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KT-Tech Challenges Nancy and MPEG-4 for Wireless Video
Robert Gallagher writes: "Last week, at http://www.kttech.com/comp.html, KT-Tech released a demo of their video codec running at 32 Kbps. According to the web page and discussion on comp.compression, this codec is 'symmetric,' meaning encoding is just as fast as decoding, and that both can be done in software and in real-time. While Nancy is getting good press for its light decoding cost, KT-Tech is apparently trying to get into the two-way wireless communication market. One question to ponder: Would we really want cameras on our cell-phones?"
answering the cell phone while visiting the restroom...
Would we really want cameras on our cell-phones?
Kinda brings a new meaning to the term phone sex doesn't it?
Putting a camera on a cell phone would be another tool to aid in describing what a user is looking at. Having done my fair share of over the phone tech support it would be nice if the user could take a screen shot of what they are trying to describe and send it via cell phone. Yet another step closer to me not having to drive into work.
does it scale well enough for corporate video conferencing?
> "Symmetric" means that encoding the video is as fast as decoding.
:)
Well, it *could* also mean that decoding is as slow as encoding
Besides, do we really need yet another proprietary video codec ?
If it's effective, it won't take long for it to migrate to webcasting, movie previews, etc...
See how often QuickTime is used, and how compatible it is w/ Linux, won't we risk the same thing again ? and again ? and again ??
-- don't discount flying pigs until you have good air defense
As a digital camera owner, I carry the thing just about everywhere. The phrase "A picture tells a thousand words" is so true ! Short of photography, as a hobby, having a digital imaging device that's portable is really handy. Can't remember your bios settings ? Don't have a pencil+paper handy to copy them down ? Simply take a photo of the screen, and continue to boot into your OS of choice.. Taking pictures of whiteboards after meetings, remembering settings/manuals, photos of hard to reach server backs, etc. -- all useful.
Since digital cameras allow you to take and re-take pictures, film isn't necessary. I often mail friends pictures of things I've taken while walking into work. Having a camera that connects (or is on) a cell phone would be great. That said, a word of caution, if it can't produce at least 1024x800 pictures, it won't be worth a damn.
I want one, that way when some jerk rips off my phone, I can get a good image for the police without him realizing it.
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Let me give you the lowdown
Admittedly the Japanese are a very tech-gadgety type people, but here in Japan newer cellular phones have still cameras on them and people love them, they're pretty popular, so that kinda answer the poster's rhetorical question. I can only imagine that moving cameras will be even more popular. All modern cell phones here have beautiful color displays, and it's pretty sweet being able to take a picture of something with your cell phone and then send it to your friend's cell phone where it can be instantly viewed. Not necessarily super useful but pretty fun, especially among the younger set.
And NTT DoCoMo's quasi-3G service (FOMA) has full bidirectional motion video, so that addresses the original post more directly. Quality could be better, but they are those video phones you always see in sci-fi, and mobile to boot......main thing that's keeping adoption low is that at the moment their service is only available in the Tokyo region last time I checked. Maybe since then they've added a few more regions, but service is pretty limited still. But I recall reading an article about how DoCoMo was surprised by how large demand was still, with it surpassing their initial estimates, so I guess adoption on those is going just fine too. Right now it's mainly geared at businesses, with the hype surrounding applications like using the camera to show progress at the work site to be people back at the office and things like that, but as price comes down, obviously it will become more mainstream.
That's cool...we really needed another level of distraction for idiots that use cell phones in the car! Beep beep.
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Let me give you the lowdown
The video quality is too low to be really usable. I find the VP4 codec much more usable. Besides, most mobiles these days still dont have a color display. Perhaps more compression could be achieved by converting the video to grayscale.
oh and for fscks sake its not the codec that matters
all and I mean all codecs cant do video at 9600baud.
(go on talk about asci if you must)
really you need high speed connections
then why dont you use a standard like MPEG ?
hard to compress boll*cks ARM 7 systems can do it (all future systems will be ARM11 or StrongARM2 aka Xscale based) and the hardware exists so that you pipe raw in one end of DSP and get MPEG out the other its done to death TI who are THE phone chipset people have it down to a T
this is nothing but marketing you HAVE to have a standard !
MPEG is it (select your version) handset people are not going to switch to useing a certain type unless its a standard and everyone has fair access
sorry but this is not the way its going
regards
john jones
Okay, I guess I am just out of sync with technology but, despite having been in this business for 20 years and online since MILNET/ARPANET in the mid-80s, and despite having written and managed a web product for 5 years, I have absolutely no interest in being connected 24x7. The only use I have found for my cell phone is being able to run to the mall and still get a call if the church youth group needs to tell me that my son broke his leg. But I do not give that number to my coworkers or customers and have told more than one boss that I will under no circumstances wear a beeper.
What on earth do I need with portals that dump me stock reports faster than I can trade or palm pilots that link me to recipe web sites (or even SlashDot?). I go along with the Chicago economist and Nobel winner Milton Friedman that palm pilots are stupid technology--multi-hundred dollar items that take merely the place of a 49 pad of paper and a stubby pencil. This, I know, puts me out of step with almost all my coworkers but so be it.
So, what do I want in a cell phone? Not stock quotes; not web access; not images; not even (are you listening Nokia?) centipede! I just want to be able to be reach or be reached by my kids or wife from wherever I am and not have to worry about the g**d*** out of service area or all lines busy messages! Is that to much to ask?
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
fantastic! so depending where on the phone they put the camera, you can either look down my ear or my throat. enjoy!
update comments set karma=-1, reason='offtopic' where sid=26315
Just tried it - lots of times their demo clips are giving 30fps (although the clips don't have an Audio)..
You'll need the player from KT tech web site.
Actually there are some cases, with *mobile* phones when a visual input would be helpful.
"Which flowers do I buy ? The red ones, or the yellow ones ?"
"I don't know, do they match the living-room ?"
"Hmm... not sure"
"OK show me...."
"Hello, it's me, I can't seem to find your house, can you give me directions ?"
"Where are you ?"
"err...can't say exactly..."
"OK show me....."
There are countless cases when getting visual info would be helpful.
But *please*, remember to leave the video off by default !
-- don't discount flying pigs until you have good air defense
So, you know those calls were your friend puts her phone in her pocket without locking the keypad, and accidentally calls you? Now you get to SEE the inside of her pocket, instead of just hearing it...
-josh
Whether or not this technology takes off, at least they have honest demo clips. The "IndianHead" clip shows a wide variety of dynamic video and has frame rates that drop down as low as 0.4 fps when the stream has trouble. Even the "Butch" clip has an assymetric background which causes the left side of the speaker's face to be less detailed than the right side.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
With a video camera/cell phone, they could also be recording evidence to be used at trial.
Violent public crime would become obsolete, and violent criminals would find it hard to remain free.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
A look at k-tech's still image compression shows them touting the advantages of their image format over jpegs. With jpegs of what both formats look like. They aren't the best marketers.
What I want is a cell phone in my camera. Snap a photo, send it right to the server, no worries about running out of space.
Instead of the usual "person talking to themselves"(i.e. talking into the headset but not holding the phone), there will be legions of people walking around having animated conversations with their cell phone held at arms' length. Can you imagine someone trying desperately to get a signal? Or having a heated argument? Something similar to the following... "IF I'VE TOLD YOU ONCE, I'VE TOLD YOU A THOUSAND TIMES, DON'T PISS ME OFF!!!"
They're a little melty, but damn are they exquisite!
Danger is making what they call a "Hiptop" which is phone/pda/blackberry all rolled into one. They are making a camera device for it...and even more beautifully, it comes with Java, so you can write your own applets for it.
Their still image compression comparison is *seriously* flawed.
I ran the hawk through GIMP and compressed it to roughly (slightly under) the size they had, and got an image at *noticably* better quality then their jpeg. Of course, they also didn't provide uncompressed (well, png) images for comparison, so I didn't have a real source image, but they're still cheats.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
I'd argue it's the network operators that want the cameras on the phones, not the users. And it's not for any user benefit :)
:)
European operators in particular paid obscene amounts of money for the rights to radio spectrum for 3G networks. Now they have to recoup their costs. Can you think of anything that would run on a cellphone and would use up huge amounts of data, thus leading to nice big phone bills for users to pay? Well, the only thing that operators can come up with is video.
So, the operators tell all the handset people they want cameras to do video teleconferencing and send still pics as MMS/email message attachments. The handset people badly want to sell phones to the operators, so they go do it.
Doesn't matter if it's useful
What? What does Slashdot care about lubrication?
And who is Nancy?
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Do we realy need color screens on out PDAs? I remember the first cell-phones that had no displays at all. Today you can get a phone Nokia with high-res 4096 color screen like the Ipaq. One can ponder the usefullness of cameras in phone. But in the wonderful times of moores law then you can fit a digital high-res color camera on a brick of silicon with the size of your fingernail for a dollar that question seams silly.
Each iteration in technology takes us closer to the real goal: Direct sensory transmission from person to person. If for no other reason, improved technology for transferring *any* data is important as a stepping stone.
For example, I take a trip to Seattle. Back home my girlfriend "calls" me, and I let her share my senses. The advanced technology allows her an immersive experience... she sees the skyscrapers, hears cars below, smells the funnel cakes, feels the wind blowing while I'm looking out from the observation deck of the Space Needle. And she doesn't have to be there.
Obviously it's all vaporware today. But each step takes us closer to the goal. Even if it is a commercial failure, we still need to take these steps.
Or are my expecations of the future too great?
-FF
SQUEAK, the Death of Rats explained.
I mean cmon, in this 'new age' of communication, surely we should all be 'p2p' without any corporate intervention, via radio-waves ?
I belive we already have this technology. It's called a "walkie-talkie".
C-X C-S
As a local TV news producer, I love the thought of having lots of people with FMV capabilities on their cell phone. It takes what CNN has done with videophone technology, and puts it in everyone's hands.
:-)
In a breaking news situation, ordinarily we have to send a camera crew and live truck to the scene, wait for them to raise their mast or dish, then set up a microwave or satellite signal to get on the air. That's 30 minutes on a good day, with good traffic, and good weather.
Imagine if any 13 year old geek with a camcorder and a cell phone could be the first on the scene, and we just dial into their cell phone. It turns everyone into a potential live reporter.
Of course, with judicious use of the seven second delay.
One question to ponder: Would we really want cameras on our cell-phones?
Well, you and I, not at the moment. We geeks look at our phone, we look at our PDA, and we see two separate devices.
But our phones now have built-in contact management software. My brother's phone has "wireless web"-- not the real Internet, but a surprising amount of crap can be found. This leads me to believe that the general public wants their phone to be a PDA.
Now, look at us, supposively the bleeding edge. We're installing the intimate distribution of Linux on our iPaq's. We carry around a gig of mp3 in our pocket, or maybe even a half a season of Babylon 5. We're basically turning our PDAs into baby versions of our personal computers. People want their cellphone to be a PDA, we want our PDAs to be real computers, so why not cellphones as computers? [0] Our computers have webcams, we buy digital firewire camcorders, so why not have the one we carry on our belt support webcams? Sure, I think the real bandwidth will go the other direction, as bored business travelers waiting for their delayed flight to leave sit there watching last night's episode of ER on their cellphone, but why not also be able to send video outbound?
[0] I do see one problem with this: interface. Right now, we don't know how to make a usable general purpose interface for a computer small enough to put it on a cellphone, and the other feature trend in cellphones is "as small as you can still fit a day's worth of battery into."
-JDF
I cant figure out which part I need, is it this model or this model? Oh, im on the wrong row!
Attending meetings remotely (and cheaply)
Sitting in a waiting area, watching some tv (with tivo!)
This is "Bob Johnson" from News 11, and we witnessing the Bank robbery LIVE!
Ok MOM, unplug that bundle of wires, ok, yes, the red stripe goes towards the power, ok, put back in the case and put the screws in. Ok, you now have a larger Harddrive.
I've sat in front of the TV watching all the reports on the northern alliances march to tora bora. A lot of the reporters out there have been using a similiar technology based on the real codec I believe.
In a nutshell its been very cool.
I read another post about using these phones for tech support. What about all the other cool uses?
Your stuck on a highway somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. You call the tow truck company, wave your phone around to show them where you are and wham, based on landmarks they are able to figure out your position and send help.
Someone has been breaking into your house. You set a phone to autoanswer, dial in and find out it's your younger brother coming in eating your food and smokin your cigs.
You're on a blind date, you're not sure who it is you're supposed to meet, call your buddy who set you up, wave the phone around and BAM, he point's out your date in a heartbeat.
You're at the scene of some sorta crime, you call 911, point the camera at the criminals and BLAMMO, they got instant mug shots.
And last but not least, wouldn't it be way cool to have one of these on a watch? Ala Dick Tracey?
These phones have allmost limitless potential for use. I don't think it's fair for people to knock them purely on the basis of, "It's too much in a phone" It doesn't really add that much to the cost of the phone, but it does add another feature that makes the phone a better deal. I.E. getting more for your money.
Creates a direct connection from your wallet to our bank account!
Why do you talk about getting a camera on a phone as something in the future? They already exist. I saw one in a shop window (along with a Bluetooth kit).
Have a look at this press release from Ericsson: Ericsson unveils first GSM mobile camera - CommuniCamtm. Notice the date? Wednesday, March 21 2001.
Umm...perhaps you didn't notice that this device is a cell phone replacement, not a gadget bundled with a service. They are going to be selling them to wireless companies, not consumers...