Enhanced Versatile Disc
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The Enhanced Versatile Disc (EVD) was announced on November 18 2003 by China's news agency Xinhua as a response to the popular DVD and its high licence costs. Like DVD, it is an optical storage medium in CD size (120 mm) that is physically like a DVD disk with the same UDF file system.
China started development on it in 1999, because DVD (CSS and Macrovision) and MPEG-2 licence costs are relatively high at 13-20 USD per hardware video player. On the EVD, the codecs VP5 and VP6 from On2 Technologies are being used. These are more efficient than MPEG-2 and enable the disk to store HDTV resolutions, a feature the DVD cannot offer. With EVD, royalties to On2 for the VP6 codec will be about $2 USD.
The audio codec comes from Coding Technologies, the EAC (Enhanced Audio Codec) 2.0. It is the successor of EAC and works on the basis of spectral band replication and supports mono, stereo and 5.1 surround sound.
The development is supported by the Chinese government and is developed by the Beijing company E-world Technology, which has reported the overcoming of development, chip-design and production problems. The team has applied for 25 patents, of which seven have currently been granted.
Competitors to the EVD include HD-DVD and the Blu-ray Disc.
First EVD disks and software players have been presented in April 2004. As the disk is physically a DVD disk it can be read with any computer DVD drive. Successful copies have been made with DVD-R disks. The number of films offered is still very limited.
