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Will the new EVD format from China take advantage of VP6?
Posted by Dan Bell on 14 November 2003 - 17:43 - Source: on2.com


I received an email this morning from a visitor that read the article we posted recently about EVD technology in China. The reader wondered if the Chinese would be utilising the VP6 compression format, good question! So I did some digging around the Internet.

The EVD format is a possible High Definition replacement or a next generation of DVD player. What makes it interesting is it skirts the royalty issue of the DVD format. Couple that with Chinas' manufacturing position and you already have a serious contender to the existing hardware manufacturing pool. But now the plot thickens, as it appears the new players will be capable of using the cheaper VP6 compression technology as well. In fact, one could surmise they are being optimised for it.

An article last June at CBS market watch stated that shortly after announcing VP6, a very large deal was penned with Beijing E-World Technology Co., a consortium of several of China's largest consumer electronic makers. The first agreement calls for On2's latest video compression technologies, called VP5 and VP6, to be used in E-World's Enhanced Versatile Disk, which is essentially the next-generation DVD player currently being developed. The agreement also provides for VP5 and VP6 to be used as the video compression technology in a high definition TV standard being developed for China as a standard by E-World and others. "This is a huge deal," said Doug McIntyre, On2's president and chief executive officer, who noted that the deal had taken 15 months to complete. "By a wide margin, it's the biggest deal in the company's history," he added. Mr. McIntyre, and other members of management, are supposed to travel to Beijing to attend the official launch on Nov. 18 of China's new digital standard.

VP6 is the leading codec available for PC and set-top box applications, offering up to 40% better quality and 50% better playback performance than our revolutionary VP5 codec.

VP6 is the best video codec on the market today. It offers better image quality and faster decoding performance than Windows Media 9, Real 9, H.264, and QuickTime MPEG-4.

In our internal testing, VP6 beat H.264, Windows Media 9 and Real Networks 9 in PSNR comparisons using the standard set of MPEG-2 test clips. The codec looks better than Windows Media 9, shows far fewer motion artifacts than Windows Media 9, and maintains more texture and detail than Real 9 or H.264.


I downloaded the Truecast player and did side by side comparisons with VP6 and Windows Media 9 which is obviously a very capable compression technology. Frankly, to my untrained eye, VP6 did look better. Nonetheless, it makes no difference as the quality is good enough, the point to be taken here is cost and competition. VP6 is promising to be cheaper than MPEG and Windows Media compression technologies. It looks as if the EVD is going to be a serious contender in the marketplace and shows some long term strategy and planning have gone into this product.

Thanks for the great question!