CBHD has been made proprietary by the Chinese Government by using a different a Modulation scheme. These players are not HD DVD players. The Chinese Government has insisted that the players be made in China and that they are not available for export. The new modulation layer is their ultimate “region control.” It gives them the ability to block cultural pollution from entering the country. By the way, the Chinese Government has banned all game consoles, including the PS3. The reason the Chinese Government selected the CBHD format is because they want lower cost discs for their people. CBHD cost .15 USD and Blu-ray’s cost 2.00 USD to make. They need a disc cost structure that fights a .60 USD (street price) pirated DVD disc. Blu-ray can never do this because the manufacturing lines are so expensive, about $7 million USD to make 25,000 discs per day. CBHD’s can be made on existing lines for a 150,000 USD upgrade, not the 800,000 quoted above. This 800,000 dollar figure includes other equipment used for mastering which is needed for either a Blu-ray or CBHD manufacturing line so it does not reflect the true costs of the discs. This point was confused in the translation from Mandarin to English. The other reason the Chinese chose CBHD over Blu-ray is that the player costs are lower. This is because the optical disc drives are much cheeper has they take far less time to build. CBHD uses an advanced PRML and ECC methods to make the drives much more manufacturable (wider tolerances). Due to the laws of physics, CBHD drives will always be cheeper than Blu-ray drives.

However, Sony having a monopoly in the format is NOT exactly great. It means they control prices among other things. Naturally this isn’t as evil as Sony-haters make it out to be (I never had problems with my Sony machines, had them for decades and while they might be a little more pricey than other brands you really get good quality). The DVD format was a monopoly and that was good, cheap and we all pretty much love it.

Berry Nall,
formerly of APL