Slashdot Mirror
Nancy Goes Head-to-Head With MPEG-4
Justin Rossi writes: "EE Times has an article about Nancy, 'the lightest video codec' which is taking Asia by storm and finally bringing streaming Video to handheld devices. What I wonder is how it shall fare against MPEG-4, Ogg Tarkin, and MC-10."
For years now, the common American penis bird has been a staple of every American's daily diet. Whether it be penis bird sandwiches, fried penis bird, or perhaps penis bird under glass (for the rich), we all have penis bird at least once a day. Many Americans have no clue how the penis bird became so important in the pyramid of a balanced diet, so in this article I will attempt to explain its history and why it is so useful.
In the early 1870s, Francis Zefran became the first penis bird breeder in North America. He started his famous Penis Bird Ranch in Canton, OH. At the time, not much was known of the penis bird's nutritional value, but the Penis Bird Ranch changed all of that. Not only did Francis Zefran raise penis birds to sell their colorful plumes (a VERY lucrative business), he also set up the world's first research lab dedicated solely to the study of the penis bird.
The lab found many interesting things. First, it was discovered that the penis bird was actually semi-sentient. Second, the scientists found that the meat of the penis bird was high in protein, vitamin A, vitamin B, and calcium, while low in fat, cholestorol, and sodium. Never before had such a nutritious meal been had without supplement or fortification. The scientists of the lab recommended immediately that the penis bird become a part of every American's daily diet.
When the news of the penis bird's usefulness reached president Rutherford B. Hayes, he was absolutely ecstatic. You see, President Hayes owed a number of favors to Francis Zefran because as I said earlier, the penis bird plume trade was an extremely lucrative business and Mr. Zefran was important in getting RBH elected through a number of monetary gifts. President Hayes immediately asked Congress to pass what we all know today as the Hayes/Zefran Penis Bird Consumption Act.
The act did a number of things to make the penis bird a daily meal, most important of which was the requirement that for every four people in a household, one penis bird must consumed every day. Another thing the act did was create an artificial monopoly for Francis Zefran's Penis Bird Industries. The act stated that the only supplier of penis bird meat in the US would be PBI. As one would imagine, this quickly made Francis Zefran into the richest man in the world. He was soon a multi-billionaire (quadrillionaire with today's inflation). Never before had a single man seen such wealth.
Many challenges were made to the Hayes/Zefran Penis Bird Consumption Act, and several even made it the Supreme Court. It was argued that the act was unconstitutional and went against liberty itself, but once the detractors tasted delicious penis bird meat for the first time, they immediately dropped their cases and followed the law to the letter. We all know today that penis bird is the most delicious meat man has ever known, but at that time, the only meats people ate were pork and beef.
In the early 1970s, though, challenges to the act began again. Many argued that the monopoly given to Penis Bird Industries by the act was in all ways unamerican. The Supreme Court finally agreed, and in 1974, Section II of the act was struck down. This in effect opened the market to competition for all.
Today, Penis Bird Industries is almost no more. Today we have the market leader Penis Bird Meat International facing against Penissoft, a recent startup. Where will the future lead the penis bird market? Only time will tell us, but one thing is certain: penis birds are here to stay!
< )
( \
X
8====D
-klerck
.. headache for the massive groups of people who encode DiVX movies anyway?
;)
If streaming media became a reality on handheld devices, all of these movies would have to be re-encoded and released for such mediums.
At least the file sizes would be smaller
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story..."
(look in my history for earlier news reports)
04 December 2001 : Taliban in Kandahar Remain Unaffected by US Bombing
ISLAMABAD (Islam News): The Governor of Kandahar, Mulla Muhammad Hasan Rahmani said Monday that despite heavy American bombing on Kandahar, the Taliban forces remain ready to fight. He further said that Mulla Muhammad Umar was safe and that the Taliban are defending Kandahar under his command and directions. He added that only Afghan civilians are being killed by the bombardment. "Nevertheless, we are ever-determined and our morale is high like before."
Mujahid Kills Three Northern Alliance Soldiers in Kabul
KABUL (Islam News): An Arab Mujaahid who was carrying explosives on his body detonated himself when attacked by Northern Alliance troops. Instead of surrendering himself, he preferred to go to Paradise, while sending the Alliance troops to the Hell-fire (we ask Allah that it is so).
Brothels and Vulgar Cinemas Re-Open in Kabul and Herat
KABUL, HERAT (Islam News): After the departure of the Taliban from Kabul and Herat, the vulgarity is rapidly increasing in these areas. Saunas and swimming pools which the Taliban closed for women have already been re- opened by the Northern Alliance. Furthermore, prostitutes have re-started their activites outside these swimming pools and saunas. Is this the type of 'modern' Islam that many anti-Taliban hypocrites amongst the Muslims have been calling for?
Anti-Taliban Pushtun Convoy Destroyed
KANDAHAR: During American bombardment of Kandahar Province, troops led by anti-Taliban Pushtun, Gul Agha, attempted an advance from Takhta Pul towards Kandahar Airport. They were ambushed by units of the Taliban. Three of their vehicles were destroyed, three of them were killed and dozens were injured. This was the first attempted advance on Kandahar Airport and it was rendered futile by the Taliban. It should be made clear that there have been many news reports concerning offensives on Kandahar for quite a few days. However, all of these reports have been baseless; the aforementioned attack was the first attempted advance of the enemy on Kandahar Airport.
Martyrdom Operation Kills Five Americans in Kandahar Province
QUETTA (Baluchistan Times): Mullah Ameenullah, the Taliban official for border affairs, reported that five American Special Forces troops were killed and 20 were injured Monday in a martyrdom operation near the small Kandahar Airport, 20km from Kandahar city. In the ensuing firefight, eight of the Taliban were martyred, may Allah accept them.
FBI Opens Immigration Controls at Karachi Airport, Pakistan
KARACHI (Daily Jang): The Pakistani newspaper, Daily Jang, reported over the weekend that the Pakistan Government, in line with its betrayal of Islam and the Muslims, has allowed the FBI to open immigration controls at Karachi International Airport. Their job is to scan the passports and details of every traveller leaving Pakistan and check them through American intelligence computers in case any traveller is wanted by America for 'Islamic activism'. Further posts are planned in international airports in Lahore, Islamabad and Peshawar. This dispels the rumours that the Pakistan Government was pursuing a double policy of cooperation with the United States.
www.qoqaz.net
If the video codec really is all it's cracked up to be, then it looks like WE HAEV A WINNAR. I doubt that MPEG-4 can hold up for very long against something which achieves similar results in a tiny fraction of the memory and CPU power without serious push from a monopoly or oligopoly.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Do you want Nancy's video in Nancy, or Ogg Nancy?
I just can say: cool a new codec, which will perhaps allow me to watch some extra pr0n on this slow computer....but then I'm running Linux and this thing is proprietary, so implementation probability is about 10%. However the chinese got their hands in it, so not all is lost.
"Nancy"? Was it named after some coders girlfriend or something?
:P
From a CPU (and therefore an electrical) standpoint the algorithm is better because it uses much simpler mathematics. But I wonder what the video quality would look like. Is it comparable to Mpeg4 based codecs like DivX? This is great for handheld devices, but I doubt it'll make much of a dent on the desktop unless the image quality is a lot better. We already have way more CPU power then we know what to do with
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The benefit of this codec is it's ease of computation, not necessarily it's image quality/bandwidth ratio.
:( It could be a cool way to put videos on my iPaq (Mpeg is still a little choppy)
Anyway, since it's so quick to encode (you can do it real-time on a 50mips machine... so cell phone, pda, whatever) You'll probably be able to convert the files as fast as you can copy them to the device, or if you want to stream the videos to a cell phone you can have your computer decode them and then reencode them for broadcast.
Unfortunately this thing seems to be a lot more tied up legaly then MPEG
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Two formats I can't play in my favorite player (which happens to be just the mediaplayer, but it's the same thing if you are using other players). Will this be the same thing all over again? I don't mind new formats, especially if they are good, but if I can't watch them where I want to, who cares? If the big companies has to buy licenses to get them in their devices, and then force all publishers to use their special software... you know the drill.
I don't care if the software is closed source as long as protocols, codecs, formats, etc are open so anyone can implement and use them.
I think Nancy is well-suited for devices that don't try to be video devices - like cell phones and PDAs.
In the relative scheme of things, non-video devices have low-resolution, low quality displays. And obviously the manufacturers of these devices are unwilling to spend significant CPU or board real estate for video purposes.
Devices that need to deliver high-quality video won't bother with Nancy - as anything that isn't a cell phone will have the power and capability to use a quality codec.
Nancy is just a stop-gap solution for delivering very low quality video to underpowered devices. As soon as the video demands increase, or as soon as the power of these devices rise, Nancy will be obsolete.
...video conferencing on the desktop, which has been available for years. Why does anyone think that they will want it in their cell phone?
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
Melanie Haber vs. Cinepak!
Audrey Farber vs. MPEG2!
Suzan Underhill vs. Sorenson!
and tonights prize fight...
Betty-Jo Bialowski vs. DiVX!
If [...] then it looks like WE HAVE A WINNAR
Bla.
Has anybody actually seen it and compared it to existing solutions?
Until then, both the article and the company's website are a little too light on details for me.
------------------
You may like my a cappella music
If software fails because of the given name, there's no hope for humanity.
The owls are not what they seem
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when recently IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dead
I would how americans feel about the government mandating interoperable cell phone systems (eg. gsm in europe). Its interesting that these countries like China and Korea are going to get working 3G systems up and running years ahead of the USA, in part because the government steps in and regulates standards. Of course USA cell phones have standards, each carrier has their own :)
As soon as the video demands increase, or as soon as the power of these devices rise, Nancy will be obsolete.
That's true. But isn't that what happens with all technology?
You can't blame 8086 because was powerless compared to a Cray.
Each device has his marked and Nancy/Cell phones can get one. People is going to use cell phones video conference and then, not now, is going to need improved displays and high-quality video.
Nancy is not just a stop-gap solution, Nancy is a good solution to cell phone video if is as good as Koichi Kato said.
-= If you fight Dragons long enough, you will become a Dragon =-
Sharp was one of the early adopters of MPEG-4, introducing an MPEG-4 video recorder and a Zaurus with an MPEG-4 player in December 2000.
Interesting, yes, but used where? The article does not say.
They also talk about "block noise" which you can see in DivX quite readily if you have a large piece of video recorded at too low a bitrate.
It is like watching a movie with a 1/4inch chicken wire overlay.
One of the problems with DivX that I have noticed is that it does not handle low light secenes very well...and it seems there are algorithms that compensate, because now some encoders complain about bright/outdoor scenes "going white"...heh.
oh, and this caught my eye...
The company has demonstrated video transmission to a notebook PC at 512 kbits/second, to a PDA at 256 kbits/s and to a cell phone at 28.8 to 32 kbits/s.
...and to charter pipeline (aka charter "sipping straw") at (drum roll please) a max of 12Kbytes a second... Road kill on the information highway.
People are going to ask which Mpeg4 codec is best, and, well that is an issue we will have to treat "Ginger"ly...hehehee
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
I don't seem to find anywhere how well this "nancy" compares in the compression rate arena. How much does it compress with the same amount of lossiness? This is very important for this, because if yu don't care about the rate I could simply use gzip to compress my movies and have no loss at all.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
I tried posting this earlier but my ISP was having some difficulties with /.
Take a look at this:
Macromedia Flash is a structured vector based web content player. It has the ability to display quite a few 2D alpha rendered polygons from a low bandwidth connection.
Nancy is a codec that takes 1x1 to 32x32 polygon shapes and encodes them into polygon data. To decode this data it just renders the polygons and blends them to create the movie.
So consider this. Wouldn't it be possible to use a Nancy encoder to embed fast 30 fps full-motion color videos into Flash that would still run on Joe Modem's 56k? Most "embedded Flash movies" today are black and white sihlouettes and color ones need connections much higher than 256 kbit/s just to view at a normal rate. This technology would not just only be good for cell phones, PDAs, and other portable devices because the desktop could use this too.
MPEG-4 has also had a huge number of research groups and commercial organisations working together on the standards.
I'm not saying that these features are necessary, but this Nancy shouldn't really be able to kill MPEG-4 off if it only competes on one out of the many aspects of MPEG-4.
Just imagine the possiblities for live phone sex shows. The porn industry will love this. And why have phone sex with your wife with only words? Soon she will be able to strip for you whereever you are in the world.
Competition = Better Codecs.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Debian actually sounds cool. I'd bet anything that if the distro were just called "Deborah" it wouldn't have much marketshare. Names really do affect people. Why do you think no one uses LISP even though it kicks ass?
Actually what I think happened is that the people picked a cool sounding 'foreign' name, like if it had been developed here they might have called it "Ritsko", or "Miho", or "Daikatana", or something, which might sound cool to American ears but retarded to Japanese (at least for a video codec)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
It's a low power (power=not much cpu required) designed for mobile devices.
The codec will run "even if CPU power is not high," said Kato. "A 50-Mips CPU can compress and decompress video at 30 frames per second with QCIF [176 x 144-pixel] resolution [using Nancy].
QCIF is a postage stamp, don't get excited... my freakin webcam can do that type of compression right now, this acheives a smaller size I'm guessing. As far as quality is concerned, I don't think thats the main focus.
Their goal is real-time, and low power cpu, and perhaps low bitrate... not highest quality, lowest overall size (MPEG4/DivX, etc)..
...just imagine youngsters doing prank-calls showing you their arse. (Can't be worse than goat.cx but nevertheless) ;-)
I imagine a bright future
"MPEG-4 uses discrete-cosine-transform and motion-estimation technologies. By contrast, Nancy uses only the four fundamental processes of arithmetic (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division), along with comparison and bit-shift operation. This keeps its operation light"
Yeah, but you can implement DCT/MPEG with only NANDs. That makes DCT even lighter.
-- if there will be no open-source version, it'll be worthless. On the other hand, Zaurus was running Linux, right?
If you want a video-> flash converter, just write one to do that, I don't see why a Nancy encoder would be able output flash. I don't see why you would want to convert a Nancy file to flash anyway, I don't think it works the way you think it does.. it splits up the image into blocks and then encodes the blocks separately (kind of like lots of little JPGs).
And secondly Joe blow already has a bunch of options for viewing 56k video over his 56k modem... ever heard of Realmedia or mpeg4 (windows media?) You could even do a java applet to decode Nancy video in real time (remember, it doesn't take much CPU power to do)
And finally, you seem really confused about flash. It isn't a streaming format at all, flash files ".swf" are downloaded to your computer and then viewed (sometimes in parts, so you get a nice 'loading' screen). It doesn't matter what kind of connection you have, just what kind of CPU you have.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
mobile phone companies are moving towards *more* cpu power in their devices as they try to emulate the capabilities of a pda and deal with rendering of real (normal) internet data (i.e. flash) etc.
/.'ing will do them a world of good :)
The strength of MPEG-4 is in its use of video objects. Using video objects you can send only the changed data for a particular webcast. Take news for example. You could send the background for the news broadcast once, then you would send just the talking head/video portion on the next broadcast. There are a lot of companies that already have the object detection and extraction technology such as http://www.objectvideo.com . Video objects are a powerful way to deliver a video message.
Don't forget rights management, I see no mention of DRM in the Nancy info, this is a BIG deal to the broadcasters. MPEG-4 already has the mechnisms in place for this.
Nancy is not new technology, nor is it unique. There are at least three other companies doing this with better technology (I have seen all of them). One I can tell you about is located at http://www.vimatix.com . Their site is already slow so I am sure a good
I have seen some reasonable demos of the vimatix technology, the stuff on the website is not as sophisticated as the latest technology.
My mom doesn't have video-conferencing and probably neither does yours. That's the problem... I don't need (or really want) to see Joe in Purchasing in order to get my job done, but Sunday mornings it would be nice to see Mom. A nice video phone and we can chat and she can see her grandkids, etc.
-Russ
Me
Nancy won't be "killing" MPEG-4, since the codecs are designed for two different fields. Perhaps some obscure Video Conferencing tool may use Nancy in the future (I guess those are on the border line), but I'd be very surprised if a codec aimed for PDA's gave us the video quality we're used to watching movies with.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
me too made such i video codec.
it runs at 9600 baud and takes a minimum of cpu time so it is well suited for cell phones and small pda`s.
the algorithm to encode a video frame:
b = a
where b is the frame and a is the buffer to be transmitted to the cell phone.
the algorithm to decode the video frame:
a = b
where a is the cell phones frame buffer and b is the buffer where the cell phone received the encoded frame.
with 4 grayscale values and a 64x64 picture it
runs at 1.17187 fps.
great isnt it ?
and dear slashdot editor:
next time when posting such news please remember that most readers are interested in stuff like picture quality, resolution, and comparsions to existing video codecs.
without them, the claims brought up are not standing on any ground or are not worth mentioning.
The machine sounds like a great gadget, but notice all the extras you need to purchase to make it fully functional -- such as the $200 recording card, another digital camera card ($200), video camera software ($40), another flash card to use the gadget as a phone, modem cards, LAN cards, PC link cables, PC link kits...
which sounds a bit much
The device itself goes for about $450 I believe.
By the way, the web site (with an English section) for NOA, the creators of Nancy is here.
I've been waiting for the 1.0 release of Ogg Vorbis for a few years now. Yes, it's a nice CODEC, but the development timeline has been less than ideal for commercial adoption. Ogg Tarkin is still in extremely early development, without even alpha code to show for the effort. While most new audio CODECs have just been proprietary hacks of standard stuff to avoid patent royalties or optimize for streaming, video CODECs are making advances by leaps and bounds. MPEG-4 has the best compression ratio out there, though that may be at the cost of quality. I think that for handhelds and such things, processor requirements may be just as important as compression ratios, and those formats that keep this in mind will flourish.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
I can just see the advertising slogan now:
"I'm a Nancy boy. Wouldn't you like to be a Nancy boy too?"
To the person who said Competition = Better Codecs.
Perhaps. How many of you belligerent, or simply benign Linux users have been to a site which demand you have WIMP, REAL, or QT installed??
Quick... which one of those players are on your platform?! None!!! Yes. You got it right.
How many players would you like? What, you only need one... well in my pedantic rant then the answer is simple: open base level MPEG4! any player picks up any stream.
While I find Sorensen encoded movie trailers rock, and streaming encoded Sorensen from CNN to be better than the WIMP or REAL alternatives in terms of image/audio QOS I don't like the fact that it is a closed system. That one must have QT to read the media.
Not the idea behind the web... and other media should evolve into at least some modicum of openness and universal(ish) access.
Why do you think no one uses LISP even though it kicks ass?
Lots of people use Common Lisp and Scheme.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Perhaps. How many of you belligerent, or simply benign Linux users have been to a site which demand you have WIMP, REAL, or QT installed??
Quick... which one of those players are on your platform?! None!!! Yes. You got it right.
Well, If you can't be bothered to install the Linux version of Realplayer or Mplayer I can't really feel sorry for you. Sorensen is a major sticking point though. The only Linux player is not freeware!
I didn't really understand the rest of your comment unfortunatly. "Open base level MPEG4?" All your base are belong to Sorensen?
I read the internet for the articles.
We already have way more CPU power then we know what to do with :P
;-) would be I/O bound, wouldn't it?
We do? Ever tried WinXP?
Seriously, the amount of "CPU power" we're "given" by companies like AMD and Intel is more an excercise in creating expensive radiators (that appears to be designed to self-destruct in absense of cooling) than any kind of "CPU power".
If we had "way more CPU power then we know what to do with" we wouldn't be struggling to optimize code, would we? Slow software (unless it was I/O bound) wouldn't be a problem, would it? Converting a movie to DivX
- first frame
- left up (pos 0,0) is a 16x32 block, near black (rgb #111111).
- next to it (pos 16,0) a 16x16 block, grayish (rgb #112211)
- below that a block (pos 16,16) with 16x8 green-grayish (rgb #115511)
- below that a block (pos 16,24) with 16x8 block, greenish (rgb #05BB05)
- next frame (Logo background appears in the middle)
- block change in middle (pos. 8,8), size 16x16, black (rgb #000000).
- next frame (Logo starting with bright expanding spot)
- block change in middle (pos. 16,16), size 1x1, white (rgb #ffffff).
- next frame (dito)
- block change in middle (pos. 14,14), size 4x4, white (rgb #ffffff).
...etc...
Something like a poor man's MJPG+MPEG. Maybe, if not using fix colors but linear gradients (4 values total = left-right and up-down) the quality can be a bit better.OTOH this compression is designed for mini-screens with waaaay sub-optimum quality anyway, so blockish compression is not an issue here? A close look at a demo and the algorithms would be interesting, agreed.
From the DVD/Mpeg2 it is a rather dark scene, but on the highest Mpeg4 setting it is dark & "muddy" and gets rather pixellated. I've noticed that while you can't see the "grid", there are still "striations/gradation/banding" (one of those words).
What you're seeing is Mach banding (Java demo; explanation) caused by the interaction between color quantization and the eye's high-pass edge detection filter. It kills the quality of anything played back at 15/16-bit high color. DVDs don't show this because the hardware decoder uses 24-bit or higher color, which eliminates most Mach banding.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Is not something you do in realtime on a 50 MIPS budget at any meaningfull resolution (there arent a lot of modern x86 or Arm platforms with such a pitifull number of MIPS).
It isn't a streaming format at all, flash files ".swf" are downloaded to your computer and then viewed (sometimes in parts, so you get a nice 'loading' screen).
Archon explained this quite well. I'd like to add that many Flash movies you find on memepool (all your base, hatten är din, hyakugojyuuichi, irrational exuberance, etc) preload their images and stream their audio or have slow intros (using little bitmap data) such that 32 kbps (the effective transfer rate of a 56K modem counting line noise and PPP and TCP overhead) can cover the first few scenes quite nicely. Look at "Pokerap 2" by Neil Cicierga: It uses a simple spinning AOL CD to cover the loading of the first scene.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Did you even read the header where it mentioned HANDHELDS?
I'll take a karma bath for this, but who cares. I'm so close to the cap now anyway...
Scheme, you'll note does not have such an obnoxious name, I wouldn't be surprised if it's used more then LISP eventually. Why do you think so many collages and universities jumped on the Scheme bandwagon in the early 90s, when LISP was right there?
Because 'Scheme' sounds better then 'LISP'
Its the same principle that's keeping GNU HURD (rhymes with turd!) from ever amounting to anything. If RMS had called it GNU Concura, or GNU KernalCloud or GNU Multitude it would have been a hit. (ok, there's a little sarcasm in there.)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
What kind moderation is that?
Did they miss the whole second paragraph? And I directly replied to the above poster's point!
Normally I don't complain about moderation but...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
...check the claims for MC-10. Is this all it is cracked up to be? If so, it is aMAZing. Are they charging an arm and two legs for it? 14 hours on a single DVD? That's two high quality movies on a CD, right? What's the catch? One thing, with the all of the emerging codec, I am wonder if DVD-R is the way to go...maybe I should put my library on DVD-RAM, DVD-RW, or DVD+RW after all.
14 hours on a single dvd ? Well, I don't think they speak about 14 hours on a DVD-5. More likely they speak about DVD-18. Then each hour of high quality movie takes 1,2 gb. MPEG-4 can reach very high quality at these data rates, too. I think MC-10 is maybe a nice codec, but it is a wonder codec. I think they just want to collect venture capital for now.
Jan
Is there an open-source equivalent? A codec/server solution intended for small screens, low bandwith, and low processing power?
am I missing something? is there a sorenson decoder for Linux? i wouldn't even mind paying for it, if I could find one that works!
Check out my sysadmin blog!
Can I run Intellimirror on my Intellivision?
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
I wrote an MPEG-1 decoder in the early 90's, for Atari computers. In pure 68030, I was reaching about 15 fps on a 68030@16MHz on 160*128 files. On the Atari Falcon (68030@16Mhz + DSP56001@20 or 25MHz, I don't remember), speed was about 25/30 fps. All this using an old an slow idct algorithm. Doing 30fps on QCIF size with a 50 MIPS machine may be clever programming, but it's not a revolution at all... Also, don't forget that MPEG groups are mainly driven by hardware companies, and these groups made some choices in order to achieve easier chipset conception, instead of focusing on the best possible compression: ...
- Hardcoded Huffman tables on MPEG1/2, don't know about MPEG4.
- DCT transform, which was chosen at first on JPEG because IDCT chips were already ready from C-CUBE).
etc
The fact of the matter is that what gets used for warez wins.. MP3 for example was orignally the preserve of 'warez d00dz', as was divx ;)
This article is nothing but marketing from Sharp..
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
Which of Microsoft's products has failed? Why, wouldn't it be the most user friendly interface ever developed?
Given the catchy and informative moniker, "Bob."
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
I think one of the great applications for this would be handheld gaming systems. They already have somewhat lo-resolution, and the GBA's arm based processor is up to the task. Lets hope to see a picture perfect Resident Evil port to the GBA!
13 year old white supremacists are shitty web designers.
"There is no other video codec in a software form that can encode and decode," said Koichi Kato, chief technology officer at Office Noa.
What's the definition of codec again? I forget.
I agree with this. Open Source authors are often poor communicators. They often pick product-destructive names.
Bush's education improvements were
Probably a coincidence that "Nancy" is Australian slang for a "lady of the evening" (c.f. "Lil McGill" in the Beatles' Rocky Raccoon).
I don't know if it works or not, but it seems to for them:h tml
http://store.yahoo.com/codeweavers-wine/crosplug.
http://wildform.com
Encode any supported codec (whatever you've got loaded) into flash5. Works great for tiny vids, but the flash plugin for PocketIE only supports flash4.
I'd hazard a guess that the Tarkin in Ogg Tarkin is taken from Grand Moff Tarkin of Star Wars fame. If I'm right (and please correct me if I'm wrong), what does the Vorbis in Ogg Vorbis mean? If I'm wrong about Tarkin I'd like to know where that comes from also.
Divx will remain the standard for some time I think. It is just great that you can put a whole movie on one CD. One thing I'm missing though is some sort of error correction program. If divx movie has errors you're in trouble.
I am running a C64 - this would be a "god"send for watching movies from the Internet for me!!!! I am anxiously awaiting the porting kings to release this for c64!!!!Internet is great!!! junis
Internet is Great!!! junis
Japan's teenagers are #1 [cnn.com] as far as their math and science skills go... which may mean they've got more geeks per capita than the U.S. will ever have!
That is not true. The CNN article clearly states that Korean teenagers scored highest on the science tests. The highest overall scores were to Finland, Canada and New Zealand.
cpeterso
I sue yuo!!!!
cpeterso
If we put a light on the camera, we can see inside the ears of millions of mobile phone lusers.
"Hullo John? My ear's really bugging me, can you see if anything's stuck in there?"
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
I work for a company that is attempting to spearhead the move of video to cell phones (and other small bandwidth devices). Just so you know, I work in the engineering group. I'm not a PR guy, and by no means do I represent the company in any way, thus I won't be mentioning its name. We're 'the big one', though.
Our codec is MPEG-4 based. There were some points in this article that were not exactly true, and others that were blantantly false.
"Our first target is 2G or 2.5G phone markets. If the data rate is at less than 28.8 kbits/s, MPEG-4 cannot enter this field."
Flat out wrong. We've demonstrated live streaming through 2G networks in trials in The States, as well as Europe and the Pacific Rim. Our original test platform was 9600 bps. While it's only a few frames per second, it's ludicrous to insinuate that MPEG-4 won't scale *down*. Other companies have done the same. There is sifficient competition in this field, and this company must be living in a vacuum if they don't know what's already out there.
"A 50-Mips CPU can compress and decompress video at 30 frames per second with QCIF [176 x 144-pixel] resolution [using Nancy]. There is no other video codec in a software form that can encode and decode."
There are many pieces of software out there that can do this, especially at that resolution. Our implementation is software only at this point. Most of the competition out there is software-only, too.
"The program for real-time video compression and decompression takes 30 to 40 kbytes of memory, "and consumes about one-tenth of the power compared with MPEG-4 operation," he added."
This would have to be highly subjective, and highly speculative. If you don't even have your stuff running on devices yet, how can you measure performance? And what rates/sizes are we going for here?
"J-Phone plans to upgrade the service to video e-mail using Nancy technology. Cell phone models ready for video e-mailing will be introduced early next year, the company said."
This is not an exclusive agreement, I know that for a fact. Most vendors at this early stage are trying out everything and waiting to see what floats up to the top. When it comes to a side-by-side comparison, something aside from Nancy will definitely win out.
"For MPEG-4, a dedicated LSI chip is necessary to suppress block noises."
Completely false. Our software does a bang-up job with this. You don't really supress them, anyway. You're going to get lost packets no matter what, it's the decoder that has to decide what to do with them. Our codec involves error correction and motion prediction algorithms to mask the lost packets. No extra hardware is necessary.
"Texas Instruments Inc., a major vendor of DSPs for cell phones, has licensed Nancy."
TI has licensed all kinds of codecs. They've licensed us, as well as most of our major competitors. What this really means is that they have licensed Nancy to be included in thir DSP SDK's, along with everyone else. It's not necessarily up to TI what goes into their chips, as they make them to a vendor's specs (which they choose by including whatever they want from the SDK.) This licensing is by no means an exclusive deal.
You also have to ask yourself if you want a different codec for everything you do (movies, cel/ phone streaming, desktop streaming.) MP4 lends itself to different kinds of scaling in the same stream. At least with our codec, if your bitstream becomes congested, the video will automatically slow down to compensate. It'll pick back up when the bandwidth becomes available. The size of our video can be scaled, too, so we can accomodate different bandwidths and video sizes in one file. No more choosing your bitrate as a user, and no more multiple encodes for providers.
Is this company a viable competitor? In this specific space, sure. But vendors are looking for diversity and flexibility, as well as value, and I don't see them going too far beyond the 2 and 2.5 G networks they're working with right now. I think it's also suspicious to be touting a single platform so heavily, especially THAT platform (Sharp). I also wonder how this company has been around since 1988, and they're just now coming to market, behind a few other major compitetors, no less.
-mattyj
The windows quicktime works flawlessly in wine now and Codeweavers makes a wine enabled netscape plugin for linux (basically a linux netscape plugin that's sole purpose is to run windows netscape plugins plugged into a program running under wine which is embedded by the linux netscape plugin....a pretty cool setup) who's main use right now is getting the quicktime plugin to work on linux. The codeweavers plugin is $19.95 but its well worth it (with realplayer for linux and mplayer I can see anything windows people can).
be nice to see what it actually looks like...
then we'd know what we're talking about.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
>I've been waiting for the 1.0 release of Ogg >Vorbis for a few years now
:-)
Really? Development only began in 1998, and nothing was even announced to the world until 2000 (right here in slashdot, a few months before we'd have liked word to leak out). No one has even known about it 'for a few years'.
>Yes, it's a nice CODEC, but the development >timeline has been less than ideal for commercial >adoption.
MPEG required ~10 years. Our code has been production grade since beta1, and every bitstream make since May 8th, 2000 will work forever. That's less than two years from beginning to frozen. The '1.0' label is just waiting on a paper list of features that has grown over time.
Hrumf. We should have just called 'rc1' 1.0 and no one would have known the difference.
> Ogg Tarkin is still in
> extremely early development,
very true.
> without even alpha code to show for the effort.
Running Tarkin code exists; we actually have three competing implementations, two in CVS, and the 'w3d' module at cvs.xiph.org is the current frontrunner (and the one we're actively developing).
But this is not release grade code.
Monty
Because the Nancy compression codec is a commercially-developed product, we have to ask this question: will they license the codec technology to Real Networks and Microsoft?
:-)
Or to be more specific, will we see the upcoming RealOne program and (current and future versions) Windows Media Player capable of playing Nancy-compressed files through a new version of the streaming media player or through an add-on? (You can forget about Apple supporting Nancy given it will cut into QuickTime support.)
If RealOne or Windows Media Player gets Nancy support, this new format could really explode in popularity.
I heard Vorbis being breathed of early in development, I thought before 2000, so I got all excited really early. You're right about rc1. I love your work, but I haven't seen anything that really does anything with it besides plugins for lame, winamp, xmms and the like. I think the hardware folks are waiting for an official 1.0.
I couldn't find the running Tarkin code. It would seem I didn't look very hard.
Good luck in your efforts. I hope my previous dire predictions are false.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Actualy, you can't moderate if you've posted to a thread. And if you've moderated and then post you undo all your mods.