Super Video CD Update: Asia...And Beyond

It's easy to forget, living in one of the planet's self-annointed ""developed"" nations, that the world is currently in the midst of not one, but rather two rollouts of optical disc-based video formats.The first format, of course, is DVD, which has exceeded expectations in the US and is moving in Europe, after a delayed start. But in the world's most populous market - China - it is ChaoJi (""Super"") VCD rather than DVD that is currently the main focus of attention.It's been a year now since factions competing to market an improved version of the Video CD - which has been popular in Asia despite its failure to make inroads in the West ñ came together around a Chinese government-defined standard for ChaoJi VCD. The rollout of this Asian alternative, known outside of China simply as SVCD, has been mixed. But the format's simplicity relative to DVD has some consumer electronics giants eyeing niche applications for SVCD, not just in Asia, but in the US and Europe as well.SVCD BasicsFor those who haven't been keeping an eye on the Chinese consumer electronics market, ChaoJi VCD is an extension of the VCD (White Book) 2.0 specification, and as such is built on the foundation of CD-ROM XA. Using MPEG-1 video encoding (constant bit rate of 1.15 megabits/second) and MPEG-1 layer II audio, VCD delivers up to 74 minutes of motion video at resolutions of either 352 x 240 (NTSC) or 352 x 288 (PAL). Still pictures are supported as well. VCD sound is either two selectable mono tracks or one stereo or surround (Dolby ProLogic) track.A typical feature film on VCD would normally be delivered on two discs. However, according to Gene Lui, General Manager of China operations for chip maker Zoran, some VCDs have been mastered at double density, yielding extended playback on a subset of VCD machines that are capable of playing back double-density discs.VCD has been tremendously popular in China, with 7 million units reportedly shipped in 1996 and 15 million in 1997. But as DVD's emergence highlighted VCD's comparatively limited quality and flexibility, Chinese government and electronics industry interests were anxious to protect their 90 percent share of the Chinese VCD player market. At the same time, DVD was thought to be too expensive for most consumers in China and many other Asian nations, and DVD royalties were seen as prohibitive. A nasty row ensued between proponents of several incompatible approaches to a VCD successor, until the Chinese authorities imposed order on the market and ChaoJi VCD was born.Chaoji VCD uses MPEG-2 video, supporting variable bitrate encoding at up to 2.6 Mbps. According to Philips Electronics (one of the main stakeholders, along with Sony, in the underlying technology) motion video resolution is 480 x 480 (NTSC) or 480 x 576 (PAL). As with VCD, still pictures are supported, and audio uses MPEG-1 layer II. SVCD's user selectable audio tracks include up to two stereo (which may be ProLogic encoded) or four mono. Philips players include support for MPEG-2 5.1 channel surround (a track in this audio format will be decoded as stereo on non-supporting machines).While Lui says that support for double-density playback is simply a matter of servo adjustment in the player (meaning no added cost to the manufacturer), ChaoJi VCD is nonetheless specified, like VCD, as a single density CD format. It does, however, call for a 2x drive mechanism, which explains how it supports data rates in excess of CD's 1.4 Mb/s, enabling the improved image resolution that is SVCD's main appeal. But with CD-sized limits on storage capacity, using these higher data rates means substantially shortening the length of material that will fit on one disc. Only about 37 minutes of maximum resolution video with a single high quality (192 kbps) stereo audio track will fit on a standard single-density disc. Thus, to realise the full advantage of Super VCD over regular VCD, three discs are required for the typical feature film.China UpdateWhen SVCD was first covered in the February issue of One to One, the format hadn't been out long enough to tell how Chinese consumers were responding. Eight months later, the picture is still fuzzy, due in part to less-developed reporting mechanisms than those in other markets, and those in the know holding widely ranging views on the situation.Regarding the number of players sold in the format's first year, for instance, Lui says he thinks the total number is about 5 million, while TL Lim of rival chipset maker for SVCD, ESS Technology, estimates between 5 to 7 million units.Gerard Smelt of the System Standards & Licensing group at Philips says, ""It has been reported that the Chinese industry delivered over 10 million SVCD players to the trade through to May 1999."" All parties seem to agree that player prices work out at between $90-150 (US), with an average of about $120. That makes the players significantly more affordable than DVD machines, which sell in the $200 range, while still giving player manufacturers a better margin than the under-$100 price of VCD players.Even greater disparities exist when estimating the number of SVCD discs sold. Eric Li, Marketing Director at EnReach Technologies (one of three companies currently offering SVCD authoring software) says ""several million,"" while Lim guesses ""about 20 million."" Another odd thing about the title market is that, according to Li, ""most ChaoJi discs are bundled with players sold."" And considering how many players are sold, there are very few titles to be had. According to Melissa Malley of C-Cube, among the leading suppliers of SVCD chipsets to Chinese player manufacturers, there are ""probably less than 100 ChaoJi titles available in the market."" Lui puts the number at less than 200. ""It's really small compared to VCD,"" he says. ""You can hardly find any titles in the stores.""A number of factors may explain why so few SVCD titles are available to play on the format's millions of players. Because SVCD players play VCD discs, consumers apparently have been willing to go ahead and pay the premium over a VCD player with the expectation that a growing selection of SVCD titles will be available in the future. And according to Lui, many purchasers have been convinced by marketing campaigns that SVCD players deliver improved image quality, without realising that they will see no benefit when viewing their existing VCDs.Lui also points out that ""there are different versions of the SVCD standard. One is published by the Chinese government, but the four consumer-electronics manufacturers that co-developed the original Video CD standard - Sony, Philips, Matsushita and JVC - have proposed a version of their own. The standard was submitted to the IEC, and the two sides compromised. But there are still many small differences in the specifications that have not been resolved."" According to Smelt, IEC 62107 currently has the status of a ""final working draft.""Philips seems to be leading the SVCD charge for the original VCD developers, and the company's technical overview of what it calls the ""Super Video CD standard version 1.0"" (www.licensing.philips.com/newoptical/svcd/newsvcd.html) describes the IEC standard as ""a full subset"" of its own standard. No mention is made of the Chinese government standard, which as of last December was available only in Chinese. In effect, this creates three potentially different sets of SVCD specifications.""It may seem like a strange situation,"" Lui says, ""and it is. But, in fact, these differences are small details that nobody is paying attention to."" Lui acknowledges, however, that such details can make it difficult to author titles that work in all players. ""That's part of the reason why nobody is putting out many titles,"" he adds.A further complication, Lui says, is the vagueness of the Chinese specification itself. ""The big structures are there,"" he explains, ""but there are still many parts that are not clearly defined. So it is up to each manufacturer or chip vendor to interpret. The majority is the same, but the people making titles have to keep them simple to be sure every player can play it.""Far East MarketsChina's combination of market size and manufacturing capacity give it strong influence in nearby nations, many of which have substantial Chinese-speaking populations. According to Lim, ""VCD currently has been widely accepted in South East Asia, shipping about 200,000 per month."" SVCD has yet to take off in these countries, where product introductions are just now getting underway. But given the popularity of VCD, SVCD would seem to have potential, and it could slow acceptance of DVD.""You can find Shinco [a top Chinese brand] ChaoJi VCD players in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia,"" Lim says. ""JVC has also introduced their SuperVCD player, which is very similar to the ChaoJi VCD spec. In Malaysia, some local player manufacturers like Amquest have also introduced the SuperVCD player.""As for titles, Smelt says that ""the majority of titles found outside China have been from mainland China."" Lim adds that ""in Malaysia, some SuperVCD titles will be introduced soon based on Hollywood movies."" For his part, Li sees markets outside of China ""picking up rapidly, judging from the interest in the authoring tool.""In measuring the impact of SVCD outside of China, Smelt does not look at dedicated SVCD players as the only, or even the most, important indicator. ""SVCD products are being introduced in Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan now,"" he says, ""especially DVD players with SVCD playback functionality. Every company selling in the Far East will have to implement SVCD in their DVD products sold there, except for in Japan. There is no way out if they want to have a part of that market.""Beyond AsiaIt may seem that if hardware manufacturers go to the trouble of supporting SVCD for their Asian DVD players, there would be little reason to disable the capability for machines sold in the US, Europe and Japan. But Smelt says it's too early to see a consistent pattern of support. ""We have noticed some companies have included the feature in their Far East models,"" he says, ""while in the US models the feature was not there. However, I do not know if the Far East model was a newer batch and the US model an older batch.""Philips, however, intends to support the SVCD standard globally. ""We do not expect specific SVCD players to be offered in the USA/Europe markets,"" Smelt explains. ""But DVD players with SVCD functionality are becoming available in the US and Europe. Our ProDVD 170 as it is produced now, has that feature already, and models produced before the SVCD standardisation are capable of accepting a field upgrade.""For computer-hosted applications, Smelt says, ""playback will be added to PCs in both software-only and hardware-supported implementations. There are already products available to support SVCD on PCs with a CD-ROM drive. For the Mac OS I am not yet aware of such support.""Perhaps the biggest question facing Philips as it moves to promote SVCD usage outside Asia is simply: Why?""SVCD functionality is similar to DVD with plus and minus elements,"" Smelt says. ""The features are not that different, but SVCD production costs are substantially lower. So SVCD can be used for distribution and storage of A/V material. You can play it back on computers with CD-ROM drives, while DVD-ROM players are not yet widely available. And you can record SVCD on CD-R.""Perhaps the biggest benefits, Smelt maintains, come in SVCD authoring. DVD-Video is known to be expensive and complicated to author, though rapid changes in the DVD tools market have lowered costs and reduced complexity for basic titles. Smelt says that ""authoring SVCD can be much easier, costs less and testing on CD-R is a big advantage. Of course, the shorter playing time is an important issue, but if the video content is up to 35 minutes, SVCD is much cheaper to author, test and duplicate.""Smelt envisions consumer uses of SVCD such as ""pictures on CD. Filmless photocameras can deliver images which may be viewed directly from the camera on a TV or on a PC screen when transferred to the hard-disk. An interesting application would be to create a photo album on disc, especially if this disc could be viewed on a player connected to the TV, such as a DVD player with SVCD functionality.""Smelt may be forgetting the absence of consumer interest in Photo CD a decade ago, but he also sees corporate/institutional applications for SVCD, which are probably more viable. Li agrees that SVCD is ""well suited to corporate applications. At EnReach, we have received many inquiries from US and Europe about our authoring tools. But the problem is a lack of players in these markets to make these applications realisable.""Extended FeaturesAlong with its SVCD partners (Sony, Matsushita and JVC), Philips may be able to address the player problem Li points out. But even given an installed base of SVCD-capable DVD players, the corporate/institutional markets on which Philips pins its hopes would probably find the standard Chinese or IEC versions of SVCD, with their numeric keypad-based navigation, too limited for interactive applications beyond simple presentations. That's why these companies have stuck by the extra features that the Chinese government reportedly preferred not to have mandated by the IEC.According to Philips, the additional elements present in the Super Video CD standard (1.0) that are not found in IEC 62107 are OGT (Overlay Graphics and Text) and Extended PSD (Play Sequence Descriptor). OGT is a full-screen graphical layer displayed on top of the video picture. Designed for movie subtitling and Karaoke lyrics, OGT supports up to four colours, each with its own transparency level, allowing highlighting for applications such as lyrics. Because the OGT layer is not mixed with video before encoding, but rather is mixed in the playback decoder, the clarity of text display is significantly improved, and up to four user-selectable languages may be included with the program.As for PSD, Philips describes it as ""a set of control structures that enables the playback of pre-programmed sequences with user selection and interaction."" Sequences are defined by Play Lists, which determine the playback order of a varied set of stored media elements, such as motion video (with or without audio), still pictures, or audio without picture. A Selection List, meanwhile, is used to define the action of the player in response to various user input from a remote control or a pointing device (a mouse on a computer, for instance). The list is used to implement selection menus and enable user-controlled branching.In the Philips-prepared SVCD standard, PSD is ""extended"" to allow use of variables for applications such as storing scores, and provides for definition of on-screen hot-spots. ""The Extended PSD option gives the co-ordinates of selection areas so you do not need to key in a number,"" Smelt says, ""and allows additional program flow control."" Philips has developed Windows NT authoring tools supporting its extended version of SVCD, which are downloadable from the Web address given above.Smelt believes that ""Extended PSD will be a great help"" in boosting SVCD's appeal both within and beyond its core Asian constituency. But with DVD authoring vendors determined to make the power of DVD-Video ever more accessible, it may be that even with its enhancements SVCD comes too late to get Western multimedia professionals to add it to their arsenal.

Source: One-To-One Online