ZitZot: CBHD, China’s own alternative to Blu-Ray
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Chinese electronics manufacturers have officially unveiled the first CBHD disc players, China’s home-grown alternative to Blu-ray (and, formerly, HD-DVD) which it hopes will jump-start a market for high-definition video in mainland China. Like Blu-ray, CBHD uses a blue laser to read high-capacity optical discs, although CBHD discs have a physical structure more like a traditional dual-layer DVD that could make it easier for existing DVD manufacturers to produce CBHD titles. CBHD is based in part on Toshiba’s defunct HD-DVD format, and uses AACS copy protection. Dual-layer CBHD discs can accommodate about 30 GB of data.
Chinese manufacturers Chinco and TCL are getting ready to put their first CBHD players on sale, with prices starting around 2,000 yuan (roughly $293 USD), which makes them substantially cheaper than Blu-ray players, in part because CBHD players don’t have to pay the licensing fees associated with Blu-ray. As for content, China hopes to have at least 100 movies available on CBHD by the end of 2009…including titles from major Hollywood studio Warner Bros.
Comments(32)
Is it just me that thinks this, or is Warner Bros. a format whore?
I hope this comes out in more countries, because blu-ray is just too expensive
Good work China.
Blueray is too expensive? Yeah it costs 20$ every month for a usenet account
Seems to me that BluRay has already established itself as the next-gen format, and currently holds too much of the market for this new format to succeed. Guess we'll find out…
hmm $293 for the player..blu ray players in the US are only $170 when on sale and avg is about 250. But the actual movie titles are crazy expensive, unless u find them on sale too.
Ps3 has bluray, Movies are not that hard to find, most are around 10-20$, just need to be SMART when it comes to shopping.
While you use usenet, their just mostly rips with minimal video quality, you won't get full quality, good luck with that. Unless have a lot of bandwith for the actual full rip of it.
Just stop be a cheap whore and buy whatever movies you like.
Welcome to 2007, the format war between Blu Ray and HD-DVD is over. What makes Dual-layer CBHD so much better?
hd-dvd was 20 gb right? and it failed. why should this work now? if the movie studios dont support it, it wont go anywhere outside china. what format will the movies be on it? blue ray prices will drop when more people will buy it and there will be competition from online video stores. but no one is gonna buy a new format again. people were confused already with hd-dvd and blue ray…
Smart Ass chinese. First, send man on space now Blue Ray rival. What else? Take over the world?
To me, this is just another format I have to convert to make things work. More codecs, more software, more problems. Although I commend them for trying to fight the Blu-ray battle again, they are going to lose. PS3 sells in China, as it does here. They do not need a Blu-ray alternative, and for some reason they think by remaking the HD-DVD, they will succeed. Mark my words, this will fail by the end of the year, as there are over 1000 Blu-ray titles to date. The prices of the Blu-ray players are taking a plunge in 2 months, and then again for Christmas.
Lol.
what another format this is annoying man i dont even know why they replacing dvd,s they r good bluray is fine but it,s expincive man 29 dollar for a movie F*_* this shiit
a new format is coming everyday hopefully dvd will survive like it survived with HD format
What a bad idea, all i can really say. I don't know why people say its a smart move? this idea died two years ago…
And it wasn't some nowhere company, it was the makers of the original dvd. So if they (Toshiba) got it wrong, tell me why the heck some bs company with the same core platform be successful??
Hopefully with competition prices will drop more quickly.
Hey Billy Mays here with the new CBHD disc player
Thats wired
Why so many formats!!!?
rslinks please
@ asdasd – i think he´s hinting at those of us that actually buy blu-rays after we download them and see if the movies any good or not.
Yeah going backwards is the right thing to do China! Good job in creating a product which is majorly based on a defunct product AND is not up to the standard of Blu-Ray.
Awesome work there guys! That's the way to do it!
But then again, it worked with SVCD! So why can't this.
Oh boy!
Did you guys see chinese new cars? Most of them by design look like as a rip off from well known brands such as Mercedes, WW, BMW. They clame it's their own design, whatever, I'm sure the quality is near close to the originals. Now this CBHD bullsh.t?
Give me a break! It will never go through!
I think a few people are missing the point here. When I first started downloading and using movies on the computer, I couldn't afford the new-fangled DVD burners and discs. The Chinese came up with the SVCD system which, for a newbie like me, was brilliant. I could put a film of near-dvd quality on a super-cheap CD, and any cheap DVD player would play it.
It would seem that this is to be something similar, and if you could burn these using a standard DVD burner, would obviously save a lot of people (mainly Chinese), a LOT of money.
Hey, I'd have a go at burning HD content, even though I have no intention of buying a BD burner.
I think it's interesting.
I would love for this to succeed so that there's a thing called COMPETITION and forces the blu ray movies to go down in price, use your brains ppl!!
@16 james
http://rapidshare.com/files/226312069/Smart_Ass_Chinese_v2.2.6+CrackAss-ChInA.zipass
about time some one took sony on
What does the acronym actually mean?
Why pay for usenet even? You should get a newsgroup access with your isp.
Glad people are trying different formats that are more cost effective. I still have around 150-200 dvds I have collected over the years from bargain bin hunting. DvD isn't going anywhere and works just fine. If they want to improve something keep working on upscaling
.
the blu-ray players and drives cost to much and theres not enough movies/tv-series/etc to buy or even to rent to make it worth buying.
please note, that the rest of the world pays-per-gig, downloading isnt always a alternative option.
Untill the ps3 is cracked burners will not be used as the disc's are to expencive.
Once and if the ps3 is hacked you will see an explosion of blue ray burners and disc's filying off the shelves.
This will then make them cheaper for retailers to sell to the public.
While they do not sell they will stay expencive to make and expencive to buy.
So lets hope the ps3 gets hacked quickly even though nothing has happened it will in the end.
But this format is not going any where lets face it, it will just stay in china HD was a better format than blueray as it has more functions and just as a disc which you all forget about.
It had online content abillity unlike the blueray, it was probably the best choce but because the ps3 was there they sold much more because of the kids and the console.
Toshiba needed to bring it out on a console the moment it brought out the disc format to compete rather than wait a year then put it on a x360.
It cost 20$ but i download like $500 worth of films, so yeah.
Once production costs for these things goes lower than blu-ray production costs, the chinese population may not have a choice when it comes to buying a HD player.
Once this format takes over china, it could very easily take over the rest of the world.
Good news for us, is that sony loses its monopoly and we get cheap stuff.
lame
YES! CHEAPER RELEASES!
To #6: usenet has rips with minimal quality? Clearly you don't know what you are talking about…
Typical usenet/torrent HD movie release is 8-12 GB 1080p rip encoded with x264 codec, high bitrate and DTS 5.1 audio (4-6 GB if 720p, sometimes DD 5.1 instead of DTS, but I download only 1080p lately). I watch movies on a 3m wide screen (last 1080p Panasonic projector) and cannot see any difference in terms of quality between original BluRay and these rips. So I just don't buy BluRays any more.
If you cannot see any difference on such a big screen, you won't see a difference on an LCD or plazma TV as well, even if it's 60 inch one.
You can also download full BluRay rips (30 GB or so) from usenet, but it doesn't make any sense to me. Takes much more time for no or very minimal gain. Bigger size is not because of better quality, but mostly because of less efficient codec used.