China approves AVS codec
Posted by Mark Nelson on 8th December 2005 | Permanent Link
The Peoples Daily tells us that China’s Ministry of Information has approved the AVS video coding standard. This proprietary standard is an attempt to sidestep the increasingly large burden of royalties that China pays for MPEG-2 patent licensing.
At this time the AVS standard is set for internal deployment, for both streaming video and perhaps playable discs. Whether this technology shows up in the export market is still to be determined.
An interesting note at the end of the article:
In its 11th Five-Year Plan, China stated clearly that the development of digital audio-visual sectors would be given priority up to 2010.
The Five-Year Plan has changed quite a bit if it now dictates video codec standards!
December 8th, 2005 at 9:43 am
Any idea where we can get more info on AVS? Every search I do for “AVS codec” or similar is met with references to avisynth.
December 8th, 2005 at 10:44 am
Jim, as said by Mark its a proprietary standard. So we can’t expect technical details to be available online.
This is a part of China’s plans to roll out their own DVD format (as if HD vs Blu-Ray wasnt enough).
December 8th, 2005 at 11:50 am
Maybe you should try to find out what happened with the broken up relationship between On2 and Beijing E-World. BEW had a license agreement to use On2’s codec (brandname VP6 and VP5) for the EVD-standard (candidate successor for DVD and supposed to support High Definition).
For some “handy” reason (not a smart one on the side of On2 if you ask me) BEW not only got the technical library of On2’s IP, but also the SOURCE codes. When you know BEW was “closely” related to AND the Chinese Government AND the AVS workgroup, I’m afraid the picture is very clear….
December 9th, 2005 at 6:47 am
>Maybe you should try to find out what happened
>with the broken up relationship between On2
>and Beijing E-World.
This is a good conspiracy theory! (And I don’t mean to put it down by using that term.)
I can easily see how a company like On2 could be lured into opening their kimono a little wider than they should by the prospect of becoming part of an emerging Chinese standard.
I hope they have some good patent protection on their IP, because that would seem to be the only way they could protect their goods in a case like this.
December 9th, 2005 at 9:43 am
> I hope they have some good patent protection on their IP,
> because that would seem to be the only way they could
> protect their goods in a case like this.
Will those patents be valid in China (without co-operation by chinese authorities)? Moreover, I am not sure if they can go to court against the govt. itself, which seems to be the case here (govt backed atleast).
On the bright side, I feel this will not have any major impact on On2’s business as AVS is gonna have zero support outside China (but if AVS standard is made public, in that case On2’s IP will also be in open, ouch!).
December 13th, 2005 at 8:23 pm
I looked into this a bit. It turns out On2 has a good number of patents, both issued and pending. And with video codecs it’s generally possible to tell if there’s any infringement, even without seeing the source code. It’s also a big uphill challenge for adoption of something new like this, even within China. So my personal view is it’s much ado about not much.
February 22nd, 2006 at 11:15 am
[...] Since mid-2002, the Audio Video Coding Standard (AVS) has been inching its way through a relatively open technical-development process. China’s Ministry of Information Industry recently completed a one-year review and quietly approved AVS in December as a candidate for a national compression standard, passing it to the Standards Administration of China, which should formally OK it in the coming months. [...]