Audio Video Standard

Audio Video Standard (AVS) is a compression standard for digital audio and digital video, which was meant to compete with AAC audio and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video to potentially replace MP3 audio and MPEG-2 video. Chinese companies own 90% of AVS patents. The audio and video files have an .avs extension as a container format. It never gained widespread use outside China, partly because efforts in other nations at royalty-free video and audio codecs have focused on other codecs such as those developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation or WebM Project and container formats like Matroska, rather than the AVS codecs, since the AVS codecs still require small royalties. However it is a very popular format in China, where it is officially promoted by the government.

Development of AVS was initiated by the government of the People's Republic of China. Commercial success of the AVS standard would not only reduce China's royalty/licensing payments to foreign companies, it would presumably earn China's electronics industry recognition among the more established industries of the developed world, where China is still seen as an outlet for mass production with limited indigenous design capability.

In January 2005, the AVS workgroup submitted their draft report to the Information Industry Department (IID). On March 30, 2005, the first trial by the IID approved the video portion of the draft standard for a public showing time.

The dominant audio/video compression standards, MPEG and VCEG, enjoy widespread use in consumer digital media devices, such as DVD players. Their usage requires Chinese manufacturers to pay substantial royalty fees to the mostly-foreign companies that hold patents on technology in those standards. For example, as of 2006, licenses ranging from $2.50 to $4 already make up about ten percent of the cost for a contract-manufactured DVD player unit.

According to the state-run media, a key consideration of AVS was to reduce foreign dependence on core intellectual properties used in digital media technology. Proposed as a national standard in 2004, AVS had a targeted royalty of 1 RMB (or about $0.10 USD) per player. On April 30, 2005, AVS standard video officially passed the public show and became the national standard.

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