EVD Technical Specifications

What can and cannot be specified

The full text of SJ/T 11299.1-4-2005 was not obtained for this research. The picture below is assembled from the standards platform record, 2003 and 2006 EE Times/EDN reporting, On2 SEC filings, Wikipedia (English, Chinese, Japanese) and E-World promotional material. Where a value comes only from alliance marketing it is labelled as such. Conflicting figures are kept side by side rather than forced into a single number.

120 mm DVD disc; EVD uses DVD-5 and DVD-9 media with a 650 nm red laser
EVD is not a new optical geometry: it uses standard 120 mm DVD discs and a 650 nm red laser. Photo: William Hook, CC BY-SA, via Openverse and Flickr.

Physical disc

Parameter Value Source
Diameter 120 mm English Wikipedia
Construction Two bonded 0.6 mm polycarbonate substrates, 1.2 mm total Japanese Wikipedia
Laser 650 nm (red) Japanese Wikipedia; TechRadar
Capacity 4.7 GB (DVD-5); 8.5 GB (DVD-9) Japanese Wikipedia
Relationship to DVD Is simply a DVD disc Chinese and English Wikipedia
Standard part SJ/T 11299.1 (disc) Standards platform sister record
Claimed playing time Two-hour HD movie on one disc / about 105 minutes of HD EDN 2003 / Zhang Baoquan

Manufacturing claims conflict. TechRadar (2006) and Baidu (HD-EVD, 2008) say production cost and process matched ordinary DVD and avoided expensive retooling. A 2019 Sohu retrospective says EVD discs needed single-sided multilayer processes much more complex than ordinary DVD. Both strands are kept. Playing-time claims (two hours versus about 105 minutes) are likewise left open.

Capacity and bitrate arithmetic

No official EVD video bitrate was published. The table below is calculation from the marketing claims, not documentation.

Case Calculation Implied average total bitrate
DVD-5, 2 hours (EDN) 4.7×10⁹ bytes × 8 ÷ 7,200 s ≈ 5.2 Mbit/s
DVD-9, 2 hours 8.5×10⁹ × 8 ÷ 7,200 ≈ 9.4 Mbit/s
DVD-9, 105 minutes 8.5×10⁹ × 8 ÷ 6,300 ≈ 10.8 Mbit/s
DVD-5, 105 minutes 4.7×10⁹ × 8 ÷ 6,300 ≈ 6.0 Mbit/s
DVD 1× channel / DVD-Video max mux 11.08 Mbit/s / 10.08 Mbit/s DVD-Video spec

E-World claimed EVD raises the stream rate by nearly double over DVD. An MPEG-2 1080i stream at 5-11 Mbit/s would sit well below period broadcast HD rates (typically 15-19 Mbit/s for ATSC MPEG-2). If the two-hour claim and EE Times’ MPEG-2 MP@HL description are both correct, commercial titles were heavily compressed, often 720p, or both. None of this is confirmed by a measured disc.

File system and data structure

Item Detail
File system UDF, as DVD
Standard part SJ/T 11299.2-2005 高密度数字激光视盘文件系统规范
Drafting units Beijing E-World; Jiangsu Shinco Electronics Group
Named drafters 徐翔, 秦志尚
Directory names / VIDEO_TS relationship Not documented in retrieved sources

This is the largest public gap. Mounting a genuine EVD disc in a PC DVD drive and listing the UDF tree would document the directory structure for the first time in an English-language source. An academic paper, Comparisons of EVD and DVD (Communication University of China), emphasises logic structure but only an abstract was retrieved.

Video codec: the central dispute

Position Source Date
Will use On2 VP5 and VP6 EDN (Junko Yoshida) 18 Nov 2003
Launch players used MPEG-2 MP@HL-based encoding on LSI Logic; On2 an alternative; long-term AVS EE Times (Clendenin) Nov 2003
EVD uses MPEG-2 MP@HL secured with proprietary encryption EE Times (Cai Yan) Nov 2006
Improved MPEG-2 coding with LSI; no Chinese chip supplier Chinese Wikipedia 2005 snapshot
Original plan was VP5/VP6 English Wikipedia (undated summary)
VP6 port to contract DSPs never completed; minimum royalties not triggered On2 SEC filings 2005-2009
Patents concern filter transforms and encode/decode optimisation E-World via PjTime 2007
Relies on China’s AVS (unsupported by other sources) Grokipedia 2026

Reading of the evidence from methodical cross-checking: the On2 licence was real and partly paid, but On2’s filings show VP6 was never ported to the chips in shipping players. Two EE Times reports three years apart, plus Chinese Wikipedia’s improved MPEG-2 wording, point to MPEG-2 MP@HL-derived video with proprietary pre/post-processing and encryption. AVS was a declared future direction (2003 and September 2005) with no documented AVS-based EVD player. That conclusion should still be tested against SJ/T 11299.3 or a real disc. All codec positions remain open disagreements until then.

Resolutions and output

E-World claimed 1920×1080i and 1280×720p, 16:9, more than 720 TV lines, and eight quality levels from VCD to HD. Players passed MII’s HD test in September 2004. Marketing contrasted true HD (source, disc, player and output all HD) with upscaling fake HD DVD players. 1080p discs were promised by end of 2007 and reappeared as HD-EVD output claims in 2008. The Shinco EVD-8700 offered component (YPbPr) HD output.

Audio, subtitles and protection

Audio. ExAC / EAC (Enhanced Audio Codec) is specified in SJ/T 11299.4 as a multichannel surround enhanced audio codec: mono, stereo and 5.1, claimed better than Dolby AC-3 at the same bitrate, with an MII listening-test score of 4.7/5 marketed as 0.2 above Dolby. Bitrates were not published. An AC3-EAC conversion tool implies titles were typically transcoded from existing Dolby Digital masters. English Wikipedia attributes EAC 2.0 to Coding Technologies; Chinese sources and the MII part-4 title treat it as E-World’s own codec. Both origin stories are kept.

Subtitles. E-World describes 256-colour floating overlays with transparency, inherited from Super VCD research and superior to DVD’s four-colour sub-pictures. One of five E-World software packages was an OGT authoring system.

Protection. Shipping scheme: proprietary encryption (EE Times 2006). Marketing claimed a 128-bit key that passed Hollywood testing (unverified). Jindian Global announced AACS for new titles on 11 December 2005; no documentation was found that any EVD title actually shipped with AACS. LSI DoMiNo product briefs list CSS/CPRM/CPPM/DES capability, which shows silicon features, not EVD’s actual scheme.

Menus, compatibility and tooling

No primary documentation of EVD menus, navigation commands or region coding was found. CBS/Xinhua launch coverage mentioned no region code. Backward compatibility was marketed across DVD, Super VCD, VCD, CD and MP3; the EVD-8700 also listed CD-R/RW, JPEG and AC-3/DTS decoding for DVD. E-World named five professional software packages (DVD-to-EVD conversion, AC3-EAC conversion, OGT authoring, disc mastering, PC player); none has been found in a public archive.

Next-generation plans that did not ship

Plan Detail Status
AVS-based EVD Agreement 26 Sep 2005 No product found
H.264 EVD E-World-ST letter of intent, 2 Jul 2005 No product found
VMD-EVD NME multilayer red-laser; 50 GB shown at CeBIT Mar 2006 No mass release
1080p / HD-EVD Promised end 2007; 2008 rename Slipped; no model numbers found

Working specification summary

Until SJ/T 11299.3 is obtained or a commercial disc is imaged, treat the following as the practical technical envelope for research and collecting:

  • Physical: red-laser 120 mm DVD-5 or DVD-9; not Blu-ray, not HD DVD capacity.
  • File system: UDF; directory layout unknown in English secondary sources.
  • Video (most likely shipping): MPEG-2 MP@HL-derived stream with proprietary encryption and possible E-World pre/post filters; On2 VP5/VP6 licensed but not completed on shipping DSPs.
  • Resolutions claimed: 1080i and 720p output; eight quality levels advertised; 1080p for late HD-EVD claims.
  • Audio: ExAC/EAC mono, stereo or 5.1; often mastered via AC-3 conversion.
  • Subtitles: 256-colour floating overlays from Super VCD OGT research.
  • Protection: proprietary encryption in shipping titles; AACS announced, not documented on discs.
  • Players: LSI Logic DoMiNo-class decoders; backward play of DVD/SVCD/VCD/CD/MP3.

Bitrate arithmetic from marketing claims implies roughly 5-11 Mbit/s total. That is calculation, not a measured bitstream. Manufacturing complexity (same as DVD versus more complex multilayer) remains an open disagreement between contemporary Western/HD-EVD marketing and a 2019 Chinese retrospective.

What a real disc would settle

Anyone holding a commercial EVD disc can close several gaps in one afternoon: mount the UDF tree and photograph the top-level directories; sample a programme stream and identify the video start codes and elementary stream types; note whether audio looks like a proprietary ExAC/EAC framing or a renamed conventional stream; and test whether the encryption prevents a naïve sector dump from yielding playable media on a PC without E-World’s licensed player. Until those observations exist in English, secondary sources will keep recycling launch-week claims. This post therefore ends as a research brief as much as a specification sheet: firm on physical DVD identity and LSI-era playback reports, deliberately open on directory layout, exact bitrates and the precise boundary between MPEG-2 and proprietary filtering.

Sources

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: