China Blue High-Definition Disc: Format at a Glance
China Blue High-Definition Disc at a glance
China Blue High-Definition Disc (CBHD) is the English commercial name for the format Chinese sources call 中国蓝光高清光盘, shortened to 中国蓝光. Earlier publicity used CH-DVD / China High Definition DVD and the DVD Forum logo name “HD DVD China.” Developers were the Optical Memory National Engineering Research Center (OMNERC, 清华大学光盘国家工程研究中心) at Tsinghua University together with the China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC) 3rd Research Institute (中国电子科技集团第三研究所).
Identity card
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Proposal to DVD Forum WG-11 | 27 July 2005 |
| Public announcement (as CH-DVD) | 7 September 2007 |
| Retail / official commercial launch | April 2009 / 22 April 2009 |
| Commercial life | Approximately 2009 to 2011 / early 2010s |
| Primary market | Mainland China (limited UK import via GBAX, 2009) |
| Physical basis | HD DVD / DVD optical architecture, 2 × 0.6 mm bonded substrates |
| Disc diameter | 120 mm |
| Capacity | 15 GB single layer, 30 GB dual layer |
| Laser / NA | 405 nm blue-violet / 0.65 |
| Track pitch / minimum pit | 0.40 μm / 0.204 μm |
| Modulation | 4-6 FSM (replacing HD DVD’s 8-12 ETM) |
| 1× transfer rate | Approximately 36.55 Mbps |
| Maximum video bitrate (reported) | 28 Mbps |
| File system | UDF |
| Maximum resolution | 1920 × 1080 (1080p) |
| Navigation | CETC navigation (replacing HD DVD Advanced Content / HDi) |
The archived official CHDA technical page is the source for the pit length, track pitch and numerical-aperture figures that later summaries often omit. It states that CBHD kept the 12 cm disc and used 405 nm light with NA 0.65, reducing pit length to 0.204 μm and track pitch to 0.4 μm.
What sits on the disc
Video codecs listed for the format are AVS (GB/T 20090.2), H.264/AVC, VC-1 and MPEG-2; MPEG-4 also appears on player lists. Audio codecs include AVS Audio, DRA (GB/T 22726), Dolby AC-3 and LPCM; the TCL THBD-1008 additionally lists Dolby Digital Plus and TrueHD. Copy protection split by content origin: DKAA for domestic titles, AACS for international titles. In 2010 the alliance also unveiled CBHD-3D and CBHD-HiFi profile extensions.
Commercial players normally documented as production models are six units: Shinco CBHD-9100, CBHD-3800, HD-2100 and HD-3700U, plus TCL THBD-1008 and THBD-1038. Prototypes and pre-production machines sat around that commercial set. Catalogue size claims cluster around about 100 titles by December 2009 to mid-2010, with one early-2010 report citing about 150; a promised 1,000 titles for 2010 was never reached.
How the numbers relate
Capacity, laser wavelength and cover-layer thickness place CBHD next to HD DVD rather than Blu-ray. Single-layer 15 GB and dual-layer 30 GB match the HD DVD envelope. The 0.6 mm bonded-substrate stack is the same family of DVD-like geometry that Chinese replication plants already knew how to make. Blu-ray’s 0.1 mm cover and 0.85 NA optics were deliberately not adopted.
Where CBHD diverges from a simple HD DVD rebadge is the channel and application stack. Replacing 8-12 ETM with 4-6 FSM changes the physical channel coding. Replacing Advanced Content with CETC navigation changes menus and interactivity. Mandating AVS and DRA (alongside legacy Western codecs on players) and pairing DKAA with AACS changes the intellectual-property and DRM profile. Those four layers-modulation, navigation, codecs, protection-are the short definition of the format beyond the capacity table.
Transfer rates and video ceiling
A 1× rate near 36.55 Mbps and a reported maximum video bitrate of 28 Mbps are reconstruction-relevant numbers. They show that CBHD is not “HD video burned onto a DVD.” The physical channel is genuine high-density blue-laser optical media. Average commercial encodes discussed elsewhere in this research cluster in the 12-18 Mbps range for 1080p, leaving headroom under the 28 Mbps ceiling for peaks and multiplexed audio.
Market envelope in one paragraph
Development started with a July 2005 proposal while HD DVD was still an active international format. Public CH-DVD announcement and CHDA founding followed in September 2007. Toshiba ended HD DVD in February 2008; Chinese work continued under MIIT backing and commercial branding as CBHD. Retail players and discs reached Chinese stores in April 2009 at player prices around ¥2,000 and disc prices initially ¥50-70. Limited overseas retail appeared when GBAX imported the TCL THBD-1008 into the United Kingdom in October 2009. By mid-2010 the title count had stalled near the low hundreds against a thin hardware base; by 2011-2012 replication had effectively ended.
Quick codec and protection matrix
- Video: AVS (national GB/T 20090.2), H.264/AVC, VC-1, MPEG-2; MPEG-4 listed on hardware.
- Audio: AVS Audio, DRA, Dolby AC-3, LPCM; Dolby Digital Plus / TrueHD on TCL THBD-1008.
- DRM: DKAA domestic; AACS international.
- Navigation: CETC (not HDi / Advanced Content).
- Extensions: CBHD-3D and CBHD-HiFi (2010).
What this glance deliberately excludes
Detailed timelines, patent numbers, authoring chains, firmware debates and catalogue title lists belong in later chapters of this series. The glance is the fixed reference card: names, dates, physical parameters from the CHDA technical page, codec and DRM labels, the six production player models, and the catalogue-size claims that contemporary reporting actually made. Use it as the index into the longer research posts rather than as a substitute for them.
When later posts cite “15/30 GB,” “4-6 FSM,” “NA 0.65,” “0.204 μm pits,” “0.40 μm track pitch,” “36.55 Mbps 1×,” or “28 Mbps max video,” they are referring to the same CHDA-backed parameter set summarised here. When they name Shinco CBHD-9100, CBHD-3800, HD-2100, HD-3700U or TCL THBD-1008 / THBD-1038, they are referring to the documented commercial hardware set, not to an open-ended list of brands.
Lineage in three steps
- Chinese HD DVD proposal to DVD Forum WG-11 (2005).
- CH-DVD announcement and CHDA founding (2007).
- Commercial CBHD branding and April 2009 retail launch.
Publications sometimes kept calling the format CH-DVD after CBHD branding appeared. Treat that as one lineage with renaming, not as three unrelated disc formats. The physical geometry stayed HD DVD-like; the Chinese team’s work concentrated on the layers that carried licensing cost and domestic-standard control.
Commercial life in numbers
Retail shelves saw players from April 2009. The official commercial launch date recorded in industry timelines is 22 April 2009. Shinco had already built 2,000 CBHD-9100 units before Chinese New Year that year. Player street prices clustered near ¥2,000 at launch-about forty percent below contemporary Blu-ray decks in mainland China-then fell: the CBHD-9100 appeared around ¥1,599 in Guangzhou by January 2010. Disc prices opened at ¥50-70 for Warner launch titles, drifted toward ¥25-30 as the format fought piracy, and were reported online near ¥28 by 2010.
Title-count reporting is noisy. Japanese Wikipedia notes 100 titles reached by 21 December 2009. A Guangzhou report in January 2010 put CBHD at about 150 titles against 1,800 Blu-ray titles and estimated about 50,000 CBHD players sold nationwide. Alliance messaging at the September 2009 Guangzhou conference still projected 1,000 titles and a million players for 2010; those targets were not met. Mid-2010 Tencent coverage still sat near about 100 titles with a single 3D title in existence.
Hardware set, named once
Only two brands shipped commercial players: Shinco and TCL. The six production designations used throughout this series are Shinco CBHD-9100 (flagship), CBHD-3800 (slim mid-range), HD-2100 (wall-mount/entry), HD-3700U (hybrid UTI/network player), TCL THBD-1008 (Toshiba HD-A30-derived launch model, also sold in the UK by GBAX at about £259.99) and TCL THBD-1038 (second-generation listing). Prototypes such as Tongfang’s CBHD-0002 and pre-production Shinco CBHD-9000 listings appear in forum photography but are not counted as the commercial six. No PC optical drives or laptops with CBHD branding were found in the research passes.
Protection and region notes
Domestic Chinese films used DKAA; international films used AACS. Patent-sharing language described “AACS+DKAA,” and the AACS consortium had interim CBHD specification documents as early as 2007. Region coding is poorly attested: one pass treats it as undocumented (HD DVD itself was region-free); another states discs were region-locked to China with no US or Europe editions. Packaging used black Blu-ray-size keep-cases originally associated with HD-VMD tooling, carrying a blue CBHD logo; the DVD Forum’s separate “HD DVD China” logo had been approved in November 2007.
Extensions that arrived late
On 2 July 2010 CHDA launched CBHD-3D products in Beijing and unveiled CBHD-HiFi. HiFi used dual-layer 30 GB capacity for multi-channel LPCM up to 24-bit/192 kHz over secure HDMI. By early July 2010 only one 3D title was known to exist; Guangzhou Asian Games ceremonies were planned for 3D release. These extensions did not reverse the retail decline that CMM data already showed from the second quarter of 2010.
Reading this card against later posts
When a later post cites Modulation 4-6 FSM, it is pointing at the channel-coding change that blocks naïve HD DVD firmware hacks. When it cites CETC, it means the navigation replacement for Advanced Content/HDi. When it cites AVS and DRA, remember that early 2009 discs may still have used VC-1 or AVC because China Record lacked an AVS encoder at launch. When it cites DKAA versus AACS, treat domestic and international discs as two preservation problems. The glance table is the shared vocabulary; the remaining thirteen posts unpack history, physics, codecs, patents, players, PC paths, firmware, authoring, catalogue, sourcing, community archives and open questions without repeating this card in full.
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: