AVS

Audio Video Standard (AVS) is a compression standard for digital audio and video, and is competing with H.264/AAC to potentially replace MPEG-2. Chinese companies own 90% of AVS patents. The audio and video files have an .avs extension as a container format.

Proposed as a national standard in 2004, AVS had a targeted royalty of 1 RMB (or about $0.10 USD) per player. On 30 April 2005, AVS standard video officially passed the public show and became the national standard.

AVS was expected to be approved for the Chinese high-definition successor to the Enhanced Versatile Disc, and when CBHD was released it shipped with 30gb blue laser discs and video in the AVS format, which rapidly gained market share - standing at 30% of the video disc market after four months.

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 some free video players like MPlayer, VLC or xine. xAVS is also an open source AVS encoder with a working decoder.