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Blog CVD Guides Standards & Patents
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CVD Standards, Licensing and Patents

What “standard” meant for CVD in 1998

China Video Disc (CVD) never received a CVD-named national standard number of its own. What exists instead is a short stack of documents and filings: a June 1998 enterprise (consortium) standard whose full text has not been recovered; SJ/T 11196-1998 《超级VCD系统技术规范》, which folded CVD into the Chaoji / Super VCD player regime; licensed White Book and IEC texts for SVCD; MPEG and CD structural standards that CVD reuses; C-Cube’s SEC language about CVD and Chao Ji VCD decoders; and a thin patent trail with no CVD-specific claim identified. This post maps that stack and keeps known numbering conflicts open.

Chinese standards records

Item Detail
Standard SJ/T 11196-1998 《超级VCD系统技术规范》 (Super VCD System Technical Specification)
Type Electronics industry standard (SJ), recommended (推荐性, “/T”)
Issuing authority Ministry of Information Industry (信息产业部)
Review 14-15 August 1998, National Recording Equipment Standardization Technical Committee
Announcement 29 September 1998 (Guangming Daily, 30 Sep 1998)
Implementation 1 November 1998
Filing number 2091-1998 (national standards registry)
Scope Discs and players; required CVD and SVCD makers to converge; player must play SVCD, CVD, VCD 2.0, VCD 1.1, CD-DA
Changes towards CVD Two technical changes (not itemised in the retrieved Guangming Daily extract); name unified as 超级VCD

The June 1998 “CVD standard” was an industry-consortium enterprise standard. A Beijing coordination meeting in July 1998 ruled it legal as an enterprise standard (Shenghuo Shibao). Its text has not been found online. No CVD-specific national standard number exists. Guangming Daily’s 3 November 1998 coverage states that SJ/T 11196 made two technical changes towards the CVD scheme and unified the commercial name as 超级VCD; point 3 of that seven-point comparison is missing from the available extract, so the two changes remain unnamed here.

One Baidu Baike page (超级VCD) gives the number as SJ/T 11198-1998 in the context of a Beijing Galaxy Computer authoring system. The national registry and most sources give SJ/T 11196-1998. Both forms are kept; 11198 is treated as a probable typo unless a primary document confirms otherwise.

International standards stack

Standard Relevance to CVD
White Book (Philips licence) Defines VCD and, from 1998, SVCD as extensions; not freely available
IEC 62107 (15 July 2000) International standard for SVCD; does not include CVD subtitles
ISO/IEC 11172 (MPEG-1) Audio Layer II used by CVD
ISO/IEC 13818 (MPEG-2) Video and programme stream used by CVD
ISO 9660 File system of track 1
CD-ROM XA / CD-i Bridge Sector formats and disc structure

IEC 62107 is therefore the international home of SVCD, not of CVD as a separately numbered format. CVD sits inside the Chinese Chaoji / SJ/T regime as a required playback target and as a disc family that shares SUPERVCD file-system identity with SVCD, while its characteristic subtitle format remains outside the IEC text. The White Book remains a licensed Philips document; researchers cannot treat public hobbyist summaries as a substitute for the licensed specification when licensing questions are at stake.

Licensing and royalties

The Chinese pitch for CVD and SVCD was royalty avoidance relative to DVD, but the formats were not royalty-free in practice. MPEG-2 video and systems fall under the MPEG LA patent pool. EVD’s later development was justified by DVD and MPEG-2 licensing costs “reportedly in the range of $13-$20 USD per hardware video player.” Chip IP remained foreign: C-Cube (United States) for CVD; ESS Technology (United States) with Shinco for the government SVCD side. A Chinese retrospective of Aido puts the dependency bluntly: “the chips were Dutch Philips, the mechanisms Japanese Sony; VCD was just an assembled product,” and “the real winners of the price war were these foreign chip companies.”

Disc production, by contrast, was described as open. Baidu Baike’s SVCD entry says Super VCD is “an open production specification, so manufacturers need not pay fees for this standard,” and that disc cost equalled VCD cost apart from content royalties-matching the 1998 Jinzheng argument that pressing plants needed no new investment. DVD fees caught up later: in 2000 the 6C DVD patent pool (Toshiba, Matsushita, JVC, Mitsubishi Electric, Hitachi, Time Warner) began negotiating with Chinese makers, and in April 2002 it reached agreement with the China Electronic Audio Industry Association on per-player fees for exports.

The political reading is therefore more precise than “royalty-free Chinese format.” CVD/SVCD avoided DVD-consortium control of the disc format and player feature set, reused existing CD plants, and kept consumer disc prices near VCD levels, while still depending on foreign MPEG decoder silicon and on MPEG-2 patent licensing for the compressed streams themselves. That distinction matters when later posts compare CVD’s politics to EVD and CBHD.

C-Cube corporate filings (SEC record)

C-Cube’s SEC filings are the only primary English-language business source for CVD. Key passages:

Filing Accession Relevant content
10-K FY1997 (filed 27 Mar 1998) 0000919870-98-000002 VideoCD “mass market adoption exclusively in China”; CL480/CL484/CL680 history; customers Idall, Malata, ChangHong, SAST, Xiamin Solid, Samsung; one customer = 20% of revenue; plans for “next generation MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 decoders” in 1998; half-D1 CLM4400 encoder
10-Q Q2 1998 0000919870-98-000011 Net revenues $82.5 million (+16%); sales from introduction of its CVDx1 decoder based on the new China Video Disc (CVD) platform
10-Q Q3 1998 (filed 16 Nov 1998) 0000919870-98-000013 “CVD decoder which is compliant with the new Chao Ji VCD standard”; China primary market for VideoCD and Chao Ji VCD players; Asian consumer markets about 45% of Q3 sales
10-K405 FY1998 0000891618-99-001073 FY1998 revenue $351.8 million; OEMs using its VideoCD decoders “also chose C-Cube’s Chaoji VCD decoders”

Note the shift in wording between Q2 1998 (“new China Video Disc (CVD) platform”) and Q3 1998 (“compliant with the new Chao Ji VCD standard”): C-Cube re-badged its CVD decoder as a Chaoji VCD part within one quarter of the MII standard. The customer list in the FY1997 10-K already names the brands that later appear in CVD launch reporting, including the still-unresolved “Xiamin Solid.” Asian consumer markets accounting for about 45% of Q3 1998 sales underline how dependent C-Cube’s decoder business was on the Chinese VideoCD channel that CVD and Chaoji were meant to extend.

Patent leads

No CVD-specific patent was identified in the gathered material. Relevant leads include US6370323B1 (“Digital video disc decoder including command buffer and command status pointers”), an LSI Logic patent assigned via C-Cube that illustrates decoder architecture patents but is not CVD-specific; and C-Cube’s FY1997 portfolio statement of 21 issued US patents and 61 pending, with expiries in the 2010-2015 window. Chinese patents (CNIPA) for 超级VCD, CVD 视盘 or C-Cube decoder terminology were not searched here and remain an open research task. Until a CNIPA hit or a C-Cube product patent expressly ties claim language to China Video Disc, treat “CVD patents” as an empty category rather than inventing a portfolio.

Standards research map

Item Status Where to look next
June 1998 CVD enterprise standard text Not found Chinese trade-press archives (电子报, 家用电器, 电子世界 1998); Jinzheng/Aido company archives
SJ/T 11196-1998 full text Not obtained std.samr.gov.cn (catalogue); Chinese standards resellers; university libraries
The “two technical changes towards CVD” Not itemised Full Guangming Daily 3 Nov 1998 article; the standard itself
C-Cube CVD decoder datasheet (CVDx1 / Chaoji parts) Not found Datasheet archives; LSI Logic legacy documentation
Philips SVCD 1.0 specification Licensed, not public Philips IP licensing
IEC 62107 Purchasable IEC webstore

Until those primary texts are in hand, CVD “specifications” in preservation guides remain reconstructions: SVCD geometry and file system, half-D1 MPEG-2 video, 44.1 kHz Layer II audio, CVD-style subtitles outside IEC 62107, and a Chaoji player mandate that keeps CVD playback as a Chinese Super VCD requirement rather than as a permanently separate national standard number. That is enough for identification and authoring practice; it is not enough for a lawyer’s reading of what the June 1998 enterprise standard originally claimed.

For later posts on players, PC playback and authoring, the working rule is: treat SJ/T 11196-1998 and Chaoji VCD as the binding Chinese compatibility frame; treat IEC 62107 and Philips SVCD 1.0 as the public/international SVCD disc references; treat MPEG LA and foreign decoder silicon as the real royalty floor; and treat any claim of a free-standing “national CVD standard number” as unsupported unless the June 1998 enterprise text or a CNIPA filing surfaces. C-Cube’s own SEC wording-from “China Video Disc (CVD) platform” in Q2 1998 to “Chao Ji VCD standard” in Q3-is the clearest primary-source marker of how quickly the brand was folded into the ministry umbrella.

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:

Blog CBHD Guides Standards & Patents
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CBHD Standards, Licensing and Patents

What carried a standard number-and what did not

The DVD Forum approved the Chinese HD DVD physical-format text in February 2007. The CBHD application format was developed mainly in China afterwards. Formal DVD Forum book names and version strings for “HD DVD China” were searched for and not found. Component standards that did receive numbers:

  • AVS video: GB/T 20090.2-2006
  • DRA audio: SJ/T 11368-2006; GB/T 22726-2008

CBHD itself: no GB/T or SJ/T standard number was found by any research pass. OMNERC drafts press-and-publication (新闻出版) disc standards-for example it was a lead drafter of a CD-DA test-parameter industry standard on std.samr.gov.cn-so any CBHD standard is more likely a CY/T or 新闻出版 document than an SJ/T. That is an inference pending a manual search of std.samr.gov.cn. One pass refers to a CHDA published format document (2009) as the reference for mandatory AVS video/audio and DKAA; a placeholder citation like “AVS (GB R1xxx)” in secondary text is not a real standard number.

Royalty arithmetic

Physical format accounts for 60-70% of disc royalties; application format for 30-40%. In CBHD, modulation-coding patents are Chinese-owned. Foreign holders of RF and servo patents had to place them in a CBHD patent pool controlled by Chinese companies. AVS, navigation and DRM patents are held jointly by Chinese and foreign companies.

Comparison figures used in contemporary reporting:

Item Figure
Blu-ray player fee $9.50
Blu-ray recorder fee $14
BD-ROM disc fee $0.11
CBHD player royalty (expected) about $8 (DFC Intelligence, 28 Jul 2008)
DVD cumulative per player about $22 or about €15 (sources differ)
One maker’s claimed DVD fee saved $21
AVS decoder licence about 1 RMB

CHDA argued that Chinese factories could press discs on existing DVD lines with minimal retooling while avoiding foreign royalties that Blu-ray lines would have imposed. The $8 CBHD player figure is an expected range from analyst reporting, not a published tariff schedule recovered in the passes.

Patent entries that name CBHD explicitly

The following patents relate to CBHD. They are not all core CBHD patents and are not all labelled as such in their titles.

CN101908354B – RLL modulation coding

Applicants: Tsinghua University and OMNERC; Polystar Digidisc also listed as current assignee. Filed 4 June 2009 (CN200910085226); published 8 December 2010 as CN101908354A; granted 25 July 2012; later lapsed for non-payment. Inventors include 倪屹, 裴京, 潘龙法, 徐海峥, 陆达, 刘海龙, 刘相伟. Claims a 4/5 plus 3/3 conversion code for blue-laser multi-level storage with track pitch under 0.52 μm; cites CN101567207A. Caveat: this is an OMNERC RLL patent by the CBHD team, not confirmed as the 4-6 FSM code used in commercial CBHD. The FSM patent itself was not located.

CN101556807B – CBHD blue-laser optical pickup

Application CN2008100234723A; priority 7 April 2008; inventor 杨南荔; granted 4 January 2012. Describes a complete blue/red optical path for a CBHD pickup: blue laser, red laser, diffraction gratings, prism, quarter-wave plate, beam splitter, astigmatic lens and photodetector, with physical optical dimensions. Shows Chinese work extended to CBHD-specific, Chinese-owned optical pickup hardware.

CN201549222U – multi-format optical pickup mechanism

Concerns a pickup able to handle multiple disc formats. States that CBHD and Blu-ray were incompatible and describes the problem of building a pickup supporting both; identifies CBHD as a 405 nm format with DVD-like production architecture.

CN102682801B – objective lens compatible with BD and CBHD

Priority 17 March 2011; inventors 李荣彬, 杜雪, 李莉华, 王文奎; assignee Hong Kong Polytechnic University. A freeform objective lens focusing 405 nm light correctly for both BD (NA 0.85) and CBHD (NA 0.65). Direct evidence that BD/CBHD compatibility required optical engineering, not firmware alone.

CN102157185A – Blu-ray/CBHD/DVD/CD optical front end

Uses the Novatek NT90912 servo DSP, supporting FSM, ETM, EFM+ and EFM-covering CBHD, DVD and CD. RF amplifier: Novatek NT90902, about 60 MHz bandwidth, supporting CBHD/DVD/CD differential signals and tracking-error detection. Shows at least one later optical chipset was designed to handle CBHD’s FSM channel alongside conventional formats. Novatek documentation and chips are therefore a major research target for modern CBHD hardware.

CN101712809A – organic dye and recordable CBHD medium

Describes CBHD as then a read-only format for replicated video discs and proposes a dye system for a recordable CBHD medium. Evidence that CBHD-R was technically contemplated even though commercial CBHD remained pressed/read-only.

Six-area patent research map

Area Topics
A. Physical disc Modulation, channel coding, error correction, servo, optical pickup, objective lenses, disc structure
B. Application Navigation, file system, video packaging, subtitles, menus
C. Codec AVS, DRA
D. DRM DKAA, key management
E. Hardware CBHD chipsets, combo players, optical heads, universal drives
F. Recordable CBHD Dyes, recording layers, write strategies, recorders

OMNERC and CHDA members filed patents on unique features (DKAA, AVS/DRA integration, two-highlight menus), mostly in Chinese databases. No official English-language patents or programming manuals are publicly distributed in the sense the passes sought. Specific DKAA patent numbers were not found by any pass.

Licensing administrators and AACS paperwork

Japanese Wikipedia states CBHD licensing was handled by BOC (Beijing Optical Consulting Co., Ltd.); that entity was not located as a live website in the research pass. An AACS Licensing Administrator order form carries a “CBHD (China)” category with both Pre-recorded (P) and Recordable (R) media options. Ja.wikipedia cites an AACS specification PDF for CBHD pre-recorded media, v0.90, dated 7 October 2008 (AACS_Spec_CBHD_Prerecorded_0.90_20081007.pdf). That document is a primary technical lead for international-content protection on CBHD, separate from the still-undocumented DKAA stack used on domestic titles.

Toshiba held licensing because it owned underlying HD DVD physical IP even after Chinese application work moved to OMNERC. DVD Forum-OMNERC agreements in 2007-2008 created a formal path for Chinese editing of specifications without making CBHD discs playable in ordinary HD DVD players. Standards paperwork and playback compatibility remain different questions.

Open standard-number work

Until a CY/T, 新闻出版 or CHDA book identifier is recovered, “CBHD standard” citations should name the CHDA 2009 format document (when located), the DVD Forum February 2007 physical-format approval, GB/T 20090.2-2006 for AVS video, and GB/T 22726-2008 / SJ/T 11368-2006 for DRA-not an invented GB/T for the whole disc format. Patent PDFs above are concrete; the FSM 4-6 patent and DKAA patents remain missing pieces on the map.

How royalties were supposed to change the factory floor

CHDA’s public argument was not only about cheaper players. Physical-format royalties dominate disc economics (60-70% of disc royalty stacks in the framing used by the research passes). By replacing ETM with Chinese-owned 4-6 FSM modulation patents, the alliance claimed Chinese factories could keep pressing on upgraded DVD lines while avoiding Blu-ray Disc Association fees and reducing dependence on foreign pools that had charged roughly $21-22 per DVD player. DFC Intelligence’s 28 July 2008 note that CBHD player royalties were “expected to be in the $8 range” sat beside Blu-ray’s published $9.50 player / $14 recorder / $0.11 BD-ROM figures as a competitive talking point. AVS’s ~1 RMB decoder licence reinforced the narrative that China could own the expensive layers.

Foreign RF and servo patents still existed; the model required placing them in a CBHD pool controlled by Chinese companies rather than eliminating physics patents altogether. Application-format royalties (30-40%) mixed Chinese and foreign holdings on navigation, codecs and DRM. Toshiba retained licensing leverage because it owned underlying HD DVD physical IP even after OMNERC received editing rights in February 2008. Standards approval and commercial royalty schedules are therefore related but not identical stories.

Reading the six patents as a hardware map

Taken together, CN101908354B (RLL coding by the OMNERC team), CN101556807B (CBHD blue/red pickup), CN201549222U (multi-format pickup problem statement), CN102682801B (BD/CBHD freeform lens), CN102157185A (Novatek FSM-capable front end) and CN101712809A (recordable dye) sketch a research programme that reached into pickups, lenses, channel DSPs and even CBHD-R media-not merely a codec swap. None of these documents is a substitute for the missing commercial FSM patent or a DKAA specification, but they falsify the idea that CBHD left no Chinese-owned hardware trail.

Google Patents and CNIPA PDFs for the granted numbers above are live research entry points. Inventor lists overlap OMNERC names already tied to the 2005-2009 programme (陆达 and colleagues on the RLL patent). Assignees change over time. CN101908354B later lapsed for non-payment.

AACS paperwork versus DKAA silence

International titles dragged CBHD into the AACS ecosystem: interim CBHD AACS documents in 2007, a Pre-recorded Book v0.90 dated 7 October 2008, and an LA order form category for CBHD (China) Pre-recorded and Recordable media. Domestic titles used DKAA, described only in fragments-dual-key marketing language, Gemini’s MKB/lead-in and hardware key-exchange sketch, HDCP enforcement notes. No pass recovered DKAA patent numbers or a public specification. Preservationists therefore inherit a split stack: AACS tools and literature may apply to Warner-class international CBHD discs; domestic discs remain opaque until DKAA artefacts surface in Chinese patent or CHDA archives.

Japanese Wikipedia’s claim that BOC (Beijing Optical Consulting) administered CBHD licensing is an unconfirmed lead; the entity was not located as a live site. CHDA/CHDIA member lists and Toshiba licence schedules remain complementary targets. Until a CY/T or 新闻出版 number appears on std.samr.gov.cn, cite component GB/T numbers and the DVD Forum 2007 physical-format approval rather than inventing a whole-format GB/T code.

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:

Blog EVD Guides Related Formats
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EVD Related Formats: HVD, FVD, VMD and Neighbours

The red-laser HD field, 2003-2008

Between DVD (1996) and the blue-laser formats (2006), several groups tried to put HD video on red-laser DVD-sized discs. The shared idea was simple: keep cheap optical pickups and pressing lines, and gain HD through better compression or more layers. EVD was China’s government-backed entry in that field. It competed with domestic rivals HVD and HDV, Taiwan’s FVD, UK-based VMD, and Microsoft’s short-lived WMV-HD DVD experiment, then lost the larger war to HD DVD, Blu-ray and finally CBHD.

Format Origin Physical Video Max resolution Status
EVD China, E-World, 2003 DVD-5/9, 650 nm MPEG-2 MP@HL-based (EE Times) / VP5-VP6 (On2 contract) 1080i, 720p (1080p HD-EVD) Dead c. 2008
HVD (China) Amlogic + TV makers, Apr 2004 DVD media Not verified HD claimed Dead
HDV (China) Beijing Kaicheng HD, Jan 2004 DVD media Not verified; later IP-HDV HD claimed Dead
FVD Taiwan ITRI / AOSRA, 2004-2005 650 nm, tighter track pitch; ~6 GB/layer WMV9 (also MPEG-2, MPEG-4 in players) 720p (1080i on three-layer) Defunct
VMD / HD VMD New Medium Enterprises (UK) Red multilayer, ~5 GB/layer MPEG-2, VC-1 1080p Dead
WMV-HD DVD Microsoft/studios, 2003-2004 Standard DVD-ROM WMV9 1080p PC-only niche

HVD and HDV: domestic rivals

HVD was backed by Shanghai Amlogic (上海晶晨) with roughly nineteen TV and player makers including Skyworth, Changhong, TCL and Malata. Three of those brands (Skyworth, Changhong, Malata) were also EVD alliance members. Contemporary reports say HVD launched with an Amlogic-designed chip whose IP was held in China, offered patents free to alliance members, and performed better in the market than EVD. 2005 HVD sales were reported above ¥200 million. In some months of 2006 EVD sold about one-tenth as many units as HVD. By 2006 Amlogic was even listed among EVD’s technology providers, underscoring how porous the camps were.

HDV came from Beijing Kaicheng HD Electronic Technology (北京凯诚高清), led by 任为民, launched in January 2004 with Gome and later Suning as channels. Kaicheng had reportedly taken part in EVD research before launching its own format. Industry commentators urged the three domestic red-laser camps to combine before Blu-ray arrived: multiple incompatible formats would confuse consumers and leave nobody large. They did not combine.

FVD (Taiwan)

Taiwan’s Forward Versatile Disc was developed by ITRI’s Opto-Electronics Systems division and promoted by AOSRA (about 29 companies). ITRI argued that DVD royalties of as much as US$10 per Taiwan-made player were unsustainable. FVD kept 650 nm lasers with NA 0.6-0.65 and reduced track pitch (0.64 µm) to reach about 6 GB per layer. Sigma Designs processors powered first players, decoding WMV9, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 up to 720p with hardware AES DRM. First Taiwanese players were expected around April 2005 at about TWD 5,500 (US$175). BenQ and Mustek were early supporters; Cheertek announced an FVD chip for 2006. Wikipedia describes FVD-1 as using DVD’s 8/16 modulation, 135 minutes of 720p on dual-layer and 135 minutes of 1080i on three-layer discs, and calls the format apparently defunct.

EE Times explicitly compared FVD to mainland EVD and noted that FVD backers looked to the mainland for sales. A Calimetrics Wikipedia article claims China instead chose Taiwan’s FVD. No other source supports that claim; China’s chosen industry standard was EVD (SJ/T 11299). The Calimetrics wording is kept as an outlier disagreement.

VMD and the NME partnership

New Medium Enterprises’ Versatile Multilayer Disc used red-laser multilayer discs of about 5 GB per layer (20 GB for a four-layer disc), with MPEG-2 and VC-1 video and up to 7.1-channel audio. E-World signed cooperation with NME in September 2005 and a share-exchange in November 2005; a 50 GB EVD/VMD was shown at CeBIT in March 2006. The partnership produced no commercial EVD/VMD product. HD VMD itself launched in 2007 and failed; its IP was later revived for larger-capacity experiments.

EVD versus DVD, HD DVD, Blu-ray and CBHD

Parameter DVD-Video EVD HD DVD Blu-ray CBHD
Laser 650 nm 650 nm 405 nm 405 nm 405 nm
Capacity (SL / DL) 4.7 / 8.5 GB 4.7 / 8.5 GB 15 / 30 GB 25 / 50 GB 15 / 30 GB
Video MPEG-2 (MPEG-1) MPEG-2 MP@HL-based (reported) / VP6 (contract) MPEG-2, VC-1, AVC MPEG-2, VC-1, AVC AVS, AVC, VC-1, MPEG-2
Max resolution 720×576 / 720×480 1080i, 720p (1080p HD-EVD) 1080p 1080p 1080p
Audio LPCM, AC-3, DTS, MPEG ExAC / EAC DD+, TrueHD, DTS-HD DD, TrueHD, DTS-HD MA DRA and others
Protection CSS Proprietary (AACS planned) AACS AACS, BD+ Own scheme
Standard owner DVD Forum E-World / MII SJ/T DVD Forum BDA China HD DVD / OMNERC
Launch 1996 Nov 2003 Mar 2006 Jun 2006 2008-2009
End Current c. 2008 Feb 2008 Current Niche

The table makes the structural point: EVD never left the red-laser DVD capacity envelope. Blue-laser formats multiplied capacity by three to five times on single-layer discs. Once HD DVD and Blu-ray launched, EVD’s pitch (HD on existing DVD lines) competed against true next-generation capacity, not only against other Chinese red-laser brands.

EVD in the Chinese disc lineage

Format Year Chinese standard Physical base Foreign dependency
VCD 1993 (China from ~1995) None (White Book) CD Philips/Sony licence; C-Cube chips
CVD / Super VCD 1998 SJ/T 11196-1998 CD C-Cube and ESS chips; MPEG-2
EVD 2003 SJ/T 11299-2005 DVD LSI Logic chips; On2 licence; DVD royalties for DVD playback
CBHD 2008 China HD DVD specifications HD DVD (blue laser) Toshiba/NEC HD DVD base; DVD Forum licence

EVD is the middle link: Chinese system specification on a foreign optical base, after Super VCD on CD and before CBHD on HD DVD-derived blue laser. EE Times in 2003 already compared EVD to the earlier VCD-to-Super-VCD pattern. Collectors should not confuse modern EVD-keyword DVD players with this 2003-2008 red-laser format, nor confuse EVD discs with CBHD or Blu-ray.

How to read the neighbourhood

For magazine-length orientation, keep five distinctions sharp:

  1. EVD vs DVD: same laser and capacities; different encryption, audio codec claims and HD output targets. An ordinary DVD player rejects commercial EVD discs.
  2. EVD vs HVD/HDV: three Chinese red-laser HD brands fighting the same shelf space in 2004-2006, sometimes with overlapping member companies.
  3. EVD vs FVD: mainland SJ/T industry standard versus Taiwan ITRI/AOSRA WMV9-centred disc with tighter track pitch; parallel royalty anxieties, different politics.
  4. EVD vs VMD: partnership and CeBIT demo, no mass EVD/VMD product.
  5. EVD vs HD DVD / Blu-ray / CBHD: red 4.7/8.5 GB versus blue 15-50 GB class; once blue laser shipped, red-laser HD lost the capacity argument even if compression improved.

Jindian Global’s October 2005 “five measures” against HD DVD (free film licences for EVD hardware makers, purchase guarantees for publishers, incentives for multi-title releases) show how quickly the blue-laser threat reshaped red-laser politics. Changhong and Amoi had already announced HD DVD production. The domestic red-laser war was unfinished when the international blue-laser war arrived.

Why red-laser HD clustered then died

Every format in this neighbourhood answered the same industrial question: can HD video ride existing red-laser tooling cheaply enough to matter before blue laser ships? EVD answered with government SJ/T status, LSI silicon and proprietary encryption. HVD answered with Amlogic IP held in China and free patent licensing to members. FVD answered with tighter track pitch and WMV9. VMD answered with more layers. None of them accumulated Hollywood-scale catalogues or a clear winner among Chinese living-room buyers. When HD DVD and Blu-ray arrived in 2006, and when China later adapted HD DVD into CBHD, the red-laser HD cluster lost both the capacity race and the standards race.

For this site’s later CBHD posts, EVD matters as the failed middle chapter that taught Chinese OEMs how expensive format politics could be when content, royalties and televisions were not aligned. For collectors, the practical takeaway is narrower: buy documented 2004-2008 LSI-era players and commercial Jindian/Zhongkai discs, and treat every modern EVD shopping keyword as noise until proven otherwise.

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:

Blog CVD Guides Related Formats
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CVD Related Formats: SVCD, Chaoji VCD and Neighbours

CVD in the family of CD video formats

China Video Disc (CVD) is easiest to understand as one neighbour among several CD-based video formats rather than as an isolated invention. It inherits White Book Video CD’s physical geometry and disc-bridge conventions, fights government and Philips Super Video CD (SVCD) over resolution and subtitles, shares a Chaoji VCD player-compatibility umbrella in China, and later collides in hobbyist language with XVCD, XSVCD, KVCD templates and half-D1 DVD. This post keeps those relatives distinct: what each name means, which parameters actually differ, and which naming collisions still confuse collectors.

Philips CD-i player - White Book / CD-i Bridge lineage
CVD sits on the White Book / CD-i Bridge physical stack that also underpins Video CD. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (Philips CD-i), CC BY-SA (via Openverse).

White Book VCD: the baseline CVD set out to beat

Video CD was defined in 1993 by Sony, Philips, JVC and Matsushita. VCD 2.0 (1995) added playback control, still images and clearer PAL/NTSC variants; a VCD-Internet extension followed in 1997; SVCD was published as a White Book extension in 1998. The White Book itself is not freely available and must be licensed from Philips.

Parameter VCD 1.1 / 2.0
Video MPEG-1, constant bitrate 1,150 kbps (1,151.9 max)
Resolution 352×240 at 29.97 or 23.976 fps (NTSC); 352×288 at 25 fps (PAL)
Audio MPEG-1 Layer II, 224 kbps CBR, 44.1 kHz stereo
Playing time About 74-80 minutes per disc
Directory /VCD (INFO.VCD, ENTRIES.VCD, PSD.VCD, LOT.VCD), /MPEGAV, /SEGMENT, /CDI, /EXT
PBC VCD 2.0 onward
Chinese quality perception (1998) About 240-280 lines horizontal; “similar to watching TV” (Jinzheng)

VCD’s resolution is a quarter of standard-definition television-the problem CVD set out to fix. In China the White Book was complemented by domestic “VCD 3.0” player features, which 1998 press credits SVCD (not CVD) with supporting. CVD therefore improves picture by moving to MPEG-2 at half-D1 while keeping the same CD Form 2 world that VCD already occupied in Chinese living rooms.

Three things called “SVCD”

It is important to keep three different SVCD-labelled objects apart, plus the later international text:

Name What it is Date
Government SVCD (超级VCD draft) MII / National Recording Standards Committee programme, ESS-supported Draft mid-1998
Philips / VCD Consortium SVCD 1.0 Government SVCD after HQ-VCD features were merged; White Book extension distributed by Philips 1998
SJ/T 11196-1998 “Chaoji VCD” Chinese industry standard and player-compatibility regime covering SVCD and CVD discs Announced 29 Sep 1998; effective 1 Nov 1998
IEC 62107 International standard for SVCD (and VCD) 15 Jul 2000

SVCD parameters-the base from which CVD differs-are MPEG-2 VBR video at a maximum of about 2.6 Mbps, 480×480 (NTSC) or 480×576 (PAL), MPEG-1 Layer II audio at 44.1 kHz with up to two stereo or four mono tracks (MPEG-2 multichannel allowed), up to four OGT subtitle streams, and about 35-45 minutes per CD at full rate. Chinese press claimed about 350 lines of horizontal resolution. Philips later added an SVCD logo to its Compact Disc logo family. Western “SVCD-compatible” DVD player claims usually referred to the Philips disc format, which is why Region 1 players could claim SVCD support without CVD support.

HQ-VCD

HQ-VCD (High-Quality Video CD) was the Video CD Consortium’s own proposal, released in March 1998 and merged into SVCD in July 1998. It survives as a disc-type variant: VCDImager can build HQ-VCD images (-t hqvcd) carrying INFO system ID “HQ-VCD”, system profile tag 1, mandatory /EXT/SCANDATA.DAT and optional SEARCH.DAT. No commercial HQ-VCD title releases were found in the gathered material. For identification work, “HQ-VCD” in INFO is therefore a rare system-ID cousin of SUPERVCD, not a synonym for CVD.

CVD versus SVCD: the engineering trade-off

Factor CVD SVCD Comment
Horizontal resolution 352 480 SVCD has 36% more columns
Pixels per frame (PAL) 202,752 276,480 CVD spends the same bits on 27% fewer pixels
Bits per pixel at 2.5 Mbps ≈ 36% more than SVCD baseline Fewer blocking artefacts in motion
Scaling to DVD-player output (720/704) Exact ×2 Non-integer ×1.5 SVCD “foldover” aliasing on many players
DVD-legal video Yes No CVD video can move to DVD without re-encoding
Interlace Full lines kept Same Both better than VCD, which discards a field
Visible detail on 1998 CRT TVs Close to TV limit (makers’ claim) Above what many TVs resolve noulakaz argument
Player support outside China Lower Higher Community reports vary
1998 line-count claims 280 (hostile) to 400 (makers) 350+ Partisan figures

The 1998 Chinese makers argued that CVD’s resolution was “exactly at the upper limit of the TV set,” so the extra pixels of SVCD-or even DVD-would only show on fully digital televisions (Shenghuo Shibao, 29 July 1998). A later VideoHelp user with a large player-testing background summarised the practical bitrate result: DVD at 720×576 “will almost always look better than CVD… except at below 4,000 kbs bitrates at which point CVD can look better than SVCD and DVD is likely to show macroblocks.” Those claims are kept as community engineering arguments, not as laboratory measurements.

Community variants: XVCD, XSVCD, KVCD and “CVD on DVD”

These names are not standards but community labels for non-compliant variants.

  • XVCD (eXtended VCD): VCD structure with MPEG-1 (or MPEG-2 at VCD resolution) above 1,150 kbps, often up to about 2,500 kbps. Uses SUPERVCD-style or VCD INFO; player tolerance varies.
  • XSVCD (eXtended SVCD): MPEG-2 in Mode 2/XA at SVCD resolution but not meeting the SVCD standard (higher bitrate, larger GOPs, custom matrices). A 352-wide XSVCD is structurally a CVD.
  • KVCD / KSVCD / KDVD: Kwag’s TMPGEnc templates with custom quantisation matrices, long GOPs and low VBR rates (examples include 528×480 and 352×240). Marketing claims of “near DVD quality” for 120+ minutes are the template author’s, not measured results.
  • MVCD (Mole VCD): an XSVCD variant from the MVCD template set.
  • “CVD on DVD” / half-D1 DVD: 352×480/576 MPEG-2 authored as DVD-Video with 48 kHz audio-fully DVD-compliant, used for VHS archives and packing several films per DVD.

mjpegtools’ anytovcd.sh script has a cvd profile that actually means half-D1 DVD (mpeg2enc -f 8, AC-3 at 48 kHz, up to 7,500 kbps, with SARs 20:11 / 59:27 for 4:3 or 80:33 / 236:81 for 16:9). That is “CVD-resolution DVD,” not a CD-based CVD. The naming collision causes confusion in tutorials and must be read carefully whenever a guide says “author CVD.”

DVD-Video and why 352 is legal

DVD-Video permits MPEG-2 at 720×480/576, 704×480/576, 352×480/576 and 352×240/288 (MPEG-1 is also allowed at 352×240/288). The 352×480/576 case is the half-D1 resolution C-Cube already supported in its CLM4400 encoder. Audio for DVD must be 48 kHz (LPCM, AC-3, MPEG audio or DTS), so the only change needed to move CVD video to DVD is audio resampling and DVD authoring (IFO/VOB structure). As one VideoHelp user put it: “CVD, if done correctly, complies to the DVD standard (low res DVD video streams).”

Master comparison

Format Status Video NTSC / PAL Typical ceiling Time / 80-min CD DVD-legal video
VCD 1.1/2.0 White Book (1993/1995) MPEG-1 CBR 352×240 / 352×288 1,150 kbps ~80 min Yes (audio no)
CVD C-Cube/OEM 1998; inside Chaoji VCD MPEG-2 VBR 352×480 / 352×576 ≤~2.6 Mbps (2.52 typical) 35-45 min Yes (audio no)
SVCD IEC 62107; SJ/T 11196 MPEG-2 VBR 480×480 / 480×576 ≤~2.6 Mbps 35-45 min No
HQ-VCD IEC 62107 variant MPEG-2 as SVCD as SVCD as SVCD No
XVCD / XSVCD Non-standard MPEG-1/2 VCD or SVCD (or other) above White Book / SVCD varies Depends
KVCD family Templates MPEG-1/2 e.g. 528×480, 352×240 low VBR claimed 120+ min KDVD yes
DVD-Video DVD Forum MPEG-2 (MPEG-1 allowed) 720/704/352×480; 352×240 ≤9.8 Mbps n/a (4.7 GB) –
EVD (2003) Chinese VP5/VP6 (On2) up to HD – n/a (DVD disc) No
CBHD (2009) Chinese AVS / H.264 / VC-1 up to 1080 up to ~28 Mbps video n/a (blue laser) No

CVD sits between VCD and SVCD on the CD-era ladder: same physical CD and roughly the same bitrate budget as SVCD, half-D1 instead of 2/3 D1 video, and a path into DVD-Video without re-encoding the pictures. Chaoji VCD is the Chinese player-compatibility umbrella that required both CVD and SVCD discs to play; IEC 62107 is the later international SVCD text that does not include CVD-style subtitles. Later Chinese formats-EVD and CBHD-repeat the political pattern of seeking domestic control over the next optical generation, but they leave the CD Form 2 world entirely. For collectors and archivists, the practical neighbour set is VCD for installed-base context, SVCD for file-system identity, HQ-VCD for the rare system-ID variant, and half-D1 DVD for the modern reuse of CVD’s resolution.

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:

Blog CBHD Codecs Guides
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CBHD Codecs Today: AVS, DRA and Tooling

Starting point

Pressed CBHD discs carried video and audio under Chinese and Western codec labels. Reconstructing or playing ripped material in 2026 depends less on finding a “CBHD player app” and more on whether modern open-source stacks can decode AVS video and DRA audio after the container and DRM layers are stripped. This post inventories what exists today, what is missing, and how those tools map onto the format’s commercial codec list.

AVS video on the open-source side

FFmpeg’s cavs decoder handles AVS1-P2 Jizhun (base) profile. Stefan Gehrer wrote it in 2006-before CBHD’s commercial launch-because AVS itself is older than the disc format. The AVS working group began first-generation work in 2002; AVS Part 2 video became national standard GB/T 20090.2-2006 in February 2006. For software archaeology that timing matters: a CBHD encoding tool may simply have been an AVS encoder feeding a proprietary mux/authoring system, not something branded “CBHD Encoder.”

Support for AVS+ (AVS1-P16, broadcasting profile) was proposed in a 2026 FFmpeg-devel RFC titled along the lines of “avcodec/cavs: bugfixes and AVS1-P16 (AVS+) decoding,” but that work is not yet merged. Encoding uses libxavs, available in FFmpeg builds configured with --enable-libxavs; Chinese CSDN guides document such builds. FFmpeg’s separate avs decoder is for an unrelated game video format and must not be confused with Chinese AVS. The name uAVS appeared as a search target in the research brief; no pass reported usable details.

What commercial CBHD actually put in the bitstream

Official CHDA documentation lists AVS, H.264/AVC, VC-1 and MPEG-2. Player specifications made AVS, MPEG-4 AVC and VC-1 mandatory. Early 2009 discs almost certainly used VC-1 or AVC because AVS content and encoders were not yet available at China Record; AVS and DKAA discs were presented as a “new generation” only at the September 2009 Guangzhou conference. An actual disc could therefore contain a conventional MPEG-2, H.264 or VC-1 stream even though later marketing emphasised AVS.

Technical traits reported for AVS as used on CBHD include compression efficiency comparable to H.264 High Profile with lower computational complexity; licensing about 1 RMB per decoder unit versus multi-dollar MPEG-LA structures; 8×8 integer transforms; quarter-pel motion-vector accuracy; context-adaptive spatial prediction; and its own loop filter. Typical CBHD encodes are described as 1080p at 23.976 or 24 fps, or 1080i at 50 Hz for domestic Chinese TV masters, at average bitrates of 12-18 Mbps under a format maximum video bitrate of 28 Mbps.

DRA audio: silicon IP and one thesis tree

DRA (standardised as SJ/T 11368-2006 and GB/T 22726-2008) was developed by DigiRise / Guangzhou Digital Rise Technology. Expansions of the acronym differ across sources-“Dynamic Resolution Adaptation” versus “Digital Rise Audio” after the developer. It is optional in Blu-ray from version 2.3. Reported capabilities include multi-channel compression using sub-band coding, psychoacoustic masking and MDCT; channel layouts from mono/stereo to 5.1 and 7.1; and bitrates from 64 kbps to 1.5 Mbps.

Commercial decoder IP: Synopsys DesignWare ARC Sound IP (2011, first to support DRA) and Tensilica HiFi Audio DSP library (2012). Open source: a DRA encoder/decoder from Tianyi Geng’s Tsinghua undergraduate thesis, published on GitHub as tianyigeng/DRA-Audio-System. No DRA decoder exists in mainline FFmpeg. For archival workflows that means DRA either goes through the thesis codec or through a conversion step before ordinary desktop players see the soundtrack.

Player-facing audio lists for context

  • Official specification: AVS Audio, DRA, Dolby AC-3.
  • Shinco CBHD-9100: AVS-Audio, LPCM, DRA, Dolby AC-3; coaxial digital and 5.1 analogue.
  • TCL THBD-1008: Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, PCM.

CBHD-HiFi (July 2010) used dual-layer capacity for multi-channel LPCM up to 24-bit/192 kHz over secure HDMI. That profile is a separate audio path from DRA compression and matters for identifying special collector editions from China Record Corporation.

Putting decoded streams into players

A decrypted CBHD AVS elementary stream should decode in FFmpeg-based players such as mpv, MPC-HC via LAV Filters, and probably VLC, provided the cavs path is available. Transcoding can use FFmpeg with libxavs when re-encoding is required. DRA still needs the thesis codec or conversion. No research pass found software that decrypts DKAA. International titles protected with AACS follow the AACS route rather than a CBHD-specific PC decryptor.

Standalone player USB paths remain relevant when discussing “home content” without disc authoring: the Shinco CBHD-9100 plays 1080p video files and TS/MP4 from USB with external subtitles; the Shinco HD-3700U plays AVI from USB and network shares. Those routes bypass FSM mastering entirely and are the only documented realistic home-content path on original hardware.

What is still missing

  1. Mainline FFmpeg DRA decoder.
  2. Merged AVS+ (AVS1-P16) support in cavs.
  3. Any public DKAA decryption tool.
  4. Documented uAVS encoder details usable for reconstruction.
  5. Confirmed PC application that mounts a pressed CBHD volume end-to-end (filesystem + CETC + DRM + decode).

ChatGPT pass 2 cautions that “there were no PC decoders” has not been proven as a historical absence; PC playback software and a CBHD emulator remain unresolved research targets rather than confirmed non-existence. For practical work today, treat AVS via cavs/libxavs and DRA via the thesis tree as the working open toolchain, and treat DKAA as a hard stop until keys and algorithms surface.

Codec archaeology versus disc archaeology

AVS and DRA outlived CBHD in Chinese broadcasting. AVS was re-engineered as AVS2 and AVS3; together with DRA they were mandated across terrestrial HD, 4K Ultra-HD and 8K state networks. That continuity means codec libraries and silicon IP continued after disc replication ended, but it does not automatically recover CBHD muxers, CETC navigation files or DKAA. Separating the problems helps: decode the elementary streams with tools that already exist; recover containers, navigation and DRM with disc images, firmware dumps and professional verifiers.

When a catalogue title is labelled “1080p AVS, DRA 5.1” in secondary reporting, treat that as a technical profile claim pending MediaInfo or bitstream confirmation. Early launch discs may not match that profile. When a title lists only Western codecs on a player menu screenshot, that is equally consistent with the 2009 encoder gap. Codec tooling today is strong enough to handle AVS Jizhun video once decrypted; audio and DRM remain the thinner layers of the stack.

Quick reference

Component Open tooling status
AVS1-P2 Jizhun decode FFmpeg cavs (2006)
AVS encode libxavs via FFmpeg
AVS+ RFC proposed; not merged
DRA decode/encode Thesis GitHub project; not in FFmpeg
DRA in silicon IP Synopsys ARC Sound (2011); Tensilica HiFi (2012)
DKAA No public decryptor found
AACS (international CBHD) Standard AACS research path

The next posts in this series cover standards numbers and patents, then hardware that actually ran these codecs in living rooms. Codec tooling without a disc image or firmware dump still leaves navigation and protection unresolved; codec tooling with those artefacts turns a sector dump into watchable video.

AVS as a system, not a single FourCC

The AVS organisation describes AVS1 as a full system covering system layer, video, audio, DRM and compliance testing. That breadth affects how researchers hunt tools: filenames may say AVS encoder, AVS muxer or compliance suite rather than CBHD. Part 2 video (GB/T 20090.2-2006) is the elementary stream FFmpeg’s cavs path targets. Broadcasting later moved to AVS+ and then AVS2/AVS3; those later profiles are not automatically present on 2009-2010 CBHD discs. Keeping profile names straight prevents false “unsupported CBHD” reports when the real issue is an AVS+ stream fed to a Jizhun-only decoder.

Licensing economics also explain why Chinese manufacturers preferred AVS on paper: about 1 RMB per decoder versus multi-dollar MPEG-LA stacks. Whether every pressed title actually shipped AVS is a separate empirical question. China Record’s lack of an AVS encoder in April 2009 and the September 2009 “new generation” AVS+DKAA unveiling are contemporaneous evidence that the codec story changed during the format’s short commercial life.

DRA beside Dolby on the same machines

Player marketing lists show DRA and Dolby families coexisting. The Shinco CBHD-9100 advertises DRA and AC-3 together with LPCM; the TCL THBD-1008 leans on Dolby Digital / Digital Plus / TrueHD and PCM in published specs. HDMI bitstream of DRA to Western AV receivers was reported as fragile on the HD-3700U because descriptors did not identify the payload. Desktop preservation therefore cannot assume “if the video decodes, the audio will follow in VLC”-DRA may need an offline conversion pass through the thesis codec before a standard media player sees PCM or AC-3.

Research targets still named but empty

uAVS encoders were on the original search brief; no pass returned usable documentation. Synopsys and Tensilica DRA IP proves silicon-level interest after 2011 but does not yield a Windows DLL for archivists. No pass found DKAA decryption code. AACS on international CBHD titles remains the better-documented protection path solely because AACS LA published a CBHD pre-recorded book (v0.90, 7 October 2008) rather than because those titles are easier to obtain.

Practical lab order: identify whether a given disc is domestic (DKAA) or international (AACS); extract after legal decrypt where applicable; demux; run cavs on AVS; route DRA through tianyigeng/DRA-Audio-System or transcode; archive both elementary streams and a transparent remux. USB playback on the CBHD-9100 remains available for non-DRM test encodes.

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:

Blog EVD Guides Technical Specifications
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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:

Blog CVD Guides Technical Specifications
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CVD Technical Specifications

What can and cannot be specified

The original C-Cube/consortium CVD specification is not publicly available, and the full text of SJ/T 11196-1998 was not obtained for this research. Almost every published CVD “specification” is therefore inferred from SVCD (Philips SVCD 1.0 / IEC 62107 / the Chinese Super VCD regime) plus the known resolution and subtitle differences. Values below are marked as directly attested for CVD where the 1998 Chinese press or Western tooling documentation says so, and otherwise inherited from the SVCD stack that CVD shares.

Physical disc and sector formats

A CVD is a standard 120 mm CD or CD-R using the CD-ROM XA / CD-i Bridge layout defined in the White Book. Track 1 is Mode 2 Form 1 with an ISO 9660 file system holding the metadata files (INFO, ENTRIES, PSD, LOT, SEARCH, TRACKS) and, optionally, the segment play-item area. Tracks 2 onwards are Mode 2 Form 2 MPEG tracks, one per sequence (up to 98). Form 1 sectors carry 2,048 bytes of user data with EDC and Layer-2 ECC; Form 2 sectors carry 2,324 bytes with EDC but no Layer-2 ECC-about 14% more payload. Guangming Daily’s 3 November 1998 comparison states that CVD and SVCD were “completely identical in physical format and file format, both following the relevant international and national standards.”

Disc anatomy follows the VCDImager description of Super Video CD layout: lead-in and TOC; a mandatory 150-sector pregap; an ISO 9660 track with the Primary Volume Descriptor at LSN 16 and the VCD info area at 00:04:00; an optional segment area of up to 1,980 segments of 150 sectors; then the MPEG Form 2 tracks, each preceded by a pregap of at least 150 sectors; a 150-sector postgap; and the lead-out. CVD players used 2× mechanisms; Guangming Daily associates CVD hardware with a Philips double-speed mechanism and CD7 digital servo, against a Sony double-speed mechanism on the SVCD side in the same comparison.

Capacity, data rate and playing time

Quantity Result
Raw 2× Form 2 throughput 150 sectors/s × 2,324 bytes × 8 ≈ 2,788.8 kbps
80-minute CD-R capacity (Form 2) ≈ 836.6 MB (≈ 798 MiB)
74-minute CD-R capacity (Form 2) ≈ 773.9 MB
Playing time at full 2×, 80-min blank ≈ 40 min (less ISO track and gaps)
Playing time at full 2×, 74-min blank ≈ 37 min
At ~1,800 kbps video + 224 kbps audio ≈ 53 min on an 80-min blank

The raw 2× figure explains why the combined audio-video ceiling is usually quoted as about 2.7 Mbps (Wikipedia) or 2,778 kbps (technical summaries). The ubiquitous “35-45 minutes per disc” figure is simply CD capacity read at 2×. Longer programmes need lower average VBR rates, typically 1.5-2.0 Mbps for sixty to eighty minutes.

Video and audio parameters

Parameter CVD value Basis
Codec MPEG-2, Main Profile @ Main Level 1998 press (“same decompression technology as DVD”); Western references
Resolution (NTSC) 352×480 at 29.97 fps Wikipedia; DeVeDe FAQ; VideoHelp
Resolution (PAL/SECAM) 352×576 at 25 fps same
Film content 23.976 fps with 3:2 pulldown flags Inherited from SVCD
Also permitted in 1998 2/3 D1 (480-wide) sources Guangming Daily 3 Nov 1998
Rate control VBR (CBR allowed) Guangming Daily; inherited
Maximum video rate ≈ 2,600 kbps (2,516-2,520 in practical recipes) Inherited; ffmpeg SVCD preset; SatStorm
VBV buffer 1,835,008 bits (224 KiB) in ffmpeg’s SVCD preset; 230 KB in mplex Tool defaults
Aspect ratio 4:3 or 16:9 (anamorphic) Inherited

Whether CVD was strictly 352-wide or also allowed 480-wide video is not settled. Western sources define CVD by its 352 width. Guangming Daily says CVD “suits both 1/2 D1 and 2/3 D1” sources while SVCD suited only 2/3 D1. Both claims are kept. Pixels per bit favour CVD: 352×576 is 202,752 pixels per frame against SVCD’s 480×576 at 276,480, so at the same bitrate CVD spends roughly a third more bits per pixel. That is the engineering argument for the format. Marketing-era horizontal resolution claims ranged from “up to 400 lines” (makers, July 1998) and “350-400 lines” (Jinzheng) to “about 280 lines” for early 1/2 D1 discs in a December 1998 Wenzhai Bao piece written from a pro-SVCD framing.

Audio is MPEG-1 Layer II at 44.1 kHz, typically 224 kbps within a 32-384 kbps range inherited from SVCD documentation. Up to two stereo or four mono tracks were marketed for karaoke (vocal/instrumental) or four language dubs. MPEG-2 multichannel 5.1 is allowed in the SVCD family but rarely supported; Guangming Daily notes that a “5.1-channel CVD scheme” had already been announced by November 1998. One AnandTech forum user in 2002 described CVD as “basically an SVCD with 352 × 240 VCD resolution and 48 KHz audio.” Every other source gives 352×480/576 and 44.1 kHz. VideoHelp users report that some players accept 48 kHz on CD and some play it too slowly (a Sony S560D is named). Both strands are kept. For DVD use, 44.1 kHz audio is not legal and must be resampled to 48 kHz.

File system, metadata and MPEG constraints

CVD uses the SVCD directory tree. From the GNU VCDImager manual the important paths are /SVCD/INFO.SVD (system ID “SUPERVCD”), ENTRIES.SVD, LOT.SVD, PSD.SVD, SEARCH.DAT, TRACKS.SVD, plus /MPEG2/ (or legacy /MPEGAV/) sequence tracks, /SEGMENT/ play items, and optional /EXT/ scan or caption files. VCDImager lists “SUPERVCD” as the INFO.SVD system ID for SVCD, XVCD and CVD, and “HQ-VCD” for HQ-VCD. There is no documented CVD-only identifier. Wenzhai Bao’s December 1998 report that CVD and SVCD players used different “disc identifiers” (识别码) to lock each other out suggests proprietary variants existed in practice, but no documentation of those identifiers was found.

Chinese legacy variants documented in VCDImager’s svcd vcd30 build options include the non-compliant /MPEGAV folder (EnReach I-Author) instead of /MPEG2, the deprecated ENTRYSVD signature, and a “chinese /SVCD/TRACKS.SVD format which differs from the format defined in the IEC-62107 specification.” The vcd-info tool also contains a heuristic “CVD interpretation (probably)” when parsing TRACKS.SVD, confirming that real CVD discs were seen with a distinct TRACKS layout.

Programme streams must be packed in 2,324-byte packs aligned to sector boundaries. Every I-frame must be preceded by a GOP header and a sequence header in the same sector, or entry points and scan tables break. SVCD requires scan-information user data in every I-picture so players can fast-forward and rewind; encoders write placeholders and VCDImager fills them with --update-scan-offsets. Official SVCD streams should signal 540 (4:3) or 720 (16:9) in the display horizontal size field; what CVD streams should carry here is undocumented. Peaks above the 2× ceiling cause stutter on real players even when a software compliance check passes.

Subtitles, menus and “protection”

CVD’s subtitles are the one on-disc feature besides resolution that most clearly separates it from IEC SVCD. CVD-style bitmaps travel in MPEG-PS private_stream_1; they are interlaced 2-bit RLE with a four-entry YUV palette plus highlight palette, metadata after the image data, and up to four streams. They are not in IEC 62107. SVCD OGT (Overlay Graphics and Text) uses Philips’ layout with private_data_id 0x70 and sub-stream IDs selecting channels 0-3; VCDImager notes that OGT is “sadly not part of the IEC62107 specs” either, even though it is the Philips SVCD format. VCDImager’s CVD subtitle documentation was reverse-engineered from submux sample code and “a couple of samples of dubious origin,” documenting tags for duration (0x04), coordinates (0x17/0x1f), palettes (0x24-0x27, 0x2c-0x2f), transparency and even/odd row offsets. VLC’s MPEG-PS demuxer is widely understood to map private_stream_1 sub-IDs 0x00-0x03 to CVD subtitles and 0x70-0x73 to SVCD OGT; that mapping was not confirmed from VLC source in the material used here. The 1998 makers marketed “four languages and four on-screen text choices” and “high-definition overlay subtitles.”

Menus inherit SVCD playback control: play lists, selection lists, end lists and (SVCD-only) command lists, with entry points in ENTRIES.SVD acting as chapters. Menu stills are MPEG-2 stills in the segment area at 480×480/576 or high-resolution 704×480/576 under SVCD rules. Makers described this as “two-way interactive playback control” (双向交互式控播); Guangming Daily said SVCD’s VCD 3.0 compatibility gave it an edge in interactivity.

CVD had no documented copy-protection system of its own-no CSS-style encryption, no region code and no Macrovision flag in the standards. The only documented “protection” is the 1998-1999 practice of adding proprietary identifiers and interference codes (干扰数码) so rival makers’ players could not read discs, and the counter-practice of fitting decryption components to players. These were compatibility weapons, not anti-piracy measures. The exact mechanism-modified INFO fields, deliberate errors, or non-standard TRACKS/ENTRIES data-is undocumented.

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:

Blog CBHD Guides Technical Specifications
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CBHD Technical Specifications

Physical disc geometry

CBHD kept the 12 cm diameter and the DVD-like structure of two 0.6 mm polycarbonate substrates bonded back to back, giving a 0.6 mm cover layer above the data layer. It did not adopt Blu-ray’s thinner 0.1 mm cover and 0.85 NA lens. Physically the disc resembles an HD DVD disc. Optical readout uses a head capable of differential phase detection tracking.

CHDA comparison: CBHD vs DVD vs Blu-ray

Parameter CBHD DVD Blu-ray
Laser 405 nm Red (650 nm) 405 nm
Numerical aperture 0.65 0.60 0.85
Single layer 15 GB 4.7 GB 25 GB
Dual layer 30 GB 8.5 GB 50 GB
Maximum resolution 1080p 576p 1080p
Track pitch 0.40 μm 0.74 μm 0.32 μm
Minimum pit 0.204 μm ~0.40 μm ~0.149 μm
Modulation 4-6 FSM EFM(+) BD modulation
File system UDF UDF UDF
1× data rate 36.55 Mbps – –
Max video bitrate 28 Mbps – –

CBHD vs HD DVD vs Blu-ray (codec and DRM view)

Parameter CBHD HD DVD Blu-ray
Cover substrate 0.6 mm 0.6 mm 0.1 mm
Primary video AVS (GB/T 20090.2) VC-1, H.264, MPEG-2 H.264, VC-1, MPEG-2
Primary audio DRA (GB/T 22726) DD+, DTS-HD, LPCM TrueHD, DTS-HD MA, LPCM
Copy protection DKAA / AACS derivative AACS AACS, BD+
Navigation CETC Advanced Content (iHD/XML) HDMV / BD-J

Laser wavelength, NA, track pitch, minimum pit length and capacities match HD DVD’s physical envelope. Error-correction details remain undocumented across the research passes. Early presumption that CBHD matched HD DVD’s NA 0.65 and 0.40 μm pitch was later confirmed from the archived CHDA technical page.

Why DVD factories could convert

Because recording-layer geometry stayed close to DVD, Chinese plants could modify existing DVD lines instead of building a Blu-ray production ecosystem. Plants in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou needed upgrades such as a 405 nm mastering laser and spin-coater retrofits for denser pit geometry. A secondary unverified source puts line conversion near US$800,000 versus about $3 million for Blu-ray. Memory-Tech independently confirmed the strategy and built a complete CBHD production system through UOD.

Modulation: 4-6 FSM

CBHD replaced HD DVD’s 8-12 ETM with 4-6 FSM. Chinese industry reporting (Sina Tech, 3 April 2009) names this as one of three major changes, made “to add Chinese patents.” The Shinco CBHD-9100 specification advertises China’s proprietary 4-6 modulation coding. A 2008 Gizmodo piece described a CH-DVD player as essentially an HD DVD player “whose laser is set at a different modulation,” able to share processors and optical pickups in manufacturing.

The VCD analogy breaks here. VCD could be authored onto CD-R with ordinary burners. A pressed CBHD needs correct logical structure, premaster, CBHD physical encoding with 4-6 modulation, error-correction/channel structure, blue-laser mastering and replication. A DVD burner cannot simply be told to “burn this CBHD ISO”: the disc may be UDF, but UDF is not the physical format. A later Novatek servo DSP (NT90912) supported FSM alongside ETM, EFM+ and EFM, showing dedicated hardware support for the channel.

File system and disc structure

Chinese comparison tables explicitly identify UDF, which makes preservation more tractable than inventing a file system from zero. Descriptions of what sits on top of UDF differ between research passes:

  • Exact UDF version and containers not verified; UDF 2.5 and EVO/MPEG-PS are likely but unconfirmed given HD DVD derivation.
  • The DCA verifier validates China HD content against HD DVD Book 3 1.x with supplemental information, including EVOB, HDi content, Full Trust and Restricted Mode-implying HD DVD logical structures with Chinese extensions.
  • Another model places elementary AVS video and DRA audio in MPEG-2 Transport or Program Streams under a CBHD_TS volume directory (or HVDVD_TS on early CH-DVD transition discs), with a CBHD_TS.IFO stream map.

None of the passes cites a directory dump of a real CBHD disc. Relatively understood items include UDF as the filesystem label, 12 cm geometry, 15/30 GB capacity, 405 nm / 0.65 NA, 4-6 FSM as a concept, and the codec list. Still requiring direct disc investigation: exact UDF layout, directory conventions, EVOB usage, playlist and navigation files, CETC implementation details, DKAA structures and keys, sector-level differences, lead-in/lead-out, error correction, and exact Book 2 / Book 3 relationship to HD DVD.

Three software layers on a commercial disc

  1. Application: media assets and scripts; video in AVS; audio in DRA or LPCM; menus and multi-angle via CETC.
  2. Container / system stream: AVS and DRA elementary streams multiplexed into MPEG-2 TS or PS under CBHD_TS.
  3. Cryptographic protection: DKAA between UDF and decoders; authenticity checks; key exchange with player hardware; HDCP over HDMI.

CETC navigation

CBHD replaced HD DVD’s Advanced Content (HDi/iHD-XML, ECMAScript and SMIL) with CETC navigation. CHDA material lists dual highlight regions in menus, preview/summarised content, audio associated with the highlighted selection, and DVD-like multi-angle, multiple audio and subtitle tracks. The design kept some DVD-like interface behaviour without a Java virtual machine (unlike Blu-ray BD-J) or heavy XML parsers. A first-generation CETC bug on the Shinco HD-3700U caused pause on native CBHD to break frame sync; the TCL THBD-1038 is described as carrying an updated CETC engine. Even with UDF, video, audio and subtitles in hand, a playable CBHD still needs the CETC environment the player expects.

Video and audio codecs

Official CHDA documentation lists AVS, H.264/AVC, VC-1 and MPEG-2; player specs made AVS, MPEG-4 AVC and VC-1 mandatory. Player lists:

  • Shinco CBHD-9100: AVS-Video, VC-1, MPEG-4, AVC; JPEG; outputs 1080p/i, 720p, 480p.
  • TCL THBD-1008: VC-1, H.264, MPEG-4, MPEG-2; 1080p/24.
  • Shinco HD-3700U: AVS, MPEG-2, DVD-Video, EVD, HVD, SVCD, VCD; AVI from USB.

Early 2009 discs almost certainly used VC-1 or AVC because AVS encoders were not yet available at China Record; AVS and DKAA discs were presented as a “new generation” only in September 2009. One research pass states video was encoded exclusively in AVS; others say discs could and early discs likely did use VC-1/AVC.

AVS Part 2 video became national standard GB/T 20090.2-2006 in February 2006 after working-group work from 2002. AVS1 is a full system-system, video, audio, DRM and compliance-not only a video codec. Technical traits cited for CBHD use: efficiency comparable to H.264 High Profile with lower complexity; licensing about 1 RMB per decoder; 8×8 integer transforms, quarter-pel motion vectors, context-adaptive spatial prediction and its own loop filter; typical encodes 1080p at 23.976/24 fps or 1080i at 50 Hz, averages 12-18 Mbps.

Official audio lists AVS Audio, DRA and Dolby AC-3. Shinco CBHD-9100 adds LPCM and 5.1 output. TCL THBD-1008 lists Dolby Digital, Digital Plus, TrueHD and PCM. DRA is standardised as SJ/T 11368-2006 and GB/T 22726-2008 (DigiRise / Guangzhou Digital Rise Technology); optional in Blu-ray from version 2.3. Expansions of the acronym differ: “Dynamic Resolution Adaptation” versus “Digital Rise Audio.” Multi-channel sub-band/MDCT coding from mono/stereo to 5.1/7.1 and bitrates from 64 kbps to 1.5 Mbps are reported. CBHD-HiFi (July 2010) used dual-layer 30 GB for multi-channel LPCM up to 24-bit/192 kHz over secure HDMI; China Record music documentaries appear as HiFi special editions.

DKAA, AACS, region and packaging

CBHD-3D specifications and products launched in Beijing in July 2010; by that month only one 3D title existed; Guangzhou Asian Games ceremonies were planned for 3D release. What Hi-Fi covered the move under the headline that HD-DVD was “back” in 3D. Packaging used black Blu-ray-size cases originally designed for HD-VMD, carrying a blue CBHD logo; the DVD Forum’s “HD DVD China” logo had been approved in November 2007. Region coding remains poorly attested across passes.

Understood versus still needing a disc

ChatGPT pass 2’s checklist remains the practical guide for laboratory work. Relatively understood: UDF as the labelled filesystem, twelve-centimetre geometry, 15/30 GB capacities, 405 nm laser, 0.65 NA, 4-6 FSM as a concept, AVS and the Western video codecs, DRA and Dolby AC-3, and the existence of CETC and DKAA as named systems. Still requiring direct disc investigation: exact CBHD UDF layout and identifiers, directory conventions, exact EVOB usage, playlist structure, navigation files and CETC binaries, DKAA structures and keys, sector-level differences from HD DVD, lead-in/lead-out implementation, error-correction details, and the precise relationship between CBHD Books 2/3 and HD DVD Books 2/3. Owning an actual CBHD disc therefore becomes extremely valuable for reconstruction.

Understood versus still needing a disc on the bench

ChatGPT pass 2’s checklist remains the practical guide for laboratory work. Relatively understood: UDF as the labelled filesystem, twelve-centimetre geometry, 15/30 GB capacities, 405 nm laser, 0.65 NA, 4-6 FSM as a concept, AVS and the Western video codecs, DRA and Dolby AC-3, and the existence of CETC and DKAA as named systems. Still requiring direct disc investigation: exact CBHD UDF layout and identifiers, directory conventions, exact EVOB usage, playlist structure, navigation files and CETC binaries, DKAA structures and keys, sector-level differences from HD DVD, lead-in/lead-out implementation, error-correction details, and the precise relationship between CBHD Books 2/3 and HD DVD Books 2/3. Owning an actual CBHD disc is extremely valuable for reconstruction.

Packaging used black Blu-ray-size cases originally designed for HD-VMD, carrying a blue CBHD logo. The DVD Forum’s separate “HD DVD China” logo had been approved in November 2007. Region coding remains poorly attested. Domestic films used DKAA; international films used AACS.

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:

Blog EVD Guides History
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EVD History: From DVD Royalties to CBHD

Why China built EVD

By the early 2000s China was the world’s DVD player factory. Contemporary reports put 2002 production near 30 million units, with about 20 million exported and Chinese makers holding up to 70 percent of the global market. The industrial problem was royalties. Chinese sources put 6C pool fees at more than ten US dollars per domestic player and more than US$20 per export unit; Unitalen reprints US$13.8 domestic; English Wikipedia gives $13-$20 including CSS, Macrovision and MPEG-2. E-World later claimed China paid about US$1.2 billion a year in patent fees. Those figures disagree and are kept side by side. An E-World executive framed EVD’s purpose bluntly: so the next generation of disc players would not repeat the domestic DVD industry’s mistakes, and so China could steer its own HD direction.

1999: Beijing E-World

Research began in 1999. Chinese Wikipedia says Shinco, SVA and others jointly founded Beijing E-World Digital Technology. People’s Daily reported that the government contributed ¥10 million, about one quarter of R&D costs, and that the consortium charged ¥500,000 in licensing fees plus US$2 per player. Shareholder and alliance lists vary: E-World’s FAQ names Konka, Shinco, BBK, Amoi, Malata and SVA; English Wikipedia and c114 give longer nine-member sets. All are kept as open disagreements. Hao Jie (郝杰) led E-World and rejected the Super DVD label, pitching a modular information-appliance platform. Technical appraisal dates conflict: end of 2001 (c114, Zhang Baoquan, E-World FAQ) versus early 2002 (PjTime/ZOL reprints).

2003: On2, LSI Logic and the Great Hall launch

On2 Technologies signed EVD and non-EVD VP5/VP6 licences effective 21 June 2003 at US$2 per player with no per-disc royalty. LSI Logic announced itself as the first semiconductor supplier of high-definition EVD technology on its DoMiNo architecture. On 18 November 2003 EVD was unveiled at the Great Hall of the People. Eleven models from nine makers (Amoi, BBK, Changhong, Malata, Nintaus, Shinco, SVA, Skyworth, Yuxing) were named; players were to cost about ¥2,000; organisers hoped to attack DVD market share. Hao Jie projected up to 1.8 million players in 2004, three million in 2005 and nine million in 2006.

Same-week trade press already disagreed on the codec. EDN said EVD would use VP5 and VP6. EE Times said launch players employed MPEG-2 Main Profile @ High Level based encoding on LSI chips, with On2 an alternative option and AVS the long-term target. EE Times also noted from day one that DVD playback would still trigger DVD royalties. Both codec readings are kept.

2004: slow start

The Shinco EVD-8700 reached retail on 1 January 2004 at ¥1,998. For months it was effectively the only machine in stores; c114 recorded that only Shinco and SVA among the nine mainstream makers actually put EVD on the market. June 2004 brought a Dazhong EVD HD experience hall and a cut to ¥1,698; later promotions reached ¥998 with bundled discs. Players passed MII’s HD test in September 2004. Jindian Group and E-World formed Beijing Jindian Global with ¥200 million capital; the first release was fourteen titles. Rival red-laser camps launched the same year: Kaicheng’s HDV in January and Amlogic-backed HVD in April, with some brands sitting in two camps. Reported 2004 sales were about 200,000 players against Hao’s 1.8 million forecast. On2 filed LCIA arbitration on 3 May 2004 over unpaid fees and minimum royalties.

2005: SJ/T standard and arbitration

On 18 February 2005 SJ/T 11299-2005 was recorded as released and implemented; Chinese press dates the MII approval notice to 22 or 23 February. Western headlines called it a national standard; Chinese sources are more precise: it is an electronics-industry recommended (SJ/T) standard, not a GB national standard. Both wordings are kept. Sales ticked up briefly at chains such as Dazhong, but HD TVs still cost around ¥10,000 and discs remained scarce. Zhang Baoquan promised discs at ¥3-5; street prices stayed ¥18-28.

On 10 March 2005 the LCIA arbitrator dismissed On2’s claims. On2’s filings say minimum royalties were conditional on porting VP6 to two jointly selected DSPs, and that port was never completed. English Wikipedia instead says the claims failed primarily because few players were produced. Either way, VP6 never became the working codec of shipping EVD players. Later in 2005 E-World signed letters of intent for H.264 (STMicroelectronics), VMD multilayer discs (NME) and AVS-based next-generation EVD; none reached the market. Jindian Global announced AACS for new titles on 11 December 2005, fearing E-World’s licensed PC player would leak protection, while AACS itself was not yet final.

2006 crisis and Beijing Declaration

By late 2006 EE Times put roughly 700,000 EVD players in the market against about 20 million DVD players sold yearly in China. Li Hai of E-World had given 300,000-400,000 for 2005 sales; AFP later quoted Zhang with a conflicting 700,000 last year figure. Patent-pledge and Hao Jie rumours damaged confidence. HVD outsold EVD by as much as ten to one in some months. Suning refused to stock EVD as fake HD. Defections toward HD DVD began among alliance brands.

On 6 December 2006 the China EVD Industry Alliance issued the Beijing Declaration. Counts disagree: 18-20 makers and 51-54 players at about ¥700, framed as concentrating China’s red-laser industry against Japanese blue-laser standards, with 1080p discs promised by end of 2007. AP noted that an earlier promotion push had been dropped after 2004. Plans for Gome EVD stores and online outlets were announced; the commercial rebound did not materialise.

2007-2008 collapse and legacy

By August 2007 Nanfang Daily collected headlines that the alliance existed in name only and that sales were dismal. In 2008 Baidu records an HD-EVD rename with claimed 1080p output, ~¥1,000 players and ¥15-30 discs; no model numbers were found. English Wikipedia dates the last new hardware to 2008. Shinco, the EVD盟主, later moved to Tsinghua-backed CBHD. Around 2011-2012 Yicai reported Shinco under Changzhou government custody for restructuring, years after the first EVD.

Why it failed

  • No royalty escape: sellable players still played DVD, so 6C/3C fees remained (EE Times 2003 and 2006).
  • No content: roughly 14 titles in mid-2004 and about 100 by late 2006, mostly from one disc maker, against cheap pirate DVD compilations.
  • No visible benefit on ordinary TVs: HD sets were expensive; the EVD/DVD difference was hard to see on SD screens.
  • Divided domestic camp: EVD, HVD and HDV fought each other; some brands sat in two camps.
  • Internal conflict: On2 arbitration, E-World vs Jindian over PC playback and AACS, NME share-swap accusations, patent-pledge rumours.
  • Single chip source: only LSI Logic supplied EVD decoders (iSuppli via EE Times).
  • Blue laser arrived: HD DVD and Blu-ray launched in 2006; makers defected toward HD DVD and then CBHD.

Lineage to CBHD

EVD sits between CVD / Super VCD on CD and CBHD on blue-laser HD DVD-derived media: White Book VCD to CVD/SVCD (SJ/T 11196) to EVD (SJ/T 11299) to CBHD. EE Times already compared EVD to China’s earlier VCD-to-Super-VCD pattern. E-World itself said EVD subtitles inherited Super VCD research. English Wikipedia lists CBHD as a follow-on to EVD based on HD DVD technology. The optical jump from red-laser DVD to blue-laser CBHD closed the red-laser HD experiment that EVD embodied.

Market numbers in one place

Measure Figure Source note
2004 forecast Up to 1.8 million players Hao Jie, People’s Daily
2004 actual ~200,000 Li Hai to EE Times
2005 actual 300,000-400,000 Li Hai to EE Times
Installed base, Nov 2006 ~700,000 in the market EE Times
Conflicting 700,000 claim Sold “last year” (2005) AFP quoting Zhang; conflicts with Li Hai
China DVD market ~20 million players a year iSuppli via EE Times
Disc prices ¥18-28 typical; ¥3-5 promised (2005); ¥15-30 HD-EVD claim Kept as open disagreement with promise

Those sales envelopes are why the 2006 Beijing Declaration’s talk of replacing DVD by 2008 reads as industrial theatre in retrospect. The format had government notices, a chip vendor, a content company and retail experience halls. It never had enough titles, enough HD televisions in homes, or an escape from DVD royalties once players had to remain DVD-compatible to sell.

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:

Blog CVD Guides History
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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: