The People's Republic of China government is supporting an effort to develop own standard for compressing digital audio and video, to assert its technological independence from the rest of the world. State-run media quoted industry officials are saying the aim is to enable domestic companies to avoid using the dominant MPEG standards, which require royalty payments. The competing Chinese standard, known as AVS, was proposed as a national standard in 2004.
It is about to become the standard of the Chinese high-definition successor to the Enhanced Versatile Disc.
On 30th April, 2005, AVS standard video officially passed the public show and became the national standard.
Open source implementations of an AVS video decoder can be found in the OpenAVS project and within the libavcodec library. The latter is integrated in many popular free video players like MPlayer, VLC or xine.