China have been given the approval by the DVD Forum, the international DVD standard authority. The DVD Forum gave Chinese engineers the option to develop their own China-based format, which will rid having to pay large companies like Sony and Toshiba licensing fees to use their standard.
Whilst the format is expected to be based on Toshiba"s HD-DVD format, it will not be compatible with it, instead it will offer higher definition, better sound quality, and even better piracy controls than Sony"s Blu-Ray Discs. It will also support Audio Video Coding Standard video compression technology, plus MPEG2, MPEG4 and Windows Media Video 9.
In 2003 China developed a competitor to the DVD, with their Enhanced Versatile Disc, which was dogged with legal actions from Chinese DVD player manufactures. Despite backing from the Government this format failed to make an impact in the Chinese market, but with China"s influence on the world growing, and the country itself becoming consistently more developed it is possible that this format will challenge both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.
The immediately noticeable changes are that we are running Invision Power Board 2.1.3 and the v3.9 design has been revamped, codenamed Swift the new design removes a lot of the nested tables present in the 2001 v3.0 design here at Neowin.net.
Most of the changes are in the code, but we also made huge improvements to the layout and underlying css.
The server layout has changed too. We now use 1 dedicated server for MySQL data and 2 for Apache, the 4th does DNS, web and pop email.
Marcel (Redmak) has also coded a new news script backend and the design was updated there aswell, making the page lighter and more responsive overall.
The neowin 5 theme is not completed yet, due to the fact that staff have day jobs and the recent thanksgiving holiday halted development there temporarily, its next on the list. The most important thing is to have a working situation we can move to and I"m confident the updates will be sufficient while we finish up the new design on the new servers.