• China to launch CBHD amidst pessimism

    Jayesh Limaye, Jul 29, 2008 1502 hrs IST

    hina is soon going to sort of resurrect the dead HD-DVD by launching its Chinese version - CBHD

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According to a report on enorth.com.cn, China is soon going to sort of resurrect the dead HD-DVD by launching its Chinese version - CBHD (previously known as CH-DVD). Shanghai United Optical Disc has already laid out the foundation of the first production line. As you may be aware, CBHD is a high definition optical disc format announced in September 2007 by the Optical Memory National Engineering Research Center (OMNERC) of Tsinghua University in China. It is a joint venture between the DVD Forum and OMNERC. It is similar to the HD DVD differing in the compression and copy-protection schemes (apparently more powerful than those in HD DVD). This is a format developed mainly for China and is a way to reduce payment of royalties for foreign patents and also to combat piracy. Royalty fees for producing licensed CBHD players will be about 55 Yuan (USD 8.10), which is much lower than BD licensing rates. The result is that it will be cheaper than Blu-ray and so will be the players. This China-developed format will go into production in the fourth quarter of 2008, initially for the Chinese market. Since most of the optical drive-based media players worldwide are Chinese, it would be interesting to see how popular this format becomes. The major obstacles for CBHD are the other major format - Blu-ray Disc (BD) and the lack of support from the movie studios. Taiwan-based drive manufacturers seem to be unsure of whether this new format will succeed or will it fail.

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CBHD CH-DVD OMNERC Tsinghua University in China Optical Memory National Engineering Research Center



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