The high price of HD movies has at least two main causes: The obvious one is that the studios want to recoup their investment, and it’s just part of that early adopter tax. The lesser known reason is that there are numerous patents on the technologies involved in both the Blu-ray and HD DVD disc formats contributing to the high price of every disc. It’s this latter issue with royalties and licensing that has never gone over too well with the Chinese manufacturers.

Aware that including China in its plans would be a good thing, the DVD Forum (the group that oversees the DVD format and HD DVD as well) collaborated with the Chinese on a format that would be pretty compatible, maybe even nearly identical, to HD DVD. But not so much that it would be encumbered by all those pesky licensing fees, and the result is CH-DVD (not necessarily the final name).

CH-DVD does have licensing, but it’s all owned by the Chinese. The drive mechanics for CH DVD are supposedly close enough to HD DVD that it wouldn’t take much effort for a manufacturer to crank out an HD DVD player in their spare time. In fact, it really is HD DVD, but they just don’t put the HD DVD emblem on the player because that requires all those bad, bad patents and lawyers to get involved.

In its native market, CH-DVD is all about the Chinese having a format to call their very own, without depending too much on outsiders’ technology. To the exploitative outsiders, CH-DVD is all about getting factories revved up to crank out HD DVD players galore. By the way, these manufacturers are actually pretty big players with global revenue in the tens of billions of dollars. They should not be dismissed as non-starters.

CH-DVD players are supposed to be ready in time for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, and players should show up at CES this January.

You can satisfy your thirst for more information about CH-DVD here:

• “New Chinese Involvement Could Trigger HD DVD Price Plunge” at BetaNews.com (an excellent in-depth piece)
• “China fields homespun format in next-gen DVD war” at EE Times Asia
• Pictures of some CH-DVD players
• Press Release