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Full-Screen Video Over 28.8k: The Claims Continue
gwernol writes "Over at Screen Daily they are claiming that an Australian company has demonstrated a high quality, full-screen video-on-demand service that is delivered over a 28.8k modem. They claim this will 'eliminate the need for broadband.' If this is true, then they'll change the world. Of course, the basic technology has been around for a while, see this article from 1998 or this one from earlier this year. I remain extremely sceptical. If this is real, why won't they allow proper independent testing? But it is interesting that they're getting funding. Could this be the last great Internet scam?"
Several readers also pointed out this brief report at imdb.com as well. We've mentioned this before, but the news here is the reportedly successful demo. It would be a lot easier to swallow if he'd let people test it independently, but video-over-28.8 sure is tantalizing.
Video over 28.8 sounds tantalizing, but hard to beleive. Still, it would be neat.
Of course they have to innovate the dialup service in australia because of the broadband whoring that goes on in australia. 100 mb a month traffic limits and shit. I send more traffic than that per day of quaking.
What can you get over broadband?
"He who laughs last is usually the dumbest kid on the block." - John Lennon
Is the Internet going away and nobody told me? Somehow I doubt that anything happening today will be the _last_ great Internet scam.
If it ain't a Model M, it's a piece of crap.
Yes, and I am able to compress all of Slashdot down to 10 bytes.
Bush's education improvements were
As if video is the only need for broadband.
I need it to keep on top of the ever changing Linux binaries.
Because, hell, all I use the Internet for is streaming video. Really! I never download a single thing.
Morons.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
You click on download, the viewer launches, and the status bar reads "Buffering..." for eight hours, then the full-screen video plays in full detail. It's amazing!
Holmes expects many programme suppliers to want to form alliances once they understand the potential. "This is the first time I have ever heard of a technology that can service so many houses from one server at such high quality
And they dont expect this new technology to be bought, and exploited, by one of these already existing monopolies? And once purchased, don't they assume that it will just add to the existing monopolies?
Call me a skeptic, but this is going to be something that AOL or MS or someone pays a lot of money to buy, and then makes it completely proprietary. And that's assuming that it GETS to the consumer market without getting squashed by legal troubles.
Pshah!
With all the great things I have with broadband (at the same cost of 28.8 service), plus, if you can compress a stream for 28.8, imagine what you can do with broadband!
This won't eliminate broadband. It'll strengthen it!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Funny, I find a broadband connection incredibly useful, and yet i never watch video over the net...
The real advantages of a broadband conneciton is that you are always connected; you are accessible to others via mail and messaging at all times (just imagine that you had to explicitly connect your telephone to use it, then disconnect it again afterwards). The speed, while very nice, is actually not as important.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
...that its coming out of Australia. Even if the claims in the article were true, we'll never see it (in the US anyway). I'm sure the Australian Government will find a reason to ban it.
With the advent of wireless technology, speed is not the only issue at hand. Energy is going to be a major factor to consider. While we may be able to compress video into oblivion, the processing power required to perform the compression/decompression may be too high for handheld wireless deviced with limited battery power. Broadband availability for desktop computers is rapidly becoming a non-issue.
People are going to want to send and receive video emails from their handhelds. We need a technology that will be able to strike a balance between energy required to transmit the signal (bandwidth) and the energy required to compress and decompress the signal (signal processing).
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
http://lzip.sourceforge.net/
I hope this isn't another Pixelon...
--
E2 IN2 IE?
Hmm, another absurd claim...Color me skeptical, but Ive seen several attempts at producing high-quality, low-bandwidth video and Ive concluded that those two words comibined cant make sense. There are many codecs available today that claim to produce tiny file sizes that download quickly and play full screen, Unfortunately they rarely deliver. The article seems real light on the details, No description of connectivity besides a 28.8 modem, no details on the display, resolution, nothing. I think this company is either set to revolutionize the media industry, or they just pulled the biggest funding scam ever. Until *I see it* I wont belive this hype.
Now if I can receive Full screen Quality on my good ol' p133, 800*600, on a 28.8 modem through my noisy copper, Im golden...
There is no spork.
Yes sir, full screen video over a 28k connection.
So what am I seeing? It looks rather blank.
Well sir, that's a white cow in a snow field. It just scared out some snow hares.
Over 28k you say? Where do I sign?
A man without a God is like a fish without a bicycle.
I don't even think it would be that hard to fake.
I'm just as skeptical as the next geek, but remember: MP3 changed everything in audio. Compressing a 60M song to ~6M?!? 10-12X compression with only minor quality loss? No one believed it when they were told, but once we started hearing it ourselves, we couldnt believe our ears. I hope they have made the next quantum leap in compression. I doubt it, but I hope.
But these compressions usually involve many "roundings" in order to decrease "compression artifacts". What I think about this 28K stream is (since I cannot test it) it will probably be "good" or "avarage" but never "perfect".
As long as i can put The Matrix at dvd quality on a floppy disk.
of a game of pong
These 'secret' proprietary processes always seem to generate a lot of hyp, investment/funding, whatever and never seem to generate the proposed technology. A good example's a Calgary company that hyped its 'new' large-scale flat screen (non morticed screens) technology. It ended up that the founder had fraudulently demonstrated 'their' tech to shareholders using a compeditor's equiptment.
I can't help but think of 'The Spanish Prisoner.'
Beware the Whyte Wolf.
With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels...
Question. The article mentions "No Download Time", but that isn't exactly what a buffer is. If I spend 2 hours buffering 30 minutes of a 40 minute flick, I could show it to you, after the buffer period, streaming, and it'd finish before you got to the "live" part...
If we could only find out what _it_ is.
theITquestion.com
... they forgot to mention that thier "full screen" is a 16x16 2 bit screen. Smells like a bunch o' bull if you ask me.
If they could compress data enough to shove that much information down a 28.8 modem with little or no loss of quality, then you should be able to get surrond sound quality voice over the phone line. Pardon me if I sound skeptical, but if the folks at Ma Bell couldn't improve the basic quality over POTS that much, what makes me believe some ponces from down under could.
even video over cable modem is still vaporware IMHO what to say over 28.8...
I still remember ISPs and media focused promissing real-time-full-screen-VHS-quality-30-frames per second video over cable/DSL/ISDN... All I can get now is real-time-AM-radio-quality-sound with what seems to be a slide-show in nakednews.com with a 256 Kbps ADSL.
so, untill I _SEE_ this video over 28.8K I'll deny the possibility of such a thing...
What ? Me, worry ?
I think they forgot to specify that the screen is 32x32x8.
And that's my $0.32 (adjusted for inflation).
The above is all that in necessary to say on this subject, but due to the postercomment compression filter, I have to add this meaningless paragraph.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Of course not. It's obviously a scam, but it's equally obvious that scams are not going anywhere. Human nature hasn't changed. As long as there are people who are desperate to belive there will be people willing to tell them what they want to hear. As long as the net is less than people want it to be- which is to say as long as it exists- there will be snake oil salesmen promising that they can make it into what people want.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
too bad 28.8 is much too slow to get first post here
For anyone who's ever heard of Pixelon, we'll believe it when we can test it ourselves.
I mean, how can I do a linux install over video?
Here's Slashdot's last article about a company like this:h tm l
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/06/27/1156210.s
Good thing he doesn't have it patented, tho. As soon as he releases software, the algorithms will be available to everyone.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
...they're forgetting about Counter-Strike. You can take my DSL when you pry it out of my cold, dead NIC.
--
I like to watch.
The problem isn't just the bandwidth. The problem with the idea of video-on-demand is that, unlike broadcast, your costs scale with your audience. The technological problem of fitting high-quality signal over a tiny pipeline is a great one to solve, but video-on-demand's real problem is that the cost scales.
It's like choosing an O(exp) algorithm when you know an O(1) algorithm is available.
See, if I start broadcasting a signal, the more people that tune in, the more I can charge for pay-per-view or advertising. But the neat thing is that my cost is fixed; no matter how many people tune into that signal, it costs me the same amount to spray EM waves all over the place.
But with VoD, every new viewer means new bandwidth. Meaning that my costs go up with each new customer. And since the cost of additional bandwidth is not a linear equation, at some point there's diminishing returns, regardless of how small the stream is. My profit margins wither and die if there's enough demand for my video stream.
The only real solution for this from a business perspective is...get this...distributed file sharing, such as Napster or Gnutella. With tools like these, I'm able to avoid the added demands on my server by making the folks who want the service into servers themselves.
So the real technical problem to solve with VoD is not to make the streams smaller, although that certainly doesn't hurt, but to make money off of folks' file transfers. Obviously a direct tax on each transfer is going to cause problems, but an advertising-based model, where each transferred file has an advertisement attached with it, could work wonderfully.
Too bad for the RIAA and MPAA that they're too busy suing file-sharing users and pushing unsuccessful VoD goose-chases to figure this out, eh?
This is a cool technology if it's real. I wouldn't be surprised if it is real. But it won't make the internet into the great media-delivery tool the media corporations want it to be.
Full-screen p0rn for everyone!
but 3 pixel by 3 pixel video isn't very entertaining. However, I suppose it could be useful for broadcasting those fun-packed documentary videos of tournament level
tic-tac-toe matches.
"I too have developed technology for getting video over my 28.8. I just place my television over my modem and wallah! video over 28.8." -m
It's certainly possible that they can compress video/audio data this much. There are types of compression available far greater than what are commonly used... the reason being that they demand way too much computing power to encode and decode. For example, neural networks have been used to compress data like pictures to tiny, tiny size. But if you've ever seen neural network algorithms, you know that there's a lot of computation going on.
That said, assuming they have the compression, nobody probably has a cpu for decoding it.
He said, "You'll be able to tell your grandchildren that you helped assemble the first NT supercomputer," and I cringed.
Are these the same jokers that claimed they had done cold fusion?
Notty Blightly
But the outfit's complete unwillingness to do anything but canned demos is what really makes me think the guy in charge is doing more than just feeling like a snake-oil salesman.
If it's for real, they'll file for patent protection and we'll all get to see how it works. And if it's for real, they deserve a nice solid patent or three, but my guess is it's just a scam.
Whats 28.8 converted to real (USA) units?
Remember the DOS trojan that was floating around about 8 or 9 years ago that claimed to be fractal compression program with amazing results? It could compress a 2 megabyte file down to a few hundred bytes. How did it achieve these amazing results? Deleting the file and filling the rest with junk. :-)
I don't believe the claims of the story are even remotely posible, but what about using wavelet lossy compression (eg. jpeg2000) for video? any experts know what kinds of compression it would be able to achieve? as far as I know, all current video compression still uses discrete cosine transformations for the lossy portion of compression.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
faster pr0n? sorry, I was asleep till I realized this stories potential.
________________________________________________
Mr. Nyquist, where are you please? It seems the Aussies have forgotten your theorems.
Still, if you can put a DVD quality Matrix onto 5 megabytes... I will be fucking flabbergasted. You could then get 128 full length movies on a single CD-R! By the way, I'll believe it when I see it.
CTP
"War makes me sad." - Me
0123456789
MONEY=EVIL
See, isn't that simple?
There are SO many ways to rig an evaluation without resorting to such lame techniques as showing a completely rigged video. ;)
;)
For example, if you know the exact paramaters of a data set, you can optimize your compressor for just that data set. Like, for example, allocating a lot of bits to pink in a pr0n pic.
You can get insane compression with fractal/wavelet algorythims if you sit down and figure them out by hand or brute force.
And then, there of course is a question of what's on the system running things.
I mean, seriously, you could store four mini-streams and composite them to form the "real" stream. If you think of it that way, Flash already gives you streaming full-screen video over a 28.8 modem.
Oh yeah, and I forgot about doing really high-quality resizing to make less pixels look like more..
Gentoo Sucks
I have a friend who works for a defence contractor. About 8 years ago they made a pair of boxes that could convey 260 line video at 30 fps with full audio over a 28.8 modem. If the goverment could afford it then.. its probally afforadble now.
Part of the skepticism about watching video over the internet is due to the fact that most people haven't had the experience the convenience of watching over the internet.
In South Korea, the national broadcasting networks all have Video on Demand. Every T.V. show is stored and available for anyone to watch over the internet. They require a login for higher bandwidth/quality footage, however, it's free non-the-less. As a Korean-American, I find it extremely informative/entertaining to watch vidieos and footage from Korea. I can watch any mini-series/sitcoms, news,...etc, I want to at any time, anywhere. Even the music industry makes all their music videos available online.
Just imagine being able to watch any show you want from beginning to end, whenever you want to... That's exactly what the TiVo's for except that you can't store everything due to storage issues. In Korea, the networks and websites are responsible for the storage... thus, true VoD.
I don't know if the technology is really valid, but respond to some people who claim that they don't watch VoD even when they have broadband; You don't watch VoD b/c there isn't anything good out there... (except in Korean)...
MWB's president was heard to say, "The big breakthrough came when we realized that it wasn't in the box, but rather in the band..."
What about multi-cast?
And since the cost of additional bandwidth is not a linear equation
No, it's not linear. It gets cheaper per unit as you by more, so there is not point of diminishing returns (as far as delivering the same stream to more people goes. More bandwidth on one physical link, yes, there are diminishing returns).
So the real technical problem to solve with VoD is not to make the streams smaller, although that certainly doesn't hurt, but to make money off of folks' file transfers. Obviously a direct tax on each transfer is going to cause problems, but an advertising-based model, where each transferred file has an advertisement attached with it, could work wonderfully.
Too bad for the RIAA and MPAA that they're too busy suing file-sharing users and pushing unsuccessful VoD goose-chases to figure this out, eh?
And to think, with that great business model, the RIAA and MPAA still have all the money and your posting it on slashdot.
Think about it for a minute. Video CD and Super VideoCDs compress MPEG at anywhere between 1.15 and 2.25 Mbit/s. With transport encoding, that's between 1.25 and 3.0 or so (give or take).
Now, bear in mind that they're not transmitting over the net - so there's no lag, no reassembly - they're just squirting a continuous packet stream.
28800 is about 26400 bits per second, with overhead - which is 0.03Mbit/s.
So that's a factor of 100 difference. With some clever algorithms (eg. Div-X), making use of the fact that NTSC is generally lossy (and thus letting you throw away a lot more of the signal than a videophile would like), you might get away with it. You could just about squeeze VideoCD quality down that pipe. Not bad.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
But with VoD, every new viewer means new bandwidth.
Not with multicast. The logistical and technical hurdles of charging people to join a multicast group, plus actually getting ISPs to support it is probably prohibitive though. Also it's difficult to do it "on-demand" because it's just one stream. There are ways, but it's all pretty complex.
Well, even with all of the advancements in video compression, I still HIGHLY doubt that we're at the point were decent, broadcast-quality video can be streamed at ~2.5k/sec. Unless they have some "magic" means of compressing something that nobody will even come close to for at least a decade, I remain doubtful. "Broadcast-quality video can go anywhere from 26+MB/sec (uncompressed NTSC) to ~3.7MB/sec (DV/DVCam/etc) for a decent compression. But a decent comparison at approx. .000676 the size? I'll believe it when I see it. Besides, there's only talk so far, no REAL proof that outside people can test, review, and confirm or deny.
This all reminds me of a friend who thought he could compress his whole hard drive onto a floppy by just zipping his files up hundreds of times. You know how that goes...
But there's no doubting how cool something like this will be once the technology in compression advances to this point. Screw MPEG-4 or MP3, if someone could successfully do this, it would change how TV and the Internet are seperated (or combined in some cases) forever.
Reminds me of Pixelon, they made the same claims, and look what happend to those guys.
Almost as good as sticking tape on a 42" Plasma screen then making out to your investor it's some wonderful new technology for sowing lowcost LCD's together. They were found out and now they're fucked, how MIT tutors got involved in this company I do not know.
...substantial compression. Right now, I'm pleased watching (while I work) a 2inch x 2inch video of the Simpsons in the corner of my screen, which is allegedly at 350kbps, but that's still not Amazing Quality at Low Low Rates - unless I have my figures wrong (i.e. bits/bytes, which is entirely possible,) this would be an additional compression of, what, 12 times? That would be groundbreaking, but wouldn't we have seen some intermediate steps?
...also, does anybody else remember that April Fool's joke about lossy data compression, where it actually just deleted the files? Sure, you get 100% compression - but it's lossy.
Hell, maybe not. Maybe it is genuine. But I'm with gwernol - let's see some independent testing.
A how-to documentary on cold fusion.
First, you'd need hardware fractal compression. It's the only compression system capable of the sorts of compression ratios required, for the type of information being delivered. However, it's PAINFULLY slow, which is why it's not in general use, and the only companies touching it are using ultra-powerful dedicated hardware.
Second, "full-screen" is a bit of a suspect term, when it comes to video. Television uses interleaved frames. In principle, this means that you only really need to send over half the information, and do simple interpolation for every other scan-line.
Third, that the modem couldn't be checked is itself a bit suspect. It really wouldn't take much to conceal a DSL circuit, especially if it was an internal modem. At which point, your 28.8k suddenly becomes 28.8m. A somewhat more plausable speed.
Lastly, although I doubt it was done this way, if you run -enough- 28.8k modems in parallel (say, a thousand of them) and stripe the data across them, you could easily reach high enough speeds, AND "legitamately" claim that you had video over a low-speed modem.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Of course, the problem you're talking about is the fact that if two people want the same video stream, the stream travels twice through the pipe. Same stream, same bits. If they could have distributed caches so that they only need to send the data to those caches, from where people download them, a lot of the traffic would disappear. The nearer (hops-wise) to the receiving end it is, the more traffic it avoids, but also the more caches you need. The way I see it, ISPs could 'suscribe' to video feeds, for which the users pay per view.
In fact, if any venture capitalist is reading this, please send me a few millions, and I'll put it to personal^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H good use immediately.
Okay, sounds pretty bogus, huh? I mean, take full quality video and stereo cd sound, you're talking about 310 Megabits of data every second at the sizes they talk about.
Even if you take lossy compression such as DivX and reduce the video size, you're still talking about 100 k for decent video and 1 Mbit for anything close to full screen quality.
But we're talking data here... what about information? Data is bits. Information is the meaning of the bits, and a lot of information is highly redundant. Take english. I heard once that there are 1.2 bits per character in the english language; that's why text files get such good compression rates with gzip.
Video is not so highly compressible, mainly because the codec doesn't understand images. Codecs generally just split the image up into smaller and smaller blocks and look for exactly repeating patterns. Lossy compression allows them to look for roughly repeating patterns, and pretend they're exact. Not exactly rocket science.
Take a scene; any one. Like the one from the Matrix. Where Keanu Reeves is in his trench coat, black t-shirt, and black jeans, and an evil computer agent is standing in the background firing at him. You see Keanu bent over at the knees and there's 5 bullets coming at him with a particular trajectory pattern, with cool spiral air deformations coming off the back. Know the one I'm talking about?
Guess what? I just described it in 312 characters. About 400 bits. Through in another 100 to precisely place everything and another 500 to describe background scenery, etc. Sure, it was REALLY lossy compression, but that's an example of the kind of thing you can do if you have an understanding of what's in video. At the very least, you can decide WHAT you can ignore and focus on preserving the really important stuff.
Like, most people won't notice if the sky isn't the exact same shade of blue. Or if the flat blue areas of the sky have a slightly different texture applied to them.
Okay, this is all so far pure pie-in-the-sky theorizing so far... I just wanted to set all that up to point out that this seems possible. HOW could it be done? Well, this is pure speculation but...
A few years ago lots of people were looking at using various types of fractals to compress images down. This flourished briefly as the IFS file format (c. 1995), but the patents on the algorithm allowed the author to charge an exhorbitant royalty, so it never got off the ground other than for a few high-end video conferencing systems. These systems used (you guess it!) regular phone lines. Sure, maybe not 28.8 modems and maybe not full screen (though I distinctly remember that the frame rate was between 24 and 30 fps, depending on what kind of processor you used), but from there it's just process improvements.
Plus, I imagine that MP3 has taught us a lot about lossy compression that could be applied to this sort of thing. I don't personally know anything about the details of MP3, but assume that its methods can be applied to fractal compression with approximately the same rate, e.g. at 3x-6x compression at negligible quality loss and 12x at maximal compression... and that would be enough to take this technology to the levels this guy is talking about...
Ok, I'm done dreaming. Anyone have any comments? Does anyone remember this IFS format or have any more info on it than my hazy recollection?
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
That's not a problem if the stream is only 28.8kbps. I could serve 6 video streams over my ADSL, and someone with a T3 could serve about 2,000 streams.
Ok,
Lets assume a video frame size of 320x240x16bit. We can scale this up fairly well, however, its no where near TV quality.
Each frame takes 153,600 bytes per frame uncompressed. Now lets say you can get 80% compression on each frame. That would bring us down to 30,720 bytes per frame.
A typical 28.8K modem is going to see 2800 bytes a second (on a good day, more like 2400 bytes in the real world). Note: This is a 28.8K modem and not a 56K modem.
Based on these numbers, it would take about 10.9 seconds per frame (30,720 / 2800 = 10.9).
Obviously there are tricks that one can do such as deltas between frames rather than actual frames, etc...
However, in order to get 24FPS (3,686,400 bytes)in real time, they would have to get a compression rate of 99.93% (for the 24 frames).
It just doesn't add up. I think they are full of it and this product will never go beyond vaporware.
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
Back around 1990, there was a similiar thread going around Usenet about a company called Web technologies. They claimed to have some fantastic compression ratios, and to be able to compress compressed data again. They got a lot of press, but on Usenet it was quite obvious that they were full of &%$#.
In fact someone came up with a mathematical statement that said the only way their claims would hold water was if they just gave out 64 bit serial numbers and stored the data somewhere else. Not to different from what we call Freenet now.
Needless to say these guys ended up going under after the investors figured out they were not only full of it, but 10 lbs of it in a 5 lbs bag.
May I ask where you are getting broadband for the same cost as "28.8 service"? I'm just curious. I get dialup for $21/mo from Earthlink, and that is more expensive than most. All the DSL and Cable providers in my area charge $50/mo (Pacbell, Earthlink, DirecTV, AT&T). Where do you live that cable/dsl only costs $20/mo? Or are you talking about ISDN?
Great internet scam? Maybe. Last internet scam? Definately not.
What about multi-cast?
:) :) :) Nobody ever accused the MPAA/RIAA of being good at exploiting new markets.
Doesn't work for Video-on-Demand.
No, it's not linear. It gets cheaper per unit as you by more, so there is not point of diminishing returns (as far as delivering the same stream to more people goes. More bandwidth on one physical link, yes, there are diminishing returns).
That's the problem with VoD, because with VoD, each stream connection is a different program, started at a completely different time.
And to think, with that great business model, the RIAA and MPAA still have all the money and your[sic] posting it on slashdot.
Yeah, well, I'm a nice guy that way.
Can't we utilize this incredible technology to compress the Windows directory? It would be nice if I could fit the bloated dir on a floppy instead of a whole HDD... oh I know how to do that: /y c:\windows or format c: /q /u or fdisk or ...
deltree
Best regards,
AzErdos(TM)
Sig lost in BSOD...
Show me the money baby!!!
Only 'flamers' flame!
Well, assuming that this *isn't* a complete and utter fabrication... like most software 'demos' I've seen... this has serious implications for the movie industry.
It's still fairly difficult for users to encode, post and/or download entire DVD movies. Most computer users wouldn't have a clue of where to being.
If this codec does what it proclaims to do, however, can you see this company *not* licensing encoders one way or the other? Real's Mpeg2-based compressor was pretty revolutionary at the time, yet they still offered a 'free' version.
DivX, which is free, but questionable, is even more revolutionary in terms of quality and filesize.
Both these codecs have drawn people into the whole movie/video trading scene.
If this codec *does* allow for compression of videos to make them the same size as the average MP3, (and think about that comparison... For this to work, they'll have to reliable encode video at a lower rate than MP3 audo), the movie trading scene will take off in a way that will make Valenti's asshole shrivel up.
Of course, this company can try to keep the codec and/or encryption secret. To that I have this to say... Jon Johansen and DeCSS
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
The new article as well as the earlier one both say that the technology is "backed by a report from Monash University" {in Melbourne}, but back in April, Monash vigorously disputed claims of their support. They conducted an independent review but the compression algorithm was black-boxed. The company may be misrepresenting the purpose and parameters of the review, from the university's point of view.
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
I think instead of saying "a simple 28.8kbps modem could deliver such fast and high quality images.."
they meant to say "a simple 288kbs DSL modem could deliver such fast and high quality images.."
but even that I would have trouble believing...
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
There are ways, but it's all pretty complex.
How would you do Video-on-Demand with Multicast? It sounds a lot more than "pretty complex" to me; the only solutions I can think of involve either adding new bandwidth (eliminating the benefits of multicast) or signal quality degradation (blech).
Seems easier to generate a different model of distribution, where files are passed about from Gnutella-like clients, with the advertising embedded within the files.
What am I missing? How would you do video-on-demand with Multicasting, without the loss of quality or requiring more bandwidth per user?
Much like this one ...
http://lzip.sourceforge.net/
:-)
2000 is a pretty paltry amount.
You need to be able to serve not thousands, but tens of thousands of people.
The current state of the art in compression technology is benchmarked by Jeff Gilchrist at his site which includes current benchmarks in image compression technology too.
This was a real question from a job interview! Q: What area of programming do you consider yourself not to be good in?
They claim this will eliminate the need for broadband.
They won't eliminate my need for ISO's. I like my 1.5 mb/s down, thank you very much.
about another company with bogus video technology ...
Last year I did some work on image compression
using wavelet transforms. We were able to get
50:1 compression on scientific image data, with
12-bit dynamic range. That compression ratio was
without any use of interframe similarities --
a movie compression algorithm could probably
get another 20:1 compression without much trouble.
At 30 fps, 0.33 MB per frame, that's 10 MB of
image data per second. Compressed 1000 to one,
you're only talking about 10 kilobytes
per second. If you're willing to suffer with
less dynamic range around spike bits of data,
it's not unreasonable to think that another
factor of four could come out of that, giving 2.5
kB/sec or 20 kbps -- leaving 8kbps for the sound.
And here is how it's done:
;)
The file format:
HEADER: 16 bits: (Integer) Height
16 bits: (Integer) Width
Defines height and width (in pixels) of the video
8 bits: Red
8 bits: Green
8 bits: Blue
Defines colour for bit 0
8 bits: Red
8 bits: Green
8 bits: Blue
Defines colour for bit 1
STREAM: 1 bit
Defines the colour used
Header is sent at the beginning of the file and the stream follows. Bandwidth must achive 30bps (for full motion video). Sound is not yet implemented into the format. Where sound is a must, we recommend the MIDI format be played along side this format.
Here is a little movie I have been working on:
0000100000000000000011000000001111111100000000
0000000000000000111111110000000011010110101101
0111010101010101101011111001111001111010110110
It has a Christmas themed to it, maybe it will hit the box office this winter?
Now give me money!
It might be the "latest great Internet scam", but I doubt it is the "last".
Investors seem to lose all sense whenever someone uses "internet" or "world wide web" in their presentation.
Look at all of the stock that was sold for the various dot-com's that had no possible source of income.
(Our business plan is to give away something we don't own without hosting any advertisements on our site, and the money will just roll in)
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Of course, the problem you're talking about is the fact that if two people want the same video stream, the stream travels twice through the pipe. Same stream, same bits.
Yes, but the beauty of it is different pipes. Once someone has the content, they not only don't need to download it again, but they become a distributor as well! So the second person to download can get it from me, or from the first person. The third person can get it from me, the first person, or the second person, etc.
How do you get revenue? Advertising, embedded within the stream, so that it's not easy to remove. Just like a TV show that's been recorded off of the TV. Porn sites (always ahead of the curve with new media technologies) have been doing this for years with great success.
Even assuming that they can produce great full screen video with a 28.8 connection, there is no evidence that broadband will no longer be needed. They seem to AssUMe that the only thing broadband is used for is streaming video.
How will this miracle technology help me download the latest Linux Kernel in a few minutes over 28.8. It will not. Speed up my binary newsgroups downloads so I can get gigs of possibly copyright infringing binaries every day? No. Will it even speed up my web browsing so that I don't have to wait 30 to 60 seconds for CNN.com to show up? No, not that either.
Broadband is safe whether or not their claims are real.
If it were real, we'd see it first in the pr0n business -- just like every other internet-related technology breakthough.
-- Spaz!
"Designing an Infinite Compression Algorithm is easy. It's the decompression of that data that's difficult."
How would you do video on demand with multicast, period. You would need for multiple people to start watching the same thing at the same time.
This is supposed to be Score:3 Funny, not interesting or insightful. Lzip is a joke. The comparison is humorous, particularly if you haven't seen lzip.
The rub is if you could only receive incoming calls while the phone is in your hand. Oh, and
everytime you hang up, your phone number would change.
Thats what hes trying to get at. Thats also what your typical dialup ISP user has to deal with.
I got a static IP address from telocity, and i could never go back. The download speed is ok, and the upload band& latency are horrendous.
Still, the availability makes it all worth it.
I can log into my box from the net at large, with full confidence that itll be there. (theres no way dialup on demand can open up a PPP connection from the outside, that i know of)
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/en/s erve/multiwp.asp
http://service.real.com/help/library/guides/doc/4m ulti.htm
:wq
You could do it by embedding the on-demand streams and merging them into a single stream that has several "channels," where people can only see one "channel" at a time. But that requires more bandwidth for the whole stream, and/or degrading the signal quality of the individual streams to conserve bandwidth.
There may be another solution that doesn't end up having the same problems as just streaming on demand from a server, but I can't think of it.
Information Theory.
Come on, I'm no expert in this but there ought to be a way to prove the fundamental amount of information that is involved here. I'd like to see decent streaming AUDIO at 2kbytes/sec, let alone tv-quality AV.
And yes, as the frame-size for PAL is larger than NTSC's the bitrate is the same
And that leads to the neverending discussion of which standard is better.(hehe notice how that discussion never includes SECAM, poor french)
skeptical. next time run it through a spellchecker first.
The idea of not needing broadband connections is going to be a non-issue (possibly) in the near future, with the current prices of broadband access and expanding service range. Sure, it would be cool to have full screen video streamed over a 28.8k connection, and it would make it easier on other connections' bandwidths, but it's almost always the case that a lower bandwidth requirement means degraded quality.
This tastes like granma! By george, you're right! it DOES taste like granma! We'll take a box of it!
What's the frame rate? Sure, I could do HDTV over 28.8 -- if I had 1 frame per minute.
This is pretty absurd. Let's say 10 frame / second, which I think is probably minimum for a decent experience. 28.8 = 3600 bytes / second (yes, it's 8 bits, not 10 bits). That's only 360 bytes per frame! Full screen? 320x240x24b = 230KB uncompressed. That's 640/1 compression -- without sound. With sound??
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
-"the start of Media World Broadcasting Ltd's (MWB) quest to raise $26.5m (A$50m) to develop what it claims is the Holy Grail of VoD."
Lets start by picking this apart. Firstly, if he's already perfected this technology (software) why does he need $26.5m (A$50)? especially when software is not exactly the most costly thing to experiment with...
The holy grail of VoD? yes and also the holy grail of jpeg replacement and not to mention what this could do to replace mp3!! but no, no mention of this area which could make infinatly more money than a few people watching movies...
-""We would not be in this if we were not 110% sure that the technology works," MWB chief executive John Tatoulis told Screendaily, admitting to feeling a bit like a snake oil salesman."
Yep, you summed it up - your not in it, your on an island somewhere trying to get some cash, and you are a snake oil salesman.
How do they expect us to believe this crap with out in a photo of people watching a screen - come on you could easily fake that..
Therefore, the article is fake or someones been screwing screendaily
-tfga
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Surely not the last...
If (somehow) we've never seen "The Matrix" or have no idea who Canoe Reeves is, you description doesn't do much. I mean, what does an "evil computer agent" look like? I could imagine the MCP or one if its guards, and think "The Matrix" is some lame Bill and Ted rip-off of "Tron."
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
DivX decoding is fairly proc-intensive, the most important point in proof here beign that the Dreamcast, which has a powerfull graphics chip, but a mediocre cpu (by pc standards) cant play DivX.
And this got me thinking on another thing that goes completely unsaid. What about the AUDIO for that full-screen video.
DivX usually uses stereo mp3 @ 128kbps, and we ALL (well, some) know that 128kbps 44.100Khz Stero is 15kb/s of data. And the acceptabiliy bar to have passable soundtrack is at 96kbps 44.1kHz St and THAT is 11kb/s...
I HIGHLY doubt that these guys found a more efficient audio codec (dont bring up OGG and the like, the compression gain is not THAT significant) so we get only about 17kb/s full-screen video with passable audio (or 22kb/s if sound is mono, but mono sound sucks)
So we are back to the original thought, this has got to be a better zooming process for small images, together with a good video codec (maybe even a DivX one) and crappy sound.
even 300k Real or other compressed streams are not high quality...they are sacrificing lots of things. (sound quality included) sure, you can tell what it is that is being displayed, but definitely not something to watch a full-length movie at.
im not even mentioning this crap about streaming video over a 28.8 modem. hell, you can't even stream a decent sounding mp3 over a 28.8, and i don't think you can get much more compressed than mp3, without just destroying the music.
err so ... i like NTSC for action parts and PAL for pausing :)
In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
If this was the real deal, why would they sit on it for three years? That's a lot of revenues lost while they take their good old time commercializing the technology.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
It's easy: Each client maintains a system of non-linear equations that is quantum-mechanically
coupled with the another system of euquations that resides on the server. Thanks to
quantum mechanics (no-one really understands this stuff, anyway) every change
of the server's matrix induces an equal change in the clients matrix in no-time.
The 28.8kbit connection is only needed to establish and keep-alive the quantum-coupling.
So Einstein's laws are preserved: information can't be transmitted faster than light.
Because nobody would believe this shit otherwise.
Romans had been using a system of compression that it still unrivaled today (in terms of compression ratio, unfortuntly not in terms of speed). Very simply, you have two men on each side of the valley, one with a flag and one with a bowl and a jug of water. On the sides of the bowls are little notches.
The sender raises his flag, and both sides start pouring water into thier bowls at the same rate. When the sending side's bowl is filled high enough, he stops pouring and his flag man raises the flag again to signal the other side to stop pouring as well.
So what wa sthe point of this? Well, now both sides of the valley now have the same number of notches filled in thier bowels. Each notches, of course, was a particular battle plan that was to be carried out. But for out purposes, it could be an ascii byte of information.
This kind of "compression" is essentially one with an infinite compression ratio, i.e. any amount of data can be "sent" using only two bits of information (the start and stop bit). The only real problem with using this kind of system is one of time. Clocks are just not accurate enough to make this kind of system any faster than just sending data in the normal way.
Anyway, I'll leave it up to the rest of you to figure a way to make this into the "next big thing", but I just wanted to note that, while 99.99999% of these claims are fradulent, there is a basis for such a scheme to exist.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Even if this isnt a hoax, it will never get out in the public hands.
If they have found a way for high quality video to be expressed in less than 30kbps (not bloody likely) then the MPAA will immediately realize that people will be able to download a 3 hour movie as fast they can download a 5 minute mp3. But of course, the MPAA would never pull the plug on that...
You really have to ask yourself some nontechnical questions here: If you had invented a compression scheme with this sort of performance, what would you do?
Would you:
(a) hook up with a small time Australian film director and raise a lousy $US25m
(b) go directly to the US and find a bunch of VCs with very deep pockets indeed
Would you:
(a) find a gulible accountant to swear it was OK
(b) register worldwide patents and let them readem and weep
Would you:
(a) showcase your wares in that hotpot of high technology, the Hard Rock Cafe in seedy, inner city Darlinghurst, one street away from the lowest class prostitutes, their junkie boyfriend pimps and various other street urchins
(b) do it in style reflecting the fact you were about to get really, really, rich
Would you:
(a) get wide coverage from the world's high tech media
(b) get coverage from a web site that covers cinema
I feel sorry for John Tatoulis, he's been duped into being the front man on a $25m scam, he's probably "not very technical". Who is the guy who claims to invented this stuff? Why's he so shy?
Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
If i could get full-screen video delivered over a 56k modem line then imagine what i could get accross my DSL line. This is like saying i will never fill up that new 40GB HDD i just got. Bullshit. I will just find more crap to stream accross it.
-- Hail Eris
This is not much more than a brain fart, but it occurs to me that if any movie can be described as a single HUUUUGE number (which it can because it's a stream of bits), then a quantum computer with that number of qubits should be able to "decompress" the movie with the bit length and a checksum. Since a quantum computer can exist in all of its states at once, it would simply be a matter of filtering that huge number of bits for the only solution to the checksum.
It would be much like testing a PGP encrypted message with every possible message of that bit-length, until something clicks. But Stephen Hawking I'm not, so i'm hoping someone out there will confirm or disconfirm this theory for me.
And i am ***NOT*** by any means proposing that this is what these guys have done. I think they're probably just bullshit artists.
he is full of crap.
programmers/researchers don't talk like that.
I call bs.
> You need to be able to serve not thousands, but
> tens of thousands of people.
And that's just for watching Abe Vigoda make love to Mimi from Drew Carey Show at 3 in the morning...
Seriously, this article is just ridiculous. How does this get through when articles like the one I posted yesterday (about family advocacy groups claiming teenage mod developers are the equivalent of child pornographers) got rejected within a few minutes of submission.
PS - the claim of this story is obviously BS, just a scam to make money.
~ now you know
Crack smoking, or corporate idiocy, you decide!
Seriously though, I do believe that such might be possible, if it is true that certain video compression algorithms are incredibly efficient. The flip side, is of course, that you need a pVII 1200thz machine to decompress it in realtime. In other words, it may be possible soon, but isn't yet that way.
But it misses the whole point. Broadband isn't about sending the latest retarded sitcom to me over my modem! Don't we have that already, and it's called cable TV? Amazing that people who consider themselves technologically enlightened might say such things.
...AAlib, perhaps? :-)
-Karl
My first guess it that these aussies have impressed clueless execs with ordinary tech.
My second guess is that maybe someone finally got around to applying foveation in a way that works really well.
Perhaps these aussies are hooking up test audiences to eye-tracking devices, and recording their average gaze during a film so that they can get even higher compression by throwing out what's outside most peoples field of view?
*shrug*
Power to the Peaceful
Did the auditors get to pick a movie of their own choice?
Did the auditors supply the test HW, to ensure no tricks could be done?
If their compression is as efficient as they claim, they could patent it and submit it to the MPEG group. If it blows the competing codecs out of the water, they'll make a bundle on licensing. Instead they are staging suspect demo's hoping to lure investors. The same kind of investors who will buy stuff from ads with the "seen on TV" logo.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
Parts of my brain are slugging it out over this one. Part 1: says "Bullshit" Part 2: Is wild eyed and staring at the wall saying "18 full length movies on a CD" over and over again...
Business is Business and Business must grow, Regardless of crummies in tummies you know... -Onceler
The didnt say what they were watching. Some video coding schemes only have to transmit what has changed ala realplayer.
So if they were watching a Clutch Cargo cartoon. I am sure that u could see full screen video at 28.8K
(Clutch Cargo was a 60's cartoon where only the lips moved) for the youngins here
* Carthago Delenda Est *
we had the same thing here, in France.
anybody who claim they can stream hq video over
28.8 is a damn liar seeking a sheep to shave.
Yeah, but which is more bandwidth efficient and more cost effective:
1. One server sending out 8 multicast channels of a 1 GB file via multicast to 10,000 people
2. One server sending out a 1 GB file through 10,000 unicast channels to 10,000 people
There's also something called skyscraper broadcasting which uses multiple channels, although it's a little different than what you envision. Basically one file gets divided up into multiple pieces, with each piece getting it's own channel. The first piece of the file is the smallest, and each subsequent piece increases in size. Each user listens to and buffers two channels. Once the first two channels are buffered, the movie starts to play. Meanwhile, the user is constantly buffering the rest of the movie. If the link is perfect (granted, it usually isn't on the Internet) then any user will be able to watch the whole movie with a minimum of startup buffering time.
i see the obvious flaw here, in a number that great there would be zillions of numbers that satisfy the checksum. So the actual "test" data would have to be some subset of the film that cannot be satisfied by *ANYTHING* except that exact stream of bits. Which means that you'd still need the minimum number of bits that would specify that number, which is the greatest degree of non-lossy compression. Thermodynamics wins again.
we had the same thing here, in France.
anybody who claim they can stream hq video over
28.8 is a damn liar seeking a sheep to shave.
They made a similar claim -- they had a new video compression technology that was going to change the world. After they blew $20 million from investors it was discovered that this new technology didn't exist and the demo they had been shown was nothing more than a hacked copy of Windows Media Player.
Oh yeah, and the CEO was a actually felon on the lam from the Feds.
This is just another Internet Scam®
In this article, "broadband" seems to be used to mean "big fat pipe."
Maybe I'm being a nitpick?
Maybe not: I found a definition of broadband that jives with my own definition.
P.S. the formula is top secret.
----------------
Overheard: "Aww, why'd you go and install Windows on a perfectly good machine?"
This is precisely the reason why the Japanese will become the market leaders in online telecommunications by 2005.
I want to move to Akibura today! Even Neal Stephenson likes it there, and everyone knows he's a nonce!
I've looked at the articles - and while it seems to be likely a scam (such as a 5GB player application), one possibility does not seem to have occured to any of the other posters.
Just because he's using a modem doesn't mean that he's actually transmitting digital data over the phone line. What sort of video compression can be achieved when you don't need (or get) bit-perfect transmission, but rather encode video properties directly in the analog signal? Errors then show up as slight inconsistencies from the original color or position - but on motion video, this would be irrelevant.
The compression would still need the common video codec functionallity to remove redundancy, and send the changed areas more frequently than static images, but if the modem link mapped QAM data directly to position and color signals, it might just be possible to paint a fairly high quality picture.
For that matter, some fractal compression techniques are quite tolerant of minor errors in their probability and/or mapping factors - combine this with sending color information as analog data, and now you might be able to have a link that is unidirectional (the whole audio bandwidth can be dedicated to the video stream without need for a reverse channel) and error tolerant (no re-transmit on error or dropouts due to transient line noise).
Maybe it isn't a scam.
Liquor
Sanity is a highly overrated commodity.
> I feel sorry for John Tatoulis, he's been duped
> into being the front man on a $25m scam, he's
> probably "not very technical"
And if it's true, well, Australia has some pretty strict liability laws...
j/k, of course. They're all sacks of shit.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Well that's what the Age article says :)
:)?
Anyway, it's impossible to fit "full 768 x 576 video and 44.1Khz stereo audio" down a 64k line, let alone a 28.8. What's the bet the only data transmitted over that 28.8k connection was "...and now play C:\WINDOW\TEMP\__INST.053\MATRIX.IVA" (followed by a lot of random data
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
This is all from memory from many years ago, and another lifetime....
Back in the good ole C64/apple days we wanted to stream gfx over a modem. With ASCII and reprogramming the characters into 8x8x2 bitmaps. Using characters mappings you could make little guys run, little cars drive, etc.
Then someone came up with Megabignum (no joke), used A-Z,a-z,0-9,!@#.,etc to have a large set of characters for use.
Then there was RLE type gfx which was black and white bitmaps. (I think 4 bits actually).
You map a 320x200 RLE into 40x25 ASCII type characters. So 1000 characters per frame or lets round up to 1K per frame. I don't think anyone did anything this big, maybe on some demos.
Using this character set mapping conversion was a simple trick, but it worked.
I don't see why you couldn't take this character set idea and expand it with compression and do larger 640x480 b/w 30fps images over a 56K modem.
Maybe someone smart could come up with a way to add color.
The 28.8 modem is just to connect to the server and send control information. They have cards in the computers then that can beam the uncompressed video from one machine to the other.
>The last guy I heard demoing it ended up being on a wanted list for fraud.
That was the first thing I thought of. I saw a news report on that guy. He would always make the claims and get the funding, but he was really ripping everyone off.
If I recall correctly, the guy did it more than once. I wonder what is name was . . .
Even easier, go through the trouble of setting up a 28.8k PPP link to a computer across the room that is hosting the file. Verify that it is the only internet connection that the client machine has. Load up a web page on the server which just references a file: URL that points to a file that is already on the client machine. Click on it, and the video loads up from local disk. All the non-technical business muckity-mucks in the room wouldn't have a clue what a file: URL is and they would be picking their jaws up off the ground.
You could even use some simple javascript to obsure the file: part of the url and make it look like you were hitting an HTTP: URL.
Too many easy ways to fake it.
Hacker1: Wow, what kind of modem is that?
:-)
(cool graphics coming from another machine over modem are on the screen, yes, this modem is definately broadband, otherwise it would be impossible to show such neat graphics)
Hacker2: It's an 28k8 !!!
Hacker1: Amazing, marvellous, etc. etc.
(forgive me for not remembering the names, the wasn't that good
--
If code was hard to write, it should be hard to read
New Zealand and Australia both have unmetered local calls, even the outback has unmetered local calls.
I'm getting cable next week to get around the dual processor dial up error on OS X though.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
For a better example, let's consider several objects moving on different vectors through the frame. Very little difference from a wavelet viewpoint, much more difference to a delta-frame Sum of Absolute Differences pre-processor.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Persistence of vision becomes really flakey at under 25 frames per second. With the overhead of stop bits, start bits, PPP protocol etc 28.8Kbits/sec is actually more like 22,000 bits/sec. That means that there are less than 900 bits to encode the delta between one frame and the next.
There might be something to be had out of using second order derivatives, a delta encoding of the delta encodings. There might be something to be had out of more powerfull delta encoding techniques, more complex transformations from one piece of screen to the next.
However the law of diminishing returns applies here and however good the delta encoding is, there is still the need to send key frames from time to time. At the very minimum once per scene change. In practice very much more often. It is quite likely that a scheme substantially better than MPEG is possible, but the scheme claimed is just too close to the fundamental limits.
There are two ways to cook a compression demo. The first is to pre-load the cached data, the second is to chose the content to be compressed very carefully. For example Larry King Live compresses quite well because the video shows only two talking heads from fixed camera angles. Star Trek TNG would be much harder because the camera is often moving.
Einstein reported that he was often acosted by people who would say something like 'how do we get to the next solar system if we can't go faster than the speed of light?', to which he would reply 'I don't set the laws of physics, I am just telling you what they are'.
Seems to me that the reason that so many people invested so much in Pixelon was that they believed that because they needed the solution so baddly, it had to exist, even if Shanon's law dictated otherwise.
Similar thinking runs rampant in the GOP mania for ABM technology. There has not been a single successful test that has not been cooked, in their last test the target had a radio beacon sending out its GPS measured position to the interceptor. But because they want to believe in the technology they will believe their own cooked figures and threaten MIT Professors that try to tell them they are being had with jail.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Do Psuedo video on demand then.
/sec bandwidth no matter how many people are viewing - even 100,000 viewers! That is MUCH cheaper than serving up video on demand to even only 100 viewers!
Your show is 1 hour long. Have 12 multi-cast streams of the same show, each offset by 5 minutes. If each video stream is 256 Kbps, then you need 3 megabits
Of course, the trade off is that a viewer might have to wait 5 minutes to watch the beginning of the show.
Unfortunately, we can't even do this scheme yet anyways since there is no 'Standard' router protocol for efficient multicasting... Or is there one that doesn't require tunnels everywhere?
This is why caching proxies need to become more widely used.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
That's right, I said it. I work for a rather large VOD developer, and we're having difficulty creating tens of thousands of 300kbps video over fiber in-band broadcasting and broadband out-of-band.
What I find impossible is that based on even the most high quality QAMs, DVB boards, and network capabilities, this doesn't even seem plausible for any more than maybe 1 stream total and even that's a strech.
I saw something similar about this on tv (one of them serious programs that follow the news and go in depth). It was about a Dutch man who invented a way to compress video by finding repeating patterns. His technology converted movies to long numbers , allowing him to store a movie on a creditcard memory chip. He was so paranoid about his technology and only showed a sample to a few companies, who claimed the market would be worth 200 billion guilders in 4 years. (80 billion dollars?). He died of a heart attack. The problem was that he stored all the specs and samples in a safe and he told nobody where the safe resides.
It may sound like April Fools, but it was broadcasted around January.
You can operate a video server for thousands of customers over a single SDSL line using Swarmcast.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Caching proxies only ameliorate the problem slightly, and aren't effective for true Video-on-Demand. There are a lot of things you can do for scheduled, live events, but for watching (say) a movie when I want to, multicasting, caching proxies, and even really tiny 28.8kbps video streams don't solve the problem of video-on-demand for millions of users.
The only way to do it is to build a system that's distributed, just like the internet is, such as Gnutella or Napster, where each person who downloads a movie then becomes a distributor for the movie.
A great advantage for a napster-like system aside from the distributed bandwidth is for the people like us who actually watch the movies: Once we get a movie, we own it. We don't have to download it a second time. We can watch it as many times as we want, bandwidth-free.
....I have come up with a wonderful proof of this concept, unfortunately it is blocked by the lameness filter...
I can get 10:1 with images trivially (less than 50 lines of code)
But how about without the Java JPEG library?
I think they have been using a special "Delta-Frame" algorithym for shrinking their file sizes.
Unfortunately, their claims of Full television quality video over
28.8 lines were aparently made by streaming old episodes of "Southpark"
Win Karma - Lose Karma
I SAID NO FUCKING TEXT
"Post Comment"
"Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!"
http://www.sourceforge.net/tracker/download.php?gr oup_id=4421&atid=104421&file_id=9967&aid=455205.
Collecting data is only the first step toward wisdom. But sharing data is the first step toward community
I experimented with this last year. I was trying to prototype a client-server system on which graphics were rendered on a central server then compressed and piped to clients.
:) I wrote a software wavelet codec which I then tried to integrate with MPEG2 interframe compression. This turned out to be very tricky because a lot of the interframe motion vector compression relies on the DCT blocks from the JPEG-style intraframe stage (you've probably seen the obvious 'boxes' of pixels when viewing a very highly compressed JPEG image).
I played with some wavelet video compression/decompression cards based on the analog devices ADV601 chip (you can google it). It can achieve high compression ratios on grayscale images working on a frame by frame basis (kinda like MJPEG but with wavelets).
After playing with the server a bit (it was a Beowulf cluster
Anyway, the results I was getting (for grayscale) *sound* impressive. 200:1 was possible for most images but only pictures with smooth contrast changes looked any good after decompression. Any sharp edges (e.g. graphical overlays) were completely destroyed at any compression rate over 10:1. Throwing the MPEG interframe stuff into the mix didn't really help much (partly due to the problem outlined above), although I can't say I explored all the possibilities along this route.
After becoming more interested in coding proper parallel apps for Beowulves rather than hacking the MPEG's source I let the project drop. Code available if you'd like a look.
My personal opinion on this fullscreen video with CD-quality sound over 28.8 is that it's complete tosh. It's absolutely impossible to compress that much information into such a small pipe. Unless this guy has discovered something that makes an awful lot of our current mathematical thinking invalid then this claim is nonsense.
Resident Evil 2 on the Nintendo 64 has 15 minutes of 30fps full screen video compressed at a ratio of 165:1... And the algorithm doesn't even sound that sophisticated. This is according to an article in the september 2000 issue of game devleoper magazine.
If you can achieve this kind of compression with a unsophisticated algorithmcreated by some average joe programmer making Nintendo games for a living, shouldn't some hardcore mathematicians be able to come up with something even better?
At 165:1, you'd only have to make your compression algorithm about 6x more effiecient to get up to the 1000:1 claim. Now I have no idea how you could do that, but it seems like it might be an achieveable goal.
Also, at this 165:1 ratio, you could transfer video at approximately 6-7 frames per second over a 56K modem. So if you just make it just 4x more efficient you're golden. Who has a 28.8 modem anyhow?
He didn't say download, he said buffering!
There is one way of doing this (with reasonable quality): have an enormous dictionary. Most compression schemes have a relatively small dictionary, because the larger the dictionary becomes, the more difficult it is to compress.
:-)
Consider: there are less than 4 billion films, so a film can clearly be compressed to less than 32 bits. This is an extreme example of a large dictionary. Sounds daft? what do you think a TiVo is?
Ok, so you might want a more general compression scheme. How about this: There are clearly less than 4 billion actors in the universe. Get all-round shots of a large number of actors and use some kind of morphing technology to make them move. But the encoder as you see mecomes more and more complex, slow and domain specific: for a given film, it would have to build a model of each actor, then detect their movements, and that's not even starting on trees, cars etc.
Maybe it identifies the class of background and maps it to one of five: city, space, jungle, beach, or arctic
So the method must be more general somehow
but if it isn't some kind of cheat I bet it uses a huge dictionary.
I'm not sure it would be a good thing though even if it does work. After all, I don't want broadband for films, but I'm counting on all these investors thinking films=$$$$ so that they will build the infrastructure.
Hell, I once designed a custom lossless scheme for handling certain classes of bitmaps that beat lzw by a factor 5:1
It's easy to beat LZW on certain classes of bitmaps. For instance, LZW has a hard time with smooth gradations, whereas a lossless method with a good 2D predictor (like PNG's Paeth predictor plus zlib compression) will compress the image tighter because you get a lot of -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, and 3 in a roughly Laplacian (a*exp(-abs(b*x))) distribution. With the (lossless) compression settings cranked up to max (no gamma, no layer offset, no physical size, no comments, zlib level 9), an indexed PNG or MNG image beats the equivalent GIF on everything but really tiny images such as bullets and web bugs.
In fact, it's really easy to beat LZW on any image, even a 1x1 transparent GIF, as you could put much of the money you put toward royalties for U.S. Patent 4,558,302 and foreign counterparts toward converting your images to PNG and buying more storage and bandwidth.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Let's Get Skase, the film he produced based on...
So they want me to believe that a film producer in a small town woke up one day and developed video over 28.8k when nobody else in the world could do it?
That's OK, I'm in Croatia :-)
Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
Of course, it is impossible to judge the veracity of this Australian company's claims without further technical details. One's initial reaction is to dismiss it as untrue (or very partially true) because it is so far beyond the envelope of what is widely known to be possible. But it's important not to be completely dismissive.
While modern compression schemes are quite advanced most only seek to remove a small number of redundancies in an image. Typically they coarsen the color space greatly, the luminesence a little and subsequently seek to look for areas in the frame sequence which can be recognised as a transformation of areas in neighbouring frames.
This has proved very successful but it is certainly not the only technique one might attempt. A long while ago (several years) I turned my attention to the problem of compressing video data and considered the following approach of taking video data and deducing the geometry and surface colour of the physical entities which were filmed. This occurred to me as I result of thinking how easily I as a human can remember certain scenes by knowing the objects involved and their positions rather than remembering the scene in it's entirety.
So imagine an algorithm which when applied to video footage attempts to deduce the geometry of scene elements, and their textures and then record how they moved. Playback would involve a basic kind of 3d rendering followed by a correction stage. All sorts of other techiques could be thrown at this scheme including progressive geometric and colour-map refinements, positional interpolation, even kinematics.
I have no expertise in moving image compression and this idea came to me without much effort. A team of computer scientists and mathematicians would surely come up with something better, but with techniques like the one I outlined above I wonder what kind of quality a 28.8 connection could provide.
Programmers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your strings.
Unfortunately, it doesn't matter how well the video compression works. It's the Latency, Stupid, as the article of this link points out that kills the performace of data transfer in modems, making them pretty unreliable for streaming video no matter how large the bandwidth is.
It's a matter of making the number of bits divided by the Federal Express delivery time equal at least 28.8kbps.
There's already a company out there that claims to have found this (or a similar) video compression method (Eye-Gate) They've actually got a product available too. Has anyone heard anything about this? Anybody know if they're for real?
They promoted "Video quality: full-screen 25 fps image without any deterioration visible to the naked eye, with a quality that can be compared to VHS quality with 2 KB/second." Read more
And it turned out to be another scam...
There is also an insightful article from the 7th zone here
If this is really possible, let's see them post a demo! Post a demo codec, and let us see a demo clip.
This big secret demo policy just screams fake.
Life is but a mist upon the horizon.
The technology is around, but not great enough to displace other compressors.
Huge information can be stored in a tiny packet.
if slashdot will publish this, i've got a $500 cookie for them.
Actually, a quantum leap is a single discrete leap, precluding the existence or possibility of a leap of anything smaller. ie an electron does not *exist* between any two neighbouring states. So a quantum leap just implies there are no intervening states (well except maybe a few discrete ones if you are taking a larger leap :)
I've been enjoying full screen video over the Internet for 6 years! I started on a *14.4*! On a 56k modem, I've made well over 30fps with this streaming technology (which on average uses only 2.5-3k/s). Now, sure, Quake 2 and Quake 3 need a little more bandwidth to play bell, but....
The only way this seems logical is by finding a way to describe the wave paterns in the video through a series of complex equations rather than packing pixels. I can't possibly imagine the horse power required to derive these equations. But it's the only way I can think of you could even come close to something like this. I don't think the horse power required to solve the equations and come up with a digital stream on the other end would be very taxing.
;-)
Or maybe he has found a way of taking pie to the extream and just finds where in pie the video stream is and sends the offsets.
Don't forget those CD images to download. Even with DSL, it takes an hour to get one Redhat CD. There's NO WAY am I going to spend days for just one CD image, through a dialup modem.
-Alex
Start with a biiiig one-pixel screen....
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Fullscreen video over a phone line? The concept is tantalizing, but the reality is a pure fantasy. Let me explain:
They claim you can get full screen video at 30 fps over a 28.8 modem
Let's just consider the case of pure video (no audio), at 320x240 (a nicer size than the one they were using)
28800 bps / 30 fps = 960 bits per frame
320x240=76800 pixels per frame
960 / 76800 = 1/80 bits per pixel per frame!
So what does this mean? Well, let's supposed the bits were just being used (in the most compressed sense) to indicate any change at all. Then you're limited to positively identifying one out of every 80 pixels as changing between frames, and that's not considering the information needed to specify which ones!
What I'm saying is that I think that moving video on a full screen contains more information than 28800 bits per second.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
http://www.screendaily.com/cgi/process_template_my sql.pl?template=../html_templates/section.ttml&and _clause=stories.STORY_NUMBER=5733&redirect=../shtm l_files/search_redirect.shtml
Has anybody heard of Rate Distortion Theory? Shannon proved many moons ago that for a given distortion of a signal, there is a minimum rate. And visa versa. If you want a lower data rate, you must put up with more distortion. He also showed how this lower rate can be calculated, without having to have an algorithm to generate it. Of course the interesting thing is what you define distortion as. General definition: The difference between the decompressed signal and the original signal. This is generally measured as Mean Square Error (MSE). The cleverness behind MP3, DivX and the upcoming Jpeg2000 (although not the only cleverness, each has lots of cleverness in different ways) is that the distortion is localised to frequency bands (spatial or temporal, your pick) to which humans have a low sensitivity. There is also work being done for jpeg2000 on looking at masking signals (ie activity in a certain band will effectively mask distortion in that band) But, none of these are getting below Shannon's lower bound, they're just redistributing the distortion. Anyhoo, this claim of 'full-screen' 'high-quality' (nicely defined terms!) over 28.8 is most likely bollocks if you define full screen and high quality the way anybody with a brain would. Unless those tricky changing laws of physics are changing faster than we thought... -Perc.
DVD video is already compressed. Their "gigabyte" must be of something less compressed than DVD.
However, you're not so far off. To download at 28800 bits per second, they'd have to fit a 2 hour movie into 20 megabytes, whereas it would be 4 GB on DVD. A 2000:1 jump in compression is not something I'll accept casually.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
You got modded up, and I get modded down. Go figure.
Can't get to the original article, but found this.
F XC MEKFZQC.html
http://it.mycareer.com.au/breaking/2001/08/30/F
"Explaining the significance of the breakthrough, John Tatoulis, chief executive officer of Media World Broadcasting, said that the technology allows for the compression of digital video by a ratio of about a million times."
I've got an archived version, as they've pulled it.
Should I post it?
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
American pints are smaller than english pints, and their gallons and barrels are different sizes depending on what is being measured (i.e. wheat versus oil versus beer).
Before metric, the french had yet another system, which lead to the false assertion that Napolean was short - he was average height for the time, but french feet were different from english/us feet so when it was written down, people thought he was short. Doh!
write it 100 times
As said in some other posts, some startup tried to do the same : i2bp. VHS quality with sound in 2 kilobytes/s. This article gives a partial view on this.
Here is a short summary :
- Someone hire two or three students and ask them to work on this project (none of them are specialist of video compression). They are presented as "experts".
- He then announces that they have found some revolutionary compression format based first on MPEG-2, then on MPEG-4 and then on some fractal technology. This technology allow DVD quality on 2 KBytes/s then only VHS quality.
- He gives demo on a closed network to some journalist, without any mean to control. A public demo in flash is given on the site. Well, if we can call this a demo.
- He postpones the realease of the commercial product for some obscure patents (patents are pending on some countries, patents need to be updated, etc)
- He says that the developpers are somewhere in France with their bodyguard. Additionnaly, there is some story with the Mossad.
- He cancels a demo since many people think that their algorithm is inexistant. He says that this technology will be sold hundreds billion of dollars and say that Microsoft is interested.
- He talks about a player in Java which is only 50 bytes long. Yes. But, it could be optimized.
Finally, we have never heared of this startup since some months.All,
For anyone who doubts the claims of the post, take a look at the procuct demonstration on
http://www.forbidden.co.uk/
There you will find 372x280 @ 25 frames per second over a 56K modem....
Not exactly the best looking video you have ever seen but it works. It works!
I first saw the technology on their website in early 2000. I'm surprised it never made it to slashdot. Or maybe it did and I missed it?
...they just didnt say how MANY 28.8 modems it was travelling over ;-)
No way dudes and dudettes.
Unless these guys have somewhat miraculously found a way to use the previously unknown quantum fluctuations of electrons in phone lines for data transmission/compression purposes, this is only a software issue - namely video compression.
And what compresses better than Sorenson3, DiVX and 3ivx today? None that I know of.
And none of these will deliver decent-quality FMV on a modem line.
Summa summarum: This "undisclosed tech" is bull crap!
This article provides some more technical details about the claims.
This link have some good info. http://www.hotecho.org/hotecho/archive/se25/mainfe ature/unione.html
First we apply a transformation to the RGB values in order to obtain the Lumiance values.
Next we pass those values through a downsampler ( in this case downsampling is done by left-shifting all the bits of each byte value and dropping the carry bit )
We do this 7 times
Next we pass the values through a resolution downsampler (which outputs 1 pixel for each 2x2 pixel input blocks by averaging the values of the 4 bits).
We do this 8 times.
Last but not least we pass the result through a time downsampler (which produces 1 output frame from 2 input frames by averaging the values of each bit in frame 1 against the corresponding bit in frame 2).
We do this 3 times.
And there we have it - a highly compressed stream running at 36 bps!!!
Sure, some of you might say that a black & white (and only black and white) 3x4 image at 3 frames-per-second doesn't have that much quality, but it think you're just jealous of my revolutionary new technology!!!
As one who makes a living building video compression algorithms, I have a few words,
Say you take a 320x240 video at 10fps and upsample that to full screen using Tree-Based Resolution Synthesis (see the paper by C.B.Atkins, C.A.Bouman, and J.P.Allebach) or edge-directed interpolation. You could claim full screen video. But at a 24000 bit per second connection (about what is practical with a 28.8 modem) video only comes out to 0.03125 bits per pixel average.
So is this possible?
Sure it is, but the catch is that there has to be enough redundant data in the video stream to remove. Simple example, take a video clip where only a small region of the video changes per frame. Simple example, news cast with a fixed camera position and a talking head where the person's lips move and hands stay glued to the table.
Now getting back to what is practical, all video streams have a compressability factor directly related to the amount of entropy in the video. If the video changes a lot, like say a high action sequence where the scene completely changes on average every 2 seconds, this is not going to compress very well no matter what you do with it.
Think about how MPEG-4 gets better compression than MPEG-2. It's the same base of Motion prediction and DCT, just MPEG-4 cuts up the video into things that are not changing and things that are changing (over-simplification). But you give MPEG-4 a sequence of fast action, it still doesn't compress the video much better than MPEG-2.
So Adams cooks up a video compression algorithm designed to do 1000:1 and a demo that takes video clips that have small enough entropy to be compressed that much and sells it to some corporate types who know nothing about science. Money shuffles around. Then someone trys to compress a clip of a college basketball game, and all hell breaks loose when the video either looks like a slide show, or as if it was seen through a stain-glass window.
- Timothy Lottes (Anonymous Coward)
hawk, the rabid Nevadan who wants D.C. out of southern Nevada
I have had dealings with some of the
/proponent - Adam Clark - is a
people promoting this system of "compression"
and don't believe a word of it.
For the past 4 years I have been incredulous with
the amount of press it has been generating.
And many engineers here in Australia are
treating it sceptically but with an open mind.
Considering the technology was "invented" using
a four year old PowerMac with far less processing
power that even today's handhelds, it is
laughable that any publication, let alone
Slashdot would give this nonsense any credence
at all!
The "inventor"
video cameraman; not an engineer, or even
someone who can write code.
He claims the compression method is "so simple"
that we've all missed it.
In my humble opionion, the only thing simple
here is the brains of the investor willing to believe in this rubbish.
AP
Melbourne, Australia
-please bare with me, my english insn't perfect.
there are a few well thought out posts here. the guy with the idea about analogue not digital may have something.
think about the way you would store a value such as FF(hex). in binary its 1111 1111. thats 8 bits to store 2 simple characters which are the same. now think about ASCII where 8 bits only represent one character. highly accurate but also highly inneficient.
what if it were all analogoe? think about how you harddrive would store one sing bit. i'm guessing with a little magnetic dust for 1 bit. it would be horizontal for off and vertical for on. or "-" and "|". highly accurate but also highly inneficient. what if that piece of magnetic "dust" could be turned in any angle from 0 to 360? let's make it easier, let's make it 0-255. if a harddrive could store a value from 1 to 256 in a single bit, we could have and uncompressed bitmap immage (640x480x256) that only requires 37.5kb instead of the 300kb that it normally takes. that sounds promising but is far from what this adams guy is proposing. make that a bit more advanced. give a piece of dust 4.3 billion possitions or what some refer to as 32bpp. make a 2147483648:1 ratio. it would be incredibly difficult to make microsocopic manetic dust move into 4.3b possitions with current hardware. alangue does something very similar to this with your old audio cassets. positions are not defined and it is lossy with infinte possitions. while still using the same 37.6kb you can draw that 640x480x32 image before it's compreessed instead 1.2mb. it's getting a bit closer now but that would still require 1.1mb/sec for 30fps "uncompreessed" video.
sorry if i didn't explain this idea properly. when redifining a bit it's somewhat diffuclt to give a value in bytes!
this could help the compression of an image as far as 1.3gb to 1.4mb. someone pointed out using 3D geometric figures to represent people. there is a 64KB demo on the net using 3D geo to create a 5 minutes video and it has music... in 64kb. i found it quite hard to belive and made sure i was not connected to the net before i ran this demo. playback is great at 1024x768x32x100fps. you can do all the modeling on a good desktop. compress video like this? the problem with this is that you need a huge server cluster running advanced software to look at a picture and create geometric objects with polys and texture from a limited image (1 dvd main frame). possible but out of the question.
the next is the 5GB playing software. that is the simplest and (according to Okhams Razor) the most likely. store most of the frames in the player's software. just download info on which frame is to be played. this wouldn't be a codec theory coz it'd mean that it is a hoax.
there you have it. two theories. they seem simple enough but we are very far from either o them. i will not dispel this though. i don't think that any of us should. just becuase you can't figure it out doesn't mean that no one can. i still remember having one 3 minute ~100mb song on my harddrive. now i can fit 30 songs into 100mb. viewing a video on 28.8 is possible.