Audio Video Standard
Encyclopedia
Audio Video Standard is a compression standard for digital audio
and video
, and is competing with H.264/AAC
to potentially replace MPEG-2
. Chinese companies own 90% of AVS patents. The audio and video files have an .avs extension as a container format.
. Commercial success of the AVS standard
would not only reduce China's royalty/licensing payments to foreign companies, it would presumably earn China's electronics industry recognition among the more established industries of the developed world, where China is still seen as an outlet for mass production with limited indigenous design capability.
In January 2005, the AVS workgroup submitted their draft report to the Information Industry Department (IID). On March 30, 2005, the first trial by the IID approved the video portion of the draft standard for a public showing time.
The dominant audio/video compression standards, MPEG and VCEG
, enjoy widespread use in consumer digital media devices, such as DVD players. Their usage requires Chinese manufacturers to pay substantial royalty
fees to the mostly-foreign companies that hold patents on technology in those standards. For example, as of 2006, licenses ranging from $2.50 to $4 already make up about ten percent of the cost for a contract-manufactured DVD player unit.
According to the state-run media, a key consideration of AVS was to reduce foreign dependence on core intellectual properties used in digital media technology. Proposed as a national standard in 2004, AVS had a targeted royalty of 1 RMB (or about $0.10 USD) per player. On 30 April 2005, AVS standard video officially passed the public show and became the national standard.
AVS was expected to be approved for the Chinese high-definition
successor to the Enhanced Versatile Disc
, and when CBHD was released it shipped with 30gb blue laser discs and video in the AVS format, which rapidly gained market share - standing at 30% of the video disc market after four months.
Open source
implementations of an AVS video decoder can be found in the OpenAVS project and within the libavcodec
library. The latter is integrated in some free video players like MPlayer
, VLC
or xine
. xAVS is also an open source AVS encoder with a working decoder.
China's high-definition video disc format CBHD (China Blue High-Definition) supports AVS.
Digital audio
Digital audio is sound reproduction using pulse-code modulation and digital signals. Digital audio systems include analog-to-digital conversion , digital-to-analog conversion , digital storage, processing and transmission components...
and video
Video
Video is the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion.- History :...
, and is competing with H.264/AAC
Advanced Audio Coding
Advanced Audio Coding is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at similar bit rates....
to potentially replace MPEG-2
MPEG-2
MPEG-2 is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods which permit storage and transmission of movies using currently available storage media and transmission...
. Chinese companies own 90% of AVS patents. The audio and video files have an .avs extension as a container format.
Overview
Development of AVS was initiated by the government of the People's Republic of ChinaPeople's Republic of China
China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...
. Commercial success of the AVS standard
Standardization
Standardization is the process of developing and implementing technical standards.The goals of standardization can be to help with independence of single suppliers , compatibility, interoperability, safety, repeatability, or quality....
would not only reduce China's royalty/licensing payments to foreign companies, it would presumably earn China's electronics industry recognition among the more established industries of the developed world, where China is still seen as an outlet for mass production with limited indigenous design capability.
In January 2005, the AVS workgroup submitted their draft report to the Information Industry Department (IID). On March 30, 2005, the first trial by the IID approved the video portion of the draft standard for a public showing time.
The dominant audio/video compression standards, MPEG and VCEG
VCEG
The Video Coding Experts Group or Visual Coding Experts Group is the informal name of Question 6 of Working Party 3 of Study Group 16 of the ITU-T. Its abbreviated title is ITU-T Q.6/SG 16...
, enjoy widespread use in consumer digital media devices, such as DVD players. Their usage requires Chinese manufacturers to pay substantial royalty
Patent
A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....
fees to the mostly-foreign companies that hold patents on technology in those standards. For example, as of 2006, licenses ranging from $2.50 to $4 already make up about ten percent of the cost for a contract-manufactured DVD player unit.
According to the state-run media, a key consideration of AVS was to reduce foreign dependence on core intellectual properties used in digital media technology. Proposed as a national standard in 2004, AVS had a targeted royalty of 1 RMB (or about $0.10 USD) per player. On 30 April 2005, AVS standard video officially passed the public show and became the national standard.
AVS was expected to be approved for the Chinese high-definition
High-definition television
High-definition television is video that has resolution substantially higher than that of traditional television systems . HDTV has one or two million pixels per frame, roughly five times that of SD...
successor to the Enhanced Versatile Disc
Enhanced Versatile Disc
The Enhanced Versatile Disc is an optical medium-based digital audio/video format, developed to provide a means for playing HDTV content using existing optical media. It was announced on November 18, 2003, by the People's Republic of China's Xinhua News Agency as a response to the popular...
, and when CBHD was released it shipped with 30gb blue laser discs and video in the AVS format, which rapidly gained market share - standing at 30% of the video disc market after four months.
Open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
implementations of an AVS video decoder can be found in the OpenAVS project and within the libavcodec
Libavcodec
libavcodec is a free software/open source LGPL-licensed library of codecs for encoding and decoding video and audio data. Same name but incompatible libraries are provided from both FFmpeg project and Libav project....
library. The latter is integrated in some free video players like MPlayer
MPlayer
MPlayer is a free and open source media player. The program is available for all major operating systems, including Linux and other Unix-like systems, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Versions for OS/2, Syllable, AmigaOS and MorphOS are also available. The Windows version works, with some minor...
, VLC
VLC media player
VLC media player is a free and open source media player and multimedia framework written by the VideoLAN project.VLC is a portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It is able to...
or xine
Xine
xine is a multimedia playback engine for Unix-like operating systems released under the GNU General Public License. xine is built around a shared library that supports different frontend player applications. Another important feature of xine is the ability to manually correct the synchronization...
. xAVS is also an open source AVS encoder with a working decoder.
China's high-definition video disc format CBHD (China Blue High-Definition) supports AVS.