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HD DVD: Still made in China? (Updated) - March 6, 2008

Toshiba may have quit making HD DVD players for Japan and the West but the format may yet have life in China. According to the minutes of the DVD Forum Steering Committee meeting on Feb. 27, now posted on the Forum web site, the committee approved some final technical changes to the long-gestating China-only version of the format, a.k.a. China HD DVD Format and CH DVD. Thus blessed, the format was then essentially turned over to a consortium of Chinese industry and government groups to oversee future developments, subject to "reporting" back to the DVD Forum on their activities.

Henceforth, China HD DVD will be overseen by the China High Definition DVD Industry Assn. (CHDA), and the Optical Memory National Engineering Research Center (OMNERC), which is backed by the government.

All of which suggests to Media Wonk that someone still expects there to be a henceforth with respect to HD DVD in China.

What is China HD DVD? It's basically HD DVD with some Chinese-developed audio/video codecs in place of the Japanese and Western-developed ones approved for the original HD DVD format as well as for Blu-ray. The original goal of its Chinese backers was both to promote Chinese technology and to reduce the royalty stack Chinese manufacturers would have to pay to Japanese and Western patent owners to make HD DVD players for the Chinese market.

When Toshiba decided to pull the plug, however, many people (OK, Media Wonk) thought that was the end of China HD DVD as well. But the plug-pulling happened well before the Steering Committee meeting where final specs for China were approved and they went ahead and approved them anyway.

According to some auto-translated versions of Chinese press reports about the DVD Forum meeting, the CHDA is still planning to roll out CH DVD at the end of May (which seems a tad ambitious to Media Wonk, but still...).

What would it mean to high-def formats generally if a version of HD DVD were to live on in China? In contrast to the DVD Forum, the Blu-ray Disc Assn. never approved the adoption of Chinese technology in Blu-ray. So any Blu-ray players that turn up in China will have Japanese brand names, which means they'll be far more expensive than locally produced and branded CH DVD players. If high-def players take off in China (still a big "if") it could create a significant installed base of (essentially) HD DVD players, given the size of the Chinese market.

Sources tell Media Wonk, in fact, that at least some major U.S. studios, alert to the potential, are not writing off the possibility of eventually releasing product in China on CH DVD. That "some" could even include stalwart Blu-ray supporters here, Media Wonk is told.

And wouldn't that be something.

UPDATE: A Toshiba spokesperson in Japan tells Media Wonk via email that "the file specifications, application specifications and content protection system are under discussion for standardization at CHDA." In other words, most of the software in the players would be Chinese while the physical format would be Toshiba's.

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