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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 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
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.
Video already compresses surprisingly better than any audio format I know of.
For example, take a 10 second clip of 640x480 24-bit, RGB, 29.97 fps video (no audio). The math sez its:
640 x 480 x 3 x 29.97 x 10 = 263.41 MB (approx).
Yet 10 seconds of 10 Mbits MPEG-2 video (very high quality) takes up just 10 Megabytes of space. That's a compression ratio of over 26:1!
Over a 28.8kbps modem over the internet we are looking at about 2.6kbps of data (headers and other overhead removed). This means the above 263 MB video is supposed to compress down to less than (don't forget about the sound!) 26 k. That's a compression ratio of 10374:1!
I can believe a leap of 10x, *maybe* 50x. But a leap of 400x is just something I have to try on my own terms before I believe it.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC