Chinese scientists and researchers have made big strides in developing a home-made audio and video coding and decoding standard with the release of the final committee draft of the video section.

"It is a milestone in our work, as it is the most complex and difficult stage in the creation of the audio video coding standard (AVS)," said Huang Tiejun, secretary-general of the AVS working group, which is in charge of devising a Chinese standard with the participation of 64 Chinese and foreign research institutes, universities and businesses.

The AVS proposal includes three branches: System design, video standards and audio standards.

Since the AVS working group is using similar system design as the current international standard and the video component of a media product takes up more than 90 per cent of storage space and bandwidth - while the audio portion uses the remainder - it is the most important part of the AVS standard.

The working group's video standard has a compression ratio three times higher than the current international mark of MPEG2 and is similar to MPEG4, which is expected to be the international standard in the future - but the AVS is much less complicated than the MPEG4 version.

MPEG stands for the Motion Picture Expert Group, representing the uniform compression and decompression codes of media data, widely used in DVDs, CDs and online movies.

Huang said last Tuesday that his group is now soliciting for a patent pool, which will end around December 10.

The move means anyone who objects to the ownership of patents in the AVS video standard can raise their claims and call for ownership verification, which will decide how much the holder of a patent can get in royalties.

Once completed, the working group will concentrate on the audio standard, which will be hopefully finished by the end of the year, according to Huang.

When both the audio and video standards are ready, the group will submit the drafts to the Ministry of Information Industry so it can become an industrial standard, which will be adopted by the electronic and information industries and governed by the ministry. It may finally become a national standard next year.

The AVS standard will be first tested this month on a broadband network belonging to Legend Group, the biggest computer maker in China.

With the progress of Chinese researchers, the AVS standard is also playing a more active role in reducing patent royalties as well as burdens on consumers, which is the main reason why local scientists want to devise such a standard.

Last year, Chinese DVD player makers reached agreements with the so-called 6C patent licensing alliance that included Hitachi, Matsushita, Toshiba, JVC, Mitsubishi and Time Warner and the 3C alliance formed by Phillips, Sony and Pioneer to pay US$4 and US$5 royalties for every DVD player they exported. China exported about 10 million DVD players in 2002.

The royalty on every device using the MPEG2 standard is US$2.5. It is estimated that Chinese consumers may buy 400 million digital TVs and DVD players in the next 10 years, so it means that they could have pay around US$1 billion.

The AVS standard plans to charge only 1 yuan (US$0.12) for every coding or decoding device in the future.

Meanwhile, the MPEG Licensing Authority (MPEG LA), a company which helps MPEG patent owners charge royalties, previously wanted to charge 25 US cents on each device using the MPEG4 standard and another 2 US cents for every hour that consumers listen or watch audio or video products.

The progress of the AVS standard soon attracted interest from the US-based licensing agent.

Huang revealed the MPEG LA chief paid a visit to the AVS working group in September and exchanged views on compression technologies and licensing policies, while asking the AVS to be linked to the MPEG standard, which was declined by the Chinese side.

On November 17, MPEG LA released its new licensing strategy, which said the new royalties on every device will be 20 US cents and that there will be no royalties on the first 100,000 products.

The charge on content also became 2 US cents per title, which means consumers do not have to pay 4 US cents for a two-hour movie.

"It is hard to say that our achievements are the only reason MPEG LA's attitude changed, but one thing is for sure, our progress promoted the change," said Huang.

However, Huang said he did not believe a Chinese-developed standard was beneficial only to local consumers.

"The standard will (also extend) to other countries," he said.

The AVS working group has also attracted members like US information technology giants IBM and Microsoft, audio and visual technology firm On2 Technology, European semiconductor firm STMicro and Japanese electronics giants Panasonic and Sony.

(Business Weekly 12/02/2003 page1)