Enhanced Versatile Disc

The enhanced versatile disc (EVD) is an optical-medium-based digital audio/video format, developed by Beijing E-World (a multi-company partnership including SVA, Shinco, Xiaxin, Yuxing, Skyworth, Nintaus, Malata, Changhong, and BBK Electronics), as a rival to the DVD to avoid the high royalty costs associated with the DVD format. Its development was supported by the Chinese government. While it was intended to replace the DVD standard in China by 2008, the format had failed to gain traction and ultimately faded into obsolescence. It was announced on November 18, 2003, by the People's Republic of China's Xinhua News Agency as a response to the DVD-Video format and its licensing costs (which some considered excessive). It uses an optical storage medium in CD size (120 mm) that is physically a DVD disc with the same UDF file system. China started development on EVD in 1999, because DVD Video (CSS, Macrovision, etc.) and MPEG-2 (Video and Systems) licensing costs were relatively high—reportedly in the range of $13–$20 USD per hardware video player. Soon after, Prototype EVD discs and software players were presented in April 2004. As the disc is physically a DVD it could be read with any computer DVD drive. Successful copies were made with DVD-R discs. Despite its versatility, the number of films ever offered in the format was very limited. The audio codec was to come from Coding Technologies and was called the EAC (Enhanced Audio Codec) 2.0. It is the successor of a prior design known as EAC and works on the basis of spectral band replication. EAC 2.0 supports mono, stereo and 5.1 surround sound. The original plan was that the video codecs VP5 and VP6 from On2 Technologies would be used. These are more efficient than MPEG-2 Video and could enable the disc to store HDTV resolutions, which the standard DVD format does not support. With EVD, royalties to On2 for the VP6 codec part of the EVD design were anticipated to be about US$2 per video player (a much lower fee than that associated with MPEG-2 Video).