The Enhanced Versatile Disc (EVD) was announced on November 18 2003 by China's Xinhua news agency as a response to the popular DVD Video format and its high licensing costs. It uses an optical storage medium in CD size (120 mm) that is physically a DVD disk with the same UDF file system.
China started development on it in 1999, because DVD Video (CSS, Macrovision, etc.) and MPEG-2 (Video and Systems) licensing costs are relatively high at $13–$20 USD per hardware video player. On the EVD, the codecs VP5 and VP6 from On2 Technologies were supposed to be used. These are more efficient than MPEG-2 Video and enable the disk to store HDTV resolutions, a feature the DVD cannot offer when using MPEG-2. With EVD, royalties to On2 for the VP6 codec were anticipated to be about $2 USD. However, a contract dispute rapidly developed with On2, which announced in April 2004 that it was not being properly paid and would file for arbitration. The dispute has not yet been resolved, as of approximately a year later.
The audio codec comes from Coding Technologies , the EAC (Enhanced Audio Codec) 2.0. It is the successor of EAC and works on the basis of spectral band replication and supports mono, stereo and 5.1 surround sound.
The development was supported by the Chinese government and was developed by Beijing E-world Technology (a multi-company partnership including SVA, Shinco, Xiaxin, Yuxing, Skyworth, Nintaus, Malata, Changhong, and BBK), which reported the overcoming of development, chip-design and production problems. The team applied for 25 patents, of which at least seven have currently been granted.
Competitors to the EVD include HD-DVD and the Blu-ray Disc.
The first EVD disks and software players were presented in April 2004. As the disk is physically a DVD disk it can be read with any computer DVD drive. Successful copies have been made with DVD-R disks. The number of films offered is still very limited.
Very little news has been available about EVD since the contract dispute with On2 broke out in the Spring of 2004.
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