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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.
Yes, and I am able to compress all of Slashdot down to 10 bytes.
Bush's education improvements were
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!
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.
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?
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.
As long as i can put The Matrix at dvd quality on a floppy disk.
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...
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.
For anyone who's ever heard of Pixelon, we'll believe it when we can test it ourselves.
Actually, isn't 64Kbs the default for Media Player when you're recording? I left it on there one time, my brothers recorded a few CD's, and it sounded surprisingly good.
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
Yes but the article is extremely short on technical data.
What is this FULL-SCREEN video ?? 320x200 ? 640x480 ? true NTSC @ 29.97 FPS ? DVD resolution ? HDTV ?
Or is it 1/4 tv resolution zoomed to fit the screen ? with 1/2 the fps ?
Maybe all they did was improove the zoom, iterpolation and anti-aliasing algorithms in the player. So they send a crappy video and it ends up looking ok.
Anyway its all hot air until we get some technical data.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
I can get 30 fps video no problem on my megabit DSL...
'course, I'm using a proprietary transmission protocol...
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
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
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
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.
...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.
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)
Yeah - but it's not full-screen.
- passion
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?!
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.
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.
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!}
Much like this one ...
http://lzip.sourceforge.net/
:-)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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!"
...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.
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.
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.
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
Maybe _your_ eyes are 10-12fps
Actually, our eyes don't have a fixed fps as so many of you nerdlings tend to think. There IS a limit to how rapid changes we are able to see, but they are very dependent on brightness. We have problems seeing dark changes that happen in tenths of a second, but noone will miss a bright flash even if it lasts 200ths of a second.
In normal lighting, 10-12fps is not even in the
same ballpark as our vision. 75 fps is more like it.
A witty
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/
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.
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 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.
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?
I pay about $7 for my broadband connections.
I have 2 x 100Mbit FullDuplex switched Ethernet to my appartment (currently only using one).
The Area of (about) 100 connected users is connected through a Gigabit connection to our local ISP that has ha (today) 96Mbit connection to the internet, 155Mbit connection to the Swedish University Network and 100-1000Mbit connections to the other networks in our Town.
Fot, Fotare, Fotast...
Actually latency does throttle bandwidth in modems and the effect can reduce throughput by several kbits/sec. There is an interaction between the various layers of the protocol stack.
The most extreeme example of this effect is the Mobitex network used by RIM and PalmVI devices. Although the claimed bandwidth is 9.5Kb/sec the actual is no more than 50 bits/sec because there is a long delay between sending one packet and getting the ack that allows you to send the next.
TCP/IP over PPP is nowhere near as bad as Mobitex but there is a significant effect.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
The technology is around, but not great enough to displace other compressors.
Damn right we will..
I'm already leaning towards banning it because it enables faster dissemination of copyright materials. We may have missed the chance to outlaw the internet as a whole, but we will definately get each and every individual new peice as it comes up.
Do you people not understand that we own you.
All your ass are belong to us.
Sen. Hon. Richard K R Alston
Australian Federal Minister for Communications, Information Technology
Start with a biiiig one-pixel screen....
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
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
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
What came out was a really fuzzy image, shifted to the left, and with entirely wonky colors. But what amazes me is that the objects in the picture are distinguishable at all.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
wanna bet?
try punching this AppleScript into a Mac sometime...
tell application "QuickTime Player"l d1/bbc_world1.mov"
activate
stop every movie
close every movie
getURL "http://www.apple.com/quicktime/favorites/bbc_wor
present movie 1 scale screen
end tell
watch the BBC fullscreen...
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
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!!!
hawk, the rabid Nevadan who wants D.C. out of southern Nevada