CVD History: From VCD Boom to Chaoji VCD

Industrial background: the VCD boom, 1993-1998

China Video Disc only makes sense against the scale of the Chinese Video CD market that preceded it. White Book VCD, defined in 1993 by Sony, Philips, JVC and Matsushita, put MPEG-1 video at 352×240 (NTSC) or 352×288 (PAL) on an ordinary CD. It never caught on in the West, but it swept mainland China, Hong Kong and South-East Asia.

The Chinese industry traces its origin to Hefei in September 1993, when Jiang Wanmeng (姜万勐) and C-Cube chairman Edmund Sun (孙燕生) built the first VCD player, sold under the brand Wanyan 万燕. The first 1,000 units at ¥4,000-5,000 each were reportedly bought up by other electronics makers as reference samples. Wanyan did not patent the complete player, and competitors copied it. By 1996 secondary sources count around 600 VCD makers in China, about fifty of them significant, with combined capacity near twelve million units a year. Guangdong dominated assembly; contemporary histories describe “bed-board factories” (床板工厂) where families assembled dozens of players a day from grey-market parts.

Annual sales figures differ widely and none of the commonly cited totals cite primary audited data. One Chinese retrospective puts 1995 at 600,000, 1996 at more than six million, 1997 at ten million and cumulative sales by about 1998 near fifty million; Aho instead gives “less than one million,” 6.5 million and an estimated 18-20 million for those years. A 2004 Sina Tech retrospective calls 1998 the peak at fourteen million units. All versions are kept. A brutal price war followed Aido’s cuts in late 1996-1997; marketing escalated to CCTV “advertising king” (标王) auctions, including Aido’s Jackie Chan “爱多VCD好功夫” campaign at a reported ¥4.5 million. By early 1998 Guangming Daily reported the fight shifting to after-sales membership schemes at Malata and Aido.

C-Cube sat at the centre of this market. Its FY1997 10-K states that VideoCD had “mass market adoption exclusively in China,” that international revenue was 65% of net revenue “due primarily to sales of MPEG-1 decoder products in Asia,” and that one customer alone accounted for 20% of 1997 revenue. Named customers included Idall (Aido), Malata, ChangHong, SAST, “Xiamin Solid” and Samsung. “Xiamin Solid” remains unidentified-possibly Amoi 厦新 or another Xiamen maker. The future CVD consortium was already C-Cube’s customer base.

DVD royalties and the search for a successor

By 1997 two pressures were building: poor VCD picture on larger televisions, and DVD’s arrival. Aho gives three reasons China wanted a CD-based successor: the huge CD mechanism and pressing base; the view that DVD was tightly controlled by a closed foreign consortium; and hope that a domestic format would drive down DVD licence fees. Wikipedia repeats the second and third. Later Chinese formats followed the same logic-EVD (announced 18 November 2003) answered DVD/MPEG-2 costs “reportedly in the range of $13-$20 USD per hardware video player,” and CBHD later did the same for HD. A sceptical retrospective (dwenzhao.cn) notes that CVD/SVCD raised resolution to about 350 lines but shortened playing time, so users cared more that “the cost of watching discs went up.”

C-Cube, the consortium and the 9 June 1998 launch

C-Cube (Milpitas, California; founded 1988 by Edmund Sun, Alexandre Balkanski and others; Nasdaq: CUBE) already sold the CL450, CL480/CL484 and CL680 VideoCD decoders, the ZiVA DVD family, and the CLM4440/CLM4400 half-D1 MPEG-2 encoder chipset. Half-D1 (352-wide) MPEG-2 was therefore a resolution its tools and customers already used. Its 1997 10-K promised “next generation MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 decoders” in 1998; the CVD decoder (“CVDx1” in contemporary filings) was that roadmap, with first sales in Q2 1998.

Western sources (Aho, Wikipedia) say C-Cube completed the CVD specification in 1997 with major Chinese hardware manufacturers. Chinese sources emphasise the manufacturers: a Jinzheng staff article in Shenghuo Shibao (22 July 1998) calls CVD “the first time the Chinese electronics industry set its own industry standard” and lists Jinzheng, Changhong, SAST, BBK, Aido, Malata and Amoi as co-authors. A later Zhihu/Sina history of Aido credits founder Hu Zhibiao (胡志标) with proposing CVD and says “the CVD proposed by Hu Zhibiao was not adopted.” These accounts are not necessarily contradictory-chip vendor plus OEMs-but emphasis differs and is left open.

Wenzhai Bao (文摘报), 16 July 1998, headline 《CVD面世一月起风波》, records that on 9 June 1998 Aido, Changhong, SAST, Malata and Amoi jointly launched CVD in Shanghai and published a jointly drafted technical standard. CVD was glossed as China Video Disc (中国视频视盘), with “the key technology supported by… C-CUBE.” By moving first, the five firms already held 65% of the domestic VCD player market. Shenghuo Shibao’s 29 July survey pitched CVD as using “the same decompression technology as DVD,” horizontal resolution “up to 400 lines,” four-channel sound with four language and four subtitle choices, and backward compatibility with CVD, SVCD, VCD and CD. Players cost ¥500-600 more than VCD decks; Jinzheng priced CVD around ¥1,600-1,800 against VCD at ¥1,000-1,100 and DVD at ¥3,200-4,000, and promised free bundled discs. Launch-member lists differ across Wenzhai Bao (five), Jinzheng (seven), Baidu Baike and Western summaries; all versions are kept.

Government response, HQ-VCD and Chaoji VCD

Only a few days after launch, Wenzhai Bao reports, an unnamed state body warned companies “not to unilaterally issue technical standards covering an entire industry.” MII (信息产业部) would launch SVCD in H2 1998. The dispute was framed in national-interest terms; the government SVCD effort ran under the China Recording Standards Committee (全国录制设备标准化技术委员会) with ESS Technology support. A Beijing coordination meeting in late July then ruled the CVD enterprise standard “reasonable and legal.” HQ-VCD from Philips, Sony, Matsushita and JVC (released March 1998) was merged into SVCD in July, with the government committee keeping final authority-Aho’s “big win to the Video CD Consortium.” One Western guide later credits the Western licensors with developing “SVCD” itself; Chinese sources credit the Recording Standards Committee with HQ-VCD features merged in. Both accounts are kept.

The committee reviewed the text on 14-15 August 1998. MII announced SJ/T 11196-1998 《超级VCD系统技术规范》 on 29 September, effective 1 November. Guangming Daily called it China’s first digital A/V technical standard with independent IP and required CVD and SVCD makers to unify on it. The 3 November article states that two technical changes moved the standard toward CVD, unified the name as 超级VCD, and made existing CVD products conforming and in practice SVCD-compatible. English sources call the umbrella Chaoji Video CD: a compliant player must play at least SVCD, CVD, VCD 2.0, VCD 1.1 and CD-DA. One Baidu page gives SJ/T 11198-1998; the registry and most sources give 11196-both kept.

Compatibility war, decline and afterlife

A unified standard moved the fight into the discs. Wenzhai Bao (20 December 1998) describes early CVD mostly at 1/2 D1 (~280 lines in that article’s framing), SVCD at 2/3 D1 (more than 350 lines), mutual cracking of disc identifiers, encryption, and “interference codes” (干扰数码) so rivals’ players could not read discs. Shinco and others held “Super VCD error-correction compatibility contests” (超级VCD纠错兼容大比武) in Shanghai department stores in early November 1998. For collectors, some 1998-1999 Chinese pressings may fail on rival hardware for reasons that have nothing to do with the CVD format itself. Early CVD resolution claims also clash: about 280 lines (hostile December framing), “up to 400 lines” (July makers) or 350-400 lines (Jinzheng). These are marketing-era TV-line figures from partisan sources.

CVD as a brand name disappeared within months of 1 November 1998 because every CVD disc and player became a 超级VCD product. Aho already wondered in 2001 whether CVD would be orphaned in favour of SVCD. The wider market then turned against CD-based video: Shinco converted all sixteen production lines to DVD in 1998; makers tried MP3, MIDI, portable and networked Super VCD differentiation through mid-1999; Aido’s crisis broke on 17 April 1999; by July 1999 single-disc players fell below ¥800 and DVD began replacing VCD. No audited CVD sales figures exist-only the 300,000-600,000 installed-base cluster and conflicting claims about Super VCD’s 1998 share.

CVD’s second life had nothing to do with China. Roughly 2001-2008, Western hobbyists on VideoHelp, Doom9 and KVCD.net adopted “CVD” to mean 352×480/576 MPEG-2 on CD-R authored as non-standard SVCD-DVD-legal video, fewer artefacts per bit than SVCD at the same bitrate, and cleaner scaling to 704/720. SatStorm’s VideoHelp guide (21 June 2002) set the de-facto recipe: “352 X 576/480 @ 2520kb/s.” Lasting effects: Chaoji had to accommodate CVD’s installed base; the foreign-chip-plus-OEM versus ministry-led-standard pattern recurs with EVD and CBHD; half-D1 MPEG-2 remains useful for archives. Lineage: White Book VCD (1993) → CVD (1997/1998) / government SVCD / HQ-VCD → Chaoji VCD, SJ/T 11196-1998 → IEC 62107 (2000) → EVD (2003) → CBHD (2009).

Further reading on historic video formats

If you want to learn more about historic video formats, get The History of Physical Video Formats from the Frontier by Stephen Driver on Amazon:

• Amazon.de
• Amazon.co.uk
• Amazon.com
• Amazon.ca