It seems as if China's making its stand in the format wars now. They're going to be adopting a new kind of HD-DVD come 2008, all 51GBs of HD-DVD at that. Considering that these guys live in the most-populated country in the world, this might pose as a setback for the Blu-ray camp.

Following Toshiba's 51GB HD-DVD, the Chinese Government has just approved a 51GB HD-DVD format that's currently dubbed as the "CH-DVD" - that's short for China High Definition DVD - for production. This new disc standard has been developed by the Optical Memory National Engineering Research Center (OMNERC), with the backing of other engineers and government officials.

So what's the diff between your normal HD-DVD and CH-DVD? Well, CH-DVD is actually based off of the HD-DVD specs, but this time, it's beefed up with some Chinese intellectual property (guess it's going to be exclusively released for them). Since one of China's biggest problems is piracy, they've designed the CH-DVD to boast some advanced copy-protection features which could prevent the proliferation of pirated discs.

Chinese officials are backing up the new format standard and are already hoping to release a CH-DVD player come 2008. Ooh! Right in time for the Olympics! Do note that the CH-DVD and HD-DVD are designed to be compatible with each other - meaning, a CH-DVD player would be able to play an HD-DVD and vice versa.