Chinese audio-video standard could triumph

The Audio Video Coding Standard (AVS) has been approved by China's Ministry of Information Industry. Instead of having long meetings between interested parties, the standard was conceived by researchers inside the Chinese Academy of Sciences and approved in a year. The Chinese wish to resolve a problem that the government had for a while, and that is having to rely on foreign Intellectual Property. Developing their own standards represents a step in solving it.

Other standards which are next to be developed include the TD-SCDMA, a 3G communications spec, a wireless-LAN plan, an optical-disk format and a spec for digital TV.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences has been working on compression technologies for 2 or 3 years now, but no attempt at commercialization was made until 2002, at the moment of animosity created between Chinese producers and the DVD licensing agencies. Tensions intensified, the main cause being the licensing fees that the Chinese thought of as excessive, given the declining prices of DVD players at the time.

Despite the uncertainty over the patents, some Chinese companies have started developing AVS-compliant chips. The most well known is probably Celestial which has produced a system-on-chip that includes a hardwired accelerator for AVS video. Vimicro Corp., the multimedia mobile-phone chips producer, is also supporting AVS, by making a software decoder which runs on an embedded CPU.

Many other chip companies are waiting as well. Broadcom Corp. said it would eventually create technology for AVS, but at this point it's better to remain cautious. LSI Logic Corp., a well known supporter of China's optical-disk standard, is also stand-offish. SigmaTel Inc., member of the AVS Working Group, doesn't yet have plans to support a hardwired implementation of AVS, as it has for MPEG-4, and is evaluating the codec at this point.