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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.
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
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.