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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.
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.
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{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
People shouldn't have been that impressed with MP3. The concept of lossy compression algorithms was already in common use, in the form of JPEG compression of image data. (Now, I recall how impressed we were with JPEG back in the GIF days...) Getting 10:1 compression was pretty much the expected result of applying the same principles to audio data.
Today, we would be just as skeptical of a new audio algorithm advertising 50:1 compression over MP3 -- which is effectively what these people are asking us to believe, since their ratios are versus existing compression schemes, not raw data.
80% (factor of five) compression is unreasonably
inefficient. Even without frame-to-frame similarities, wavelet image compression schemes can achieve 50x compression with no visible degradation (I know, I did experiments last year as part of a spacecraft proposal effort). That's a factor of 10 from your figures -- 1.9 seconds per frame. Using the similarities between frames, it's not unreasonable to think that another factor-of-10 applies (MPEG achieves factor-of-100
compression where JPEG only gets factor-of-10), bringing the frame count up to 10/second.