DVD players in license fees to whoever created the standard...Sony/Matsushita/Toshiba, etc. By creating their own standard and selling it within their countries, the manufacturers gain by keeping that percentage of revenue, which is increasingly important since margins on these products are very slim to begin with. Not everything has to do with copyright infringement.
@The Walrus
You're a big meany.
Come on Cash, If we were to revenge generations after each barbarian conflict, 75% of the earth population would vanish. Japanese, russians, americans, germans, chinese, spanish, french... they all commited war crimes. Japaneses are still a bit stiff in politics (they should say sorry, its actually good to do that in modern politic) but they are not in the last century feodal to modernism transition anymore.
Well if you guys watched the video you'd see that the exact same Warner Bros. movie released on both BluRay and CBHD is $28 for the BluRay version and $7 for the CBHD version.
So you can buy FOUR completely legal movies in an HD format if you were Chinese and you bought a CBHD player, instead of being able to buy one. Not exactly surprising that Warner Bros. was happy to release movies in the cheaper format.
Less licensing fees on the players, less licensing fees on the discs, and lower manufacturing costs since it can be made in the same disc manufacturing facility as CDs and DVDs like HD-DVDs were.
Quit whining just because people came up with a cheaper format for a country where most people can't afford $28 BluRay discs. If there wasn't a cheaper format people would just pirate everything, so the government there wanted a legal alternative which might actually let legitimate stores sell legitimate HD movies.
The only thing that I'm curious about is how the codec looks, the discs themselves can hold as much as HD-DVD discs so I don't think data density is a problem.
CBHD is VCD all over again. China is a huge market, but its a huge irrelevant market when it comes to media. CBHD is just another format for piracy, which makes it the winner by default (not to mention the support of the Chinese government).
An irrelevant market... this just shows how conceited you guys are.
people here are brainwashed to think they have democracy and everything and other people are brainwashed. 720p AVCHD on D5/D9 work pretty well for many people
Yeah, but at least we can still spot out poor syntax
@htd in case you're assuming that it's on d5 and d9 running in 720p
Here are the CBD HD specs www.chinahda.org.cn/en/why-cbhd.html
CBD is an improvement over HD-DVD.
Item CBHD
Laser blue-violet laser
SL/DL capacity 15/30GB
Resolution (max.) 1920×1080 (1080P)
Modulation 4-6 modulation
Video compression AVS */H.264/VC-1/ MPEG-2
Audio compression AVS*/DRA*/ Dolby /DTS
Navigation CETC navi.
Content protection AACS, DKAA
Item BD
Laser blue-violet laser
SL/DL capacity 25/50GB
Resolution (max.) 1920×1080 (1080P)
Modulation BD modulation
Video compression H.264/VC-1/MPEG-2
Audio compression Dolby /DTS
Navigation BD navi.
Content protection AACS
Item DVD
Laser red laser
SL/DL capacity 4.7/8.5GB
Resolution (max.) 720×576
Modulation DVD modulation
Video compression MPEG2
Audio compression Dolby AC3/DTS
Navigation DVD navi.
Content protection CSS
interesting find, Intel and Tosh are on the steering committee of CBHD.
List of the Steering Committee Members
* Jiangsu Shinco Electronics Group Co., Ltd.
* TCL Multimedia Technology Holding Ltd.
* China Record Corporation
* Warner Home Video
* China Film Crest Digital Media Co., Ltd.
* China Audio & Video Publishing House
* Audio Video Coding Standard Working Group of China
* Tsinghua Optical Memory National Engineering Research Center
* China Electronics Technology Group Corporation No.3 Research Institute
* ?Mosys Inc.
* ?Shanghai United Optical Disc Co., Ltd.
* Industrial Technology Research Institute
* MediaTek Inc. China
* NEC Electronics Corporation
* Memory-tech Corporation
* Intel Corporation
* Microsoft Corporation
* Sanyo Electric Co., Ltd. Electronic Device Company
* Thomson Corporation
* Toshiba Corporation
* Innvo-Asia Electronics Technology Shenzhen Co. Ltd.
* Zhenjiang Jiangkui Group
* Qianfeng Digital Technology (Dongguan) Co., Ltd.
Got hand it Tosh if you can't beat Sony find another group to join and repeat process.
Tosh can keep on tryin' but will always end up on the losing team. Sony > Toshiba.
Content Protection? In China? Surely they jest?
It really makes me wonder if HD-DVD should have just fought it out in China to begin with by pushing more aggressive pricing. BluRay's costs make it a lot harder for it to win the war there just because manufacturing costs are so much cheaper with HD-DVD/CBHD.
CBHD is basically HD-DVD but with more copy protection to prevent counterfeiting, and lower prices on everything (to promote actually buying a legitimate disc).
Personally I actually think it's cool that they made a cheap royalty free format so people could buy affordable movies instead of pirating them. With all the whining about how China doesn't care about intellectual property you'd think people would STFU when they actually go and try to make it possible for people to buy legitimate discs but apparently all the BluRay fanboys are in a rage.
Here's a clue, if they didn't have CBHD all that would happen is that people would just pirate ripped copies of BluRay movies, probably put onto DVD9's or something as H264 files. Because $28 is just too f'ing expensive for a country where most people only make 4 figures a year.
Actually I looked it up, people *DO* pirate BluRay rips put on DVD9's in China and somehow rigged to play in BluRay players. So these CBHD discs are selling better because they're the only real affordable legitimate alternative.
What is most interesting, is this (HD DVD) is a format, because of it's success in China, can be replicated in a similar manner of semi-proprietary, sub-formats in other high piracy regions across the globe to offer, inexpensive, legal alternatives to pirating blu-ray. Regions like India or South America, where HD adoption is on the rise among the middle class as the price of HDTV continue to decline, yet like China, are still very high in piracy for the actual medium. And the CBHD model, would be perfect for bringing next-gen media into those regions.
The biggest problem that legitimate media sales have traditionally had in these regions, is the cost to consumer of the actual medium, was far more expensive than the piracy alternate. However, following the model laid down by CBHD, other regions around the world can begin taking a bite out of rampant piracy, as they transition into next-gen media. As CBHD is clearly illustrating, there is no reason in other high piracy regions across the globe, why the term "next-gen", should not also be synonymous with, "more affordable than piracy". Stricter laws with harsher punishments against piracy of next-gen media formats, coupled with an actually next-gen media format that is affordable, over the next decade would go a long way to curbing media piracy in these regions. Even now, pirating blu-ray, if you want to get the full experience and not just settle with the watered down, blu-ray converted to DVD9 experience, is still pretty expensive - a lot more expensive than the costs of new release CBHDs. So there is already a very good incentive to just buy the legal copy.
Ultimately, like with blu-ray vs. HD DVD, digital distribution is going to prove the big winner in the long term in these areas. Having the media sit in the cloud, means that the media can be sold at or below the piracy threshold for regions where piracy is an issue. The only setback would be the lack of the proliferation of broadband internet backbone in many of the affected regions. Of course, over the next five years, 4G and even 5G wireless broadband networks are going to close that gap, as wireless broadband networks are far less expensive and easier to expand, vs. their landline-based cousin, and are quickly becoming the method of choice for many private companies as well as governments around the globe to bring broadband service to their masses.
In the meantime however, creating more low cost, license-free, semi-proprietary, HD media standards out of HD DVD, would be the way forward in transitioning most of the world's regions worst effected by piracy, into legitimate consumers who purchase legal versions of their media as they transition into the next generation media. If Toshiba were smart, they could make a fortune helping other regions to convert HD DVD into their own semi-proprietary format. If Hollywood were smart, they'd be watching the success of CBHD, and jumping over themselves to not only support that medium in China, but encourage the governments, and local industry in other parts of the world where piracy is high, to adopt a similar approach to CBHD. I saw an equation the entertainment industry were promoting a while back detailing how much money they were losing for every person over the period of a lifetime, that turned to media piracy. The number (according to them) was pretty significant. Significant enough that it would seem worth their time to help promote any standard that is going to help curb piracy in some of the world's most affected regions.
@Swagman
going by your reasoning it would be great to create lots of standard. Then none of the media are compatible or inoperable like in South America where each government has a mix and match of HDTV specs from Europe to Japan, and the TVs have to have matching tuners to be able to watch TV in the respective country otherwise TVs purchased from elsewhere are useless. More standards and more products = more junk in the land fill.
It seems the war rages on even though nobody wants it.
The video was by a Japanese news agency doing a report on CBHD in China for those who don't speak the language. The video is mainly unbiased, but criticises the format in comparison to Blu-Ray.
They should of done a KIRFY Blu Ray instead of starting a format war (if there is one). Stick to your day job, China.
Great. Now I don't know if i should get Blu-Ray or CBHD
I hate China and I hate Bluray with region lock. Period.
No HD for you then I guess.
Yes, we should be worry about a new format standard in a country where 95% of the population buy or download pirated movies.
But some people actually do care about quality paying the price like the fans and so will actually pay some of their hard earned money for it.
I'm more worried about people in my own country who can't even speak the language properly. "Blahblahblah this is teh internetz n who carez if I spell bad here." Sadly it's starting to spill out into the real world. Viva Idiocracy! (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/)
95% of the population? well since 65% of them live on less than $1 a day, and ~96% of the total population lives on less than $20 a day I am just going to assume that 95% of the population does not have internet access or even a computer.
@jason, you've never been to China, have you? To you, $1 a day and $20 a day is nothing and you could never afford a computer on that. In China, it's different. You can literally live like a king if you go on vacation and bring just a couple hundred bucks with you.
Movies are cheap. Computers are cheap. Internet is cheap. Everything is cheap compared to our lifestyle and the amount of folks who have computers / internet access is a bit higher than you may think.
@Meikat
Wow dude thanks for the link thought it sounded interesting and just watched the whole movie online. lol It was so damn funny and sadly I could total see that actually happening a generation or two. lol
@Kris
Buddy, I lived there for 2 years. Computers are def. way more expensive in China. In the States you can get decent $400 laptops all day long. Price the same stuff in China (even the underground electronics markets). There is no way you're getting a decent Acer/HP/Dell laptop for 2700RMB. So are iPods and stuff because they can't sell on the margins we do here due to volume sold. Everything else is def. cheaper though...except real Nike and Adidas clothing.
Hookers are cheap......
Head massages ftw! Seriously though, while, say, food might be cheaper, things like computers really do seem to end up more expensive, maybe because traditionally there has been no middle between poor and rich and they figure rich people will pay whatever. Labor is cheap too...
I'm not buying blu ray movies until the DRM is gone and the price goes down.
Don't forget not on a physical disc. Downloading FTW.
Enjoy being throttled and reaching your download cap and paying $xx per gigabyte excess of cap.
I wonder if blu-ray will ever take off... There doesn't seem to be a large enough back-catalogue for it to be worth it. May as well just go to the cinemas (which, coincidentally, are still thriving) until the net infrastructure is fast enough. In Australia that hopefully will only be a few years away.
@Aguiluz: I don't have bandwidth caps from my ISP.
its george bush in the pic. so thats where he moved.
I'm still waiting for North Koreas format, thats the format that will win, or at least what their government says.
NK will probably bum off either from EVD or CBHD since technology is available from the other side of their border
@Dylan Gorton (who posted a referral link)
Shoo, shoo! Stop spamming! >.
Is it easier for them to make illegal copies in CBHD format?
No it's harder since the security was beefed up since the format is specifically meant for the Chinese market.
Believe it or not, the Chinese government actually likes legitimate and taxable sales more than sketchy and largely underground mob-run counterfeiting which mostly just benefits whatever police chief they bribed to look the other way.
xconan@
CBD is an improvement over HD-DVD.
Item CBHD
Laser blue-violet laser
SL/DL capacity 15/30GB
Resolution (max.) 1920×1080 (1080P)
Modulation 4-6 modulation
Video compression AVS */H.264/VC-1/ MPEG-2
Audio compression AVS*/DRA*/ Dolby /DTS
Navigation CETC navi.
Content protection AACS, DKAA
Not that I doubt you, but in what way is CBHD an improvement over HD DVD? Except for the DKAA copy protection, the specs you quoted make it look exactly the same.
@ popeye9000
you're right it's not an improvement since it's basically Tosh's HD-DVD format but with an added support of AVS, DRA, DKAA It probably should be reworded as HD-DVD plus. As far as authoring goes CETC navi is supposedly DVD nav simplified? EVD is also suing them for use of CETC nav and AVS...
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.itzhe.cn%2Fnews%2F20080814%2F199468_2.html%23&sl=zh-CN&tl=en&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
VCD(CD with MPEG 2 video) was bigger than DVD in China, so what's the point? Besides, who actually buys a physical disk anyway?
People with nice TVs, who can't stand the shitty PQ of digital copies.
disc space: BD > HD-DVD => BD wins
cost: CBHD < BD ~> CBHD wins unless BD cuts its price
The war is still on ,the format that will win in the end is hdd,as it has the biggest memory size,(yes i know its not media but people are dling movies wiht it,so its is a factor in this media war)its just easer to keep are your movies on a hdd,put em on ipod,mp4 etc mobile,pc,xbox,network it and run all your movies off the hd tv at even,all while not having to swap a disk,the real war looks like this
hddvd(out of the runing)vs blue ray vs cbhd Vs Hdd, my gut is telling em hdd ftw!
Wouldn't that be Brue Ray?
See, I don't understand where the L -> R stereotype came from. Both Chinese and Japanese have the "L-" sound (I speak both). In fact, Chinese has both "L-" and the "R-" sounds, whereas Japanese only has the "R-".
The only possible reason I can think of for this is that "Romaji", romanized Japanese, uses "R"s where "L"s would be more appropriate. So "La" becomes "Ra", "Li" becomes "Ri", and so forth. The English pronunciation of Romaji is not representative of East Asian language pronunciations, however.
I always noticed that people who speak the southern dialects (Cantonese, etc) have more trouble than someone raised where Mandarin was the native dialect/language take your pick. The Japanese however (and many Koreans for that matter) have huge difficulties separating the two, and in a lot of J-Pop I noticed the singers will use more "l"s than "r"s like they wanna sound hip but it backfires... hmmm, language.
It's not so much "lies" as much as it is "we won't talk about it and we don't want to hear anyone else talk about it". It's more being overprotective than intentional malice, but it still looks extremely awkward from an outside perspective.
They also still sell VCD and SVCD disc also in China. So doesn't mean CBHD will go global.
Blu-ray??? MKV people, get with the program.
f' blu-ray, sony is too powerful and you know it.
it's a shame that the 'almost' exact same quality, and cheaper on ALL fronts, was pushed out by a bigger giant and that tosh can't market worth shit with their smaller wallet. there is always alternatives, third part promises you that. but hey, succumb if you want and pay the +dollars ;d
We are talking about the same Sony who just released the PSPgo/Mylo...they also run with scissors.
I have lived in China, and you are an idiot
if HDDVD won the format war in the western countries and japan, we'll be having CBHD vs HDDVD now.
CBHD basically *is* HD-DVD and you can tell by the fact that Toshiba is on the steering committee for the format.
It probably wouldn't even exist if HD-DVD hadn't lost, since it uses identical hardware to HD-DVD with only the software/file structure side of it being redone to reduce royalties and increase security.
But Toshiba is still providing almost all the hardware side of things, so this is really more like a continuation of the HD-DVD vs BluRay war with Toshiba's main army having surrendered, but now with Toshiba supporting the proxy army of CBHD to make life harder for BluRay in China.
With so many customers I think even sans royalties Toshiba is happy just to be able to provide the hardware and disc manufacturing side of things.
I eat Chinese food, and have no opinion.
Im surpised they are not calling this Red Ray. Those commies.
they could also market it as couch-potato ray...
I love how @gamechld is highly ranked
HEY! My comment about how China lies to its people was removed!
Come on, Engadget, don't do that just because they may 'block' you...
This is also a country that would limit the availability of Bluray if they weren't in the lead, don't you think? That could possibly be why it is in the lead.
In China CHBD plays YOU.
Why would I give a damn about what is going on in China with their format wars?! Uh-Merica! F*ck yeah!
Just get everything down to the same costs as DVDs these days and I'll happily buy any format still around.
This is irrelevant to anyone not in China...IE most of us
*sigh* it's communistic republic! you dumb f'in AMERICAN! and please don't say it's the same thing because then you really need to go back to school!
not sure if this indicates anything, but a search for CBHD on taobao (China's ebay， sorta) turned up 151 hits. Blu-ray in Chinese, 蓝光, got 144912. And just to be sure Blu-ray in English got 10,293.
it's possible because blue-ray got a head start, does CBHD players play HD-DVD? HD-DVD compatibility would be great since it's the main question and if it's compatible with Brue-ray as some said or Blue-Ray, it's a plus for the mainland Chinese market.
Can't wait to pirate the fuck outta China Brue-Ray and teach dem chanks a lesson!
I live in China and the real indicator is what you find in the copy DVD stores. I haven't seen any copy CBHD but lots of copy BD.
Who cares if Blu Ray discs are $28 if you are a renter (like me). Hello? Netflix?
China is like a different world.
(Looking outside his window and notices two MSS agents approaching.)
(Swallows cyanide...)
Wait! An "open market" with a public option and that public option is burying the private sector. Hmmm. Shame there's a whole group of idiots who won't accept that as reality and see how it might be the same in other instances.
CBHD was finalised like 2 Years ago.
Toshiba and the Chinese Government agree to this long ago that china would basicaly be HD-DVD exclusive with the addition of some extra copy protection and other small slight variations on the the standard.
As part of the agreement all CBHD players should be 100%
This is just news becuase they actualy have gone forward with it even after HD-DVD was abandoned by Toshiba
Should read: As part of the agreement all CBHD players should be 100% compatible with HD-DVD
Great. Now I don't know if i should get Blu-Ray or CBHD. Is it easier for them to make illegal copies in CBHD format?
http://www.buycheapguide.com