CBHD is China's Own Blu-ray Disc
Selling any sort of media is tough in China due to piracy.
Blu-ray Disc has yet to take off in China due to a couple of factors. One being price, with Blu-ray players costing many times that of a DVD player. Pirated movies in China are predominantly on DVD and cost just a fraction of what a legitimate copy would cost.
Even pirated high-definition movies that are meant to play on Blu-ray players are pressed on regular DVDs. Such DVDs contain recompressed and downsampled versions of the original encode from a Blu-ray Disc, but possess image quality noticeably better than regular DVD thanks to using a more advanced codec.
But Blu-ray Disc may have more than just piracy to contend with in cracking the Chinese market. China now also has its own high-definition disc format called China Blue High Definition (CBHD), which is backed by the China High-definition DVD Industry Association (CHDA), as well as the Optical Memory National Engineering Research Center. Interestingly enough, the technology shares similarities with HD DVD, so CBHD is also backed by the DVD Forum.
Like HD DVD, CBHD discs have a capacity of 30 GB and can use existing DVD production lines. According to Gizmag’s report, the CHDA boasts: “(The) CBHD disc can be compatible with the DVD disc in physical format so that they can share production lines. It is well known that China is the country with the largest yield of DVD discs. Chinese manufacturers produce around ten billion DVD optical discs every year, which is about 30 percent of global yield.”
Does this mean that movie pirates will take to CBHD better than it has to Blu-ray Disc? After all, legitimate or not, producing a Blu-ray Disc requires new production hardware.
Consumers, on the other hand, will definitely need new hardware. CBHD players are expected to cost 40 percent less than current Blu-ray Disc players, largely thanks to the difference in licensing fees.
Gizmag reports that Warner Bros. is on-board the format with plans to release 100 CBHD titles in China this year, such as the Harry Potter, The Golden Compass and Speed Racer selling for between $7.25 and $10.15 (50-70 Yuan).
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Chinese want to create clone of all major innovations happen outside china toReply
have a control over it.
google clone, russian rockets, processor, even wifi security standards, ... list goes on...
why should others buy Chinese made stuff? Think about it... -
evilshuriken Is it weird that I read the quote in the 4th paragraph with a bad Chinese accent?Reply
Does it make me a bad person?
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talys EvilshurikenIs it weird that I read the quote in the 4th paragraph with a bad Chinese accent?Does it make me a bad person?Reply
THe 4th paragraph is written like a 1990's motherboard manual :) -
IzzyCraft Lol blu-ray is costly because it's not consumed enough dvd prices used to be blu-ray prices when it was transition years of vhs to dvd.Reply -
enyceckk101 I heard something about 500gb disk coming out soon. I will take over blu ray.Reply
" GE microholographic storage promises cheap 500GB discs, Blu-ray and DVD compatibility "
"Ah, holographic storage -- you've held so much promise for cheap optical media since you were first imagined in research papers published in the early 60s. Later today, GE will be trying to keep the dream alive when it announces a new technique that promises to take holographic storage mainstream. GE's breakthrough in microholographics -- which, as the name implies, uses smaller, less complex holograms to achieve three-dimensional digital storage -- paves the way for players that can store about 500GB of data on standard-sized optical discs while still being able to read DVD and Blu-ray media. Better yet, researchers claim a price of about 10 cents per gigabyte compared to the nearly $1 per gigabyte paid when Blu-ray was introduced. The bad news? We're talking 2011 or 2012 by the time microholographics devices and media are introduced and even then it'll only be commercialized for use by film studios and medical institutions. In other words, you'll likely be streaming high-def films to your OLED TV long before you have a microholographic player in the living room."
from engadget -
astrotrain1000 Warner Bros wants to charge the Chinese 7-10 dollars for a high def movie and $30 for Americans, and they wonder why piracy is growing in the states. Piracy will continue to grow until they start charging reasonable prices. Its like buying an Intel extreme cpu they are way over priced so people don't buy them, they buy a cheaper one and pirate the extra speed by overclocking.Reply -
michaelahess Blu-Ray is costly because of Sony, not low consumption. If we had educated consumers instead of lemmings, HD-DVD would have won out.Reply
Neither is worth crap. Digital distribution is the only way to go for soooo many reasons. Unless we all get "capped" :) -
megamanx00 I agree with michaelhess. Still Toshiba did shoot itself in the foot on HD DVD by not taking the actions it needed to soon enough.Reply -
krazynutz Lemmings? Blu-ray is the superior technology. It won the war because people didn't want to make the same mistake they did back when VHS won. People care about quality now. Crazy, I know. But it doesn't matter because in a few years (if not sooner) digi-dist will prevail. I hate optical media ;PReply