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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:

Blog CBHD Guides History
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CBHD History: From 2005 Proposal to Market Collapse

Industrial background before the proposal

Throughout the standard-definition DVD era, mainland China produced roughly 30 percent of the world’s optical disc hardware. Domestic manufacturers remained bound by licensing fees from foreign patent pools including 3C, 6C and MPEG-LA. Contemporary figures for that royalty burden vary: about $22 per DVD player in one accounting, about €15 per unit in another, and a $21 per-player saving claimed by one CBHD maker. Those fees squeezed margins and sent large sums overseas.

As the HD DVD versus Blu-ray format war escalated, Chinese state institutes looked for an exit from royalty dependence. Earlier home-grown formats had already tried: EVD (Enhanced Versatile Disc) failed for lack of content-a lesson later reviewers said CBHD needed to learn.

2005: the actual origin

On 27 July 2005, OMNERC at Tsinghua University and the CETC 3rd Research Institute jointly submitted a technical proposal to the DVD Forum’s WG-11 working group for a Chinese HD DVD standard. Chinese industry reporting gives this date explicitly. The work therefore began while HD DVD was still an active international format-not after Toshiba abandoned it.

Over roughly three years (2005-2008) researchers modified the Toshiba-derived architecture in three principal areas: 8-12 ETM modulation was replaced with 4-6 FSM; HD DVD’s navigation system was simplified and reworked; and AVS entered as Chinese audio/video technology. The stated purpose of the modulation change was to increase Chinese-owned intellectual property in the physical format. The claim that “CBHD is just HD DVD with a different codec” is therefore wrong: changes reached the physical channel-coding layer. That fact later shapes firmware and drive-compatibility debates.

Dr. Hisashi Yamada and the DVD Forum

Dr. Hisashi Yamada, former Chief Technology Fellow at Toshiba’s Digital Media Network division and often called the “father of DVD,” worked with OMNERC engineers to transfer HD DVD physical-layer specifications to China. In February 2007 the DVD Forum board/steering meeting approved the text of the Chinese HD DVD physical-format specification; application-format work and prototypes then moved mainly to China. On 15 November 2007, the Forum’s 40th Steering Committee approved the “HD DVD China” logo and the DVD Forum-OMNERC agreement, and set up a License Enforcement Committee for the China HD DVD format. In February 2008 the Forum granted OMNERC the right to edit HD DVD specifications independently (English Wikipedia footnotes disagree whether that was the 41st or 42nd meeting; February 2008 is the date given).

Standards relationship is not compatibility. Early reports described CH-DVD as an HD DVD derivative that might be handled through firmware. By the final commercial specification, channel coding, navigation, codecs and content protection had all diverged.

From CH-DVD to CBHD

The original name was CH-DVD (China High Definition DVD). On 7 September 2007 OMNERC announced CH-DVD and founded the China High Definition DVD Industry Association (CHDA), aiming to ship players in 2008. An early prototype demonstration in 2007 used modified 0.6 mm HD DVD substrates. Commercial branding later became China Blue High-Definition (CBHD). Publications sometimes kept saying CH-DVD after the rename. One lineage covers the sequence:

  1. Chinese HD DVD proposal (2005)
  2. CH-DVD (2007)
  3. CBHD (late 2008 / 2009)

Renaming is dated to late 2008 together with integration of indigenous AVS, DRA and DKAA standards.

After Toshiba exited HD DVD

Toshiba ended HD DVD on 19 February 2008. Foreign analysts treated the physical architecture as dead. Instead CHDA, backed by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), repurposed it: Western codecs, audio standards and DRM were stripped or subordinated in favour of state-owned intellectual property, and the technology was redirected to the domestic market. Factories could reuse DVD mastering and replication infrastructure, cutting capital spend and avoiding Blu-ray Disc Association licensing fees.

Through 2008, Tongfang, Shinco and TCL showed prototypes (March 2008). Launch dates of August, September, October and December 2008 all slipped. Shinco built 2,000 CBHD-9100 units before Chinese New Year 2009. Shanghai United Optical Disc (UOD) opened the first CBHD production line in July 2008. DFC Intelligence reported expected royalties around $8 per CBHD player on 28 July 2008. Patent CN101556807B (CBHD blue-laser optical pickup) carries a 7 April 2008 priority date.

Master timeline (selected)

Date Event
27 Jul 2005 OMNERC + CETC propose Chinese HD DVD to DVD Forum WG-11
Feb 2007 DVD Forum approves Chinese HD DVD physical-format text
7 Sep 2007 CH-DVD announced; CHDA founded
15 Nov 2007 “HD DVD China” logo and OMNERC agreement approved
19 Feb 2008 Toshiba ends HD DVD
Mar 2008 Tongfang, Shinco, TCL prototypes
Jul 2008 UOD opens first CBHD line
Early Mar 2009 Warner announces CBHD support via CAV Warner; launch titles ¥50-70
22 Apr 2009 Official commercial launch
Oct 2009 GBAX imports TCL THBD-1008 to UK (~£259.99)
21 Dec 2009 100 titles claimed reached
2 Jul 2010 CBHD-3D product launch; CBHD-HiFi unveiled
Q2 2010 onward CMM retail data: CBHD share falling sharply
2011-2012 Unofficial end of disc replication

Organisations and people

OMNERC deputy director Prof. Lu Da (陆达) led the project. CETC senior engineer Tian Yujing (田玉静) appears in industrialisation interviews; Gemini attributes the domestic navigation stack to CETC. MIIT supervised the effort. CHDA (later Chinese name 中国高清光盘产业推进联盟 / CHDIA) had nearly 20 founding members per Digitimes. Secretary-general Zhang Weimin (张伟民); Shinco chaired the alliance (spokesman Chen Changfeng 陈长峰; general manager Qin Zhishang 秦志尚). Other members included TCL (senior VP Shi Wanwen 史万文), Tsinghua Tongfang, Haier and BBK (步步高). CHDA copied DVD Forum committee structure. Toshiba held licensing because it owned underlying IP.

Content and replication: CAV Warner (managing director Tony Vaughan / 方东林); China Record Corporation / 中唱 and 中唱胜利影音 (GM Yan Hua 阎华); China Film Audio-Visual Press; Hongyi (January 2010 production batch); announced supporters with little visible output including Universal, National Geographic, Paramount, Celestial Pictures, BBC/Discovery. Memory-Tech developed the complete CBHD production process. UOD (Memory-Tech + China Record Shanghai) was, in April 2009, the only Chinese company with technology and equipment to press CBHD. CBC (CRC/BMB Audio Visual) handled editing, encoding and authoring. Retail channels: GOME, Suning, Dazhong; online Joyo-Amazon, Dangdang, Taobao. No GB or SJ national/industry standard number for CBHD itself was found in the research passes.

Launch performance and the 3:1 myth

Players sold in April 2009 at about ¥2,000 (~$293), roughly 40% below Blu-ray. Warner launch discs were ¥50-70 versus mainland Blu-ray at ¥150-200. Disc prices later fell to about ¥25-30, and as low as ¥28 online by 2010. In July-August 2009 TV Tokyo reported from one GOME store in Shanghai a sales split of 60% DVD / 30% CBHD / 10% Blu-ray. That single-store figure became the often-repeated claim that CBHD was outselling Blu-ray 3:1. It is not national market share. 北京商报 (12 Aug 2009) repeated the 30/10/60 claim as a promoter-sourced figure that later conflicted with CMM retail data.

ITmedia’s October 2009 field report found many ordinary DVD players, one Sony Blu-ray player and only one CBHD machine-a Shinco CBHD-9100-on display at Suning. Titles were available through Amazon China and Taobao, but many shops still relied on pirated content. Diamond Online’s China-based writer said he had never seen a physical store selling CBHD software, only online shops. CHDA-sourced figures put Shinco under 11,000 players a month from mid-2009 to mid-2010 (one pass summarises “on the order of 11,000” in late 2009). A January 2010 Guangzhou report estimated about 50,000 CBHD players sold in China. In April 2010 Suning Shanghai was selling 100+ Shinco units a month and giving 10 free discs with each player.

Decline

TCL left around late 2009. By July 2010 Tencent found only Shinco CBHD players in Beijing’s GOME, Suning and Dazhong, and only one 3D title. CMM analyst 杨瑞兵 (pjtime, 16 June 2011) said CBHD’s retail share fell sharply from Q2 2010 and that blue-laser players as a whole were only 4.2% of 2010 disc-player unit sales. December 2011 Sina coverage of Shinco’s decline said its blue-disc investment “met a cold market” as PCs spread. A 2013 ASCII retrospective treated the format as effectively gone. The Museum of Obsolete Media dates CBHD approximately 2009 to the early 2010s.

Documented causes: thin catalogue (about 100 titles by mid-2010 against 1,000 promised; China Record lacked an AVS encoder in April 2009); narrow hardware (only Shinco and TCL shipped; Tongfang held back; Panasonic, Sony, Samsung and LG refused and concentrated on Blu-ray); BD-9 piracy (dual-layer DVD-9 carrying re-compressed 1080p H.264 for Blu-ray players at ¥15-20); PC/file-based HD then streaming (iQiyi, Youku, Tencent Video rising 2010-2012); and Blu-ray’s global win, pushed in China by China Hualu and Sony.

Legacy

CBHD failed as a physical format, but AVS re-engineered as AVS2/AVS3 and DRA audio were mandated across China’s terrestrial HD, 4K Ultra-HD and 8K state broadcasting. Surviving fragments-standards pieces, patents, player specs, authoring-company records, verifier software, discs, firmware and collector hardware-are enough for a serious reconstruction attempt. The corrected historical sequence is a formal programme from 2005, deep engineering changes (ETM→FSM, Advanced Content→CETC, foreign codecs→AVS/DRA), continuation after HD DVD’s collapse, a Memory-Tech/CBC/UOD production ecosystem, launch on 22 April 2009, a documented overseas retail attempt, a catalogue exceeding 100 titles by industry claims, falling prices, then failure to build the installed base needed to survive.

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: