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Streaming DVD Video over the Internet
Sexy Commando writes "According to this article on ZDNet, the new codec, H.264, is able to stream DVD quality video using bandwidth as little as less than 1Mbps. The new codec requires 3 to 4 times as much CPU power than MPEG-2 to process the video. Now we can have two movies on 1 CD. Cheers."
But this is very cool. No more having to go sub-700kbps for movies over 2 hours! :-D
That's a LOT of pr0n!
3cx.org - A truly bad website.
This is great however if it requires 3 to 4 times as much CPU power as mpeg 2 then i don't think it will gain widespread adoption among computer video enthusiest mainly because it would take them a very long time to convert any reasonably sized movie.
I wonder what the mpaa's reaction will be to this
That's it. If this format works then the venerable old hacked MPEG4 codec will be gone - all the pirate trade will be in H.264
Well, I've got no phd in DVD technology, but the AC3 sound alone would take up far more than 1mbit all by itself right?
One of the reasons im not into watching movies on my PC is that I cannot take advantage of my DTS gizmos.
If this is just for video quality - Count me out.....
True ravers don't need drugs
Sounds cool! Will there be any pr0n?
Quote:
[..] making the size of video files a top hindrance to Hollywood's Internet video-distribution plans.
Yeah Right. Just like the Music Industry's plans for Internet music-distribution...dream on.
Moderation: +4. Modded 70% Funny and 30% Overrated. 100% Saturated.
I'm reasonably sure that I just heard Jack Valenti spinning in his grave. The MPAA thought they had problems before...
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Average film > 2 hours = 7200 seconds; assuming constant bandwidth @ 1Mbps gives a size >=~ 858 MeB per film. I suppose you could go lower than DVD quality, but personally I just dump VOBs to my harddisc, as ripping to a compression algorithm like DiVX takes far too long, so 'two movies on 1 CD' sounds, well, a bit far fetched...
James F.
Here is the VideoLocus press release for H.264/MPEG-4 AVC.
I once shot a man who posted too many, "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these"
Finally a consumer need for CPU horsepower !
he: Hey babe, wanna watch a movie ??
she: sure
he: wait till i boot the player
she: ??????
he: here we go...
she: is it me, or is it getting hotter in here??
he: thats just my dual XEON box chewing....
Why are other peoples sig's always more witty ???
if it takes 3 to 4 times more cpu power just to decompress it, how long does it take to actually make these files? I've done some DivX-ing and 16 hour compression sessions are too long.
MABASPLOOM!
H.264 exists as MPEG-4 part 10, basically using the AVC rather than the ASP profile for encoding.
Supposedly, it offers up to 2-4x size reduction over the MPEG-4 ASP.
However...
For anyone who has extensively played with the existing ASP codecs available (basically XVID, DIVX, RV9, and WM-whatever), the quality matters a *lot* based on the implementation. And not in any consistent way, letting you pick "codec X does the best job". Nope, more like "on low-motion sequences, codec X does best. For detail, codec Y. For minimal artifacts but some bluring, codec Z", and so on.
I see no reason to expect H.264 will follow any substantially different path. In another 5 years, it might well let us get a DVD quality movie onto 1 CD. For now, don't hold your breath about this changing the scene overnight. By the time this really does make good on its potential, we'll have the bandwidth and storage to make it unnecessary.
Well, we nailed the RIAA with technologies like napster, now it's time to nail the MPAA. Since these people are so enthuiastic about choking off the public domin and all the new technologies in p2p, and destroying the right to copy, we should have no qualms about practicing mass civil disobedience of copyright laws to hit them where it hurts, dry up their revenue, and get on with the information age.
I have yet to see a single movie on one CD yet alone this promise of 2 movies on one CD.
I think someone was a little bit overoptimistic :-).
Yours, Martin
but who is going to be able to use it, really? Most ISP's have some sort of bit quota in place, somwhere around 5-10 Gigs of downstream transfer per month...is it really worth using up half, or all of your transfers for one movie?
... and you'd have a professional public relations firm!
(to mindless twits who don't get it: read his sig)
Infuriate left and right
Deep Fritz wins game 5!!
Asian DVD pirate: "Buried alive.... Buried alive."
Valenti: "KHAANNN!!"
Although two movies on a cd sounds farfetched, even a single dvd-quality movie on a cd would be a big jump. Yes there have been lots of improvements in Divx, but on single-disc movies it's still quite clear at times that you're watching a divx and not a dvd.
The way I see it, Divx needs 3 things before it becomes a major threat to DVD.
1-Players capable of playing multiple soundtracks, for multiple languages and/or commentary.
2-Componant Divx Players, or more likely DVD players that can also play DIVX content. People want to watch movies on their tv, not their computer, and only geeks have good tv-output capabilities.
3-Able to fit even longer movies on a single cd with near dvd-quality. No one like changing (or flipping) disks in the middle of a movie.
Meet these demands and allow even a layman to pop a DIVX disk into their dvd player and sit back with a bowl of popcorn, and the MPA has a major problem on their hands.
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
It claims this new codec can get the same quality at 33% lower filesizes than other MPEG-4 codecs, but it doesn't say WHAT MPEG-4 codec. There is more than a 33% difference between existing MPEG-4 codecs alone! Are they comparing this to DivX 5.x, arguably the current leader in quality? Or are they comparing it to Microsoft's ISO MPEG-4 encoder, with it's horrid quality?
Regards, Guspaz.
How many libraries of congress is this per second?
Error: Erection reset by beer.
I like watching dvd's when i want and how i want, and they're already an affordable 9 bucks at alot of stores.
What i want to see is Launch.com use this for high quality VIDEOS as i'm sick of vivendi pushing the crap they want us to see and luanch.com is an awesome place to see videos of the songs we love.
From the Summary:
The new codec requires 3 to 4 times as much CPU power than MPEG-2 to process the video.
Talk about lazy, noninformative writing. Rather than say that it requires 3-4 times more processing power, how about just giving a minimum 86 or powerpc processor speed that would support this format?
The fault here isn't with the person who wrote the summary. That vital piece of information isn't contained in the source article, either. Appalling.I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
well, I guess this will add a few more entries to the mpeg-4 patentlist.
Let's just hope some day theora will be at least as good.
time is a funny concept
That was great
Vacuum cleaners suck. Kings rule.
The new codec requires 3 to 4 times as much CPU power than MPEG-2 to process the video.
Long ago, in the before time, when I had an Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73 GHz, before I fried it and got thrown back to a 1.4 GHz athlon and then I fried that and got thrown back to a 600 PIII) I was able to rip DVD's and convert them to DivX in real time (a little faster actually, around 34 fps.) Now I don't know the differences between MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 but 3 to 4 times as much CPU power doesn't sound too pleasing. Right now I'm riping a DVD, err wait no, I don't do things like that it's illegal. Hypothetically speaking, if I were ripping a DVD right now, there would be 20 hours left because on a 600P III DVD's take a long time to convert to DivX (or so I'm told.) It takes all day for me... err not me, it takes all day for a person with a 600 PIII to convert a DVD to DivX. *shudders thinking about when that person ripped the Matrix for 30 hours and had 3 files, 2 700 meg files and one 50 meg file*
So what we have here is something that needs 3 to 4 times the CPU power and a continuous 1Mbps stream. I hate to poo-poo, but how useful this going to be? As far as I know only a small segment of the population actually watches movies from their computer (i.e. Slashdot, geek, technophile crowd). That said, this would give a large boost to the quality of shorter video streams (i.e. news segments, stupid pet tricks, MCSE video promos :-) ). Slowly people will switch to high bandwidth internet lines. My cable gets more than enough bandwidth, but most DSLs are 768kbps. Not only this but if a site like CNN is going to implement this they have to make HUGE upgrades. They will need bandwidth and CPU power to serve the same (or growing) number of people with 1Mbps streams instead of 300kbps streams.
sig
The economist has a great article reviewing the latest codec offerings from different players. Specifically DivX 5.0 "is said to be particularly good at preventing tearing, a playback error that occurs when the software cannot render the video for display at the same pace that it is being decompressed and fed into the media player. And a new codec from supersecretive Pulsent claims to be object rather than block based. Whereas block-based compression and object-oriented codecs slice up backgrounds and foregrounds into grids, the Pulsent approach actually pinpoints real-world items in the frame--such as a person, tree or building--and processes each element separately. story here
I'm somewhat familiar with these folks. They are ex PixStream, who one time they were rumored to be about to "do big stuff in video" with Bell (telephone) Canada. PixStream got juicy and suffered "death by acquisition".
Sigs are bad for your health.
I can encode a DVD down to a single byte! Yes, that's right, stream a single 8-bit byte from the internet to your computer and watch a DVD! However, the media cartels have already gotten to this one, so it requires a copy of the DVD in your drive for "verification" purposes. People will definately pay for this invention!
Seriously, though, I think this is great. Now I'll be able to store all of my porn, I mean movies in less disk space - a valuable commodity when your main computer is a laptop with a 20gb drive.
Every cloud has a silver lining (except for the mushroom shaped ones, which have a lining of Iridium & Strontium 90)
Many DVDs are already coded at a fairly minimal 2Mbps or so*, so this really isn't as big a deal as people might think. If someone developed a truely intelligent encoder (for starters, one that didn't follow a static frame type pattern such as I-B-P-B-I) and fed it a really clean signal then we could really make progress.
* ZThe bitrate is according to an industry insider who gave a talk at UC Berekeley. The bitrate is low so that they can fit all the extras on a DVD, which most consumers value more than movie quality.
The main licensing clearinghouse for MPEG-4 standards, MPEG LA, has asked companies to submit for consideration by Friday any patents they believe cover the H.264 format. The early deadline aims to ensure that technology licensing for the format, which is hammered out separately from standards-setting, does not fall too far behind the ratification process, as has been the case with MPEG-4.
This got me to thinking - whenever something like this happens, people always point out that such and such a patent is invalid because of prior art. Someone should submit a bunch of prior art to the patent committee to thwart any bogus patent claim attempts.
Do you think that "Joe Computer Geek" is going to be able to get his hands on this to stream his own DVDs? Probably not. There will probably be some sort of DRM built in because the MPAA (as well as the RIAA) is too busy focusing on a few potential lost sales vs. the big revenues that could be had if they just opened their stuff up to internet distribution. They are looking at everything through an outdated selling concept. Not everyone thinks this way though... Peter Gabriel has his entire new album (UP) available to listen to in a streamable format as well as the video for his first single. The quality is low, so it encourages people to buy the real deal, but it's the entire album, so it allows for "try before you buy". The same could be applied to DVD pre-release and this technology would be great for it. But, it's still not going to be something that you or I can legitimately use to stream our own DVDs unless there are a LOT of restrictions. I for one am no longer sure of the legality of me streaming my MP3s to myself at work with icecast and not paying the RIAA those stupid broadcaster's fees. Discuss amongst yourselves.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Sorry for the lack of clarity (party too long, night too short, coffee too weak). I was referring to VideoLocus
Sigs are bad for your health.
The computer industry is in the doldrums because people don't have a solid need to upgrade. The computers that they already own are fast enough to do what they want to do.
These codecs take a lot of processing power. The ones that will follow, that will presumably be even tighter, will probably need even more power.
This is the application that will drive future upgrades. Most adults don't play video games, but everyone watches TV.
By getting in line behind palladium, MS and Intel are putting Hollywood's interests ahead of their own. Why buy a $1200 computer to watch video when an $80 DVD player will do it just as well? If you can't do more with the video -- record it, archive it, copy it, etc. -- there's no compelling reason. Why not keep your 300Mhz box for email and web surfing, and keep your DVD player for movies?
MS and Intel are undoubtedly backing palladium to get Hollywood onboard, to secure their cooperation in the grand campaign to bring computers to the living room, to home entertainment. This is what they don't understand -- that outcome is inevitable, and Hollywood will have little to say about it one way or another. It's the way the technology is evolving, just like music distribution is moving online, with or without the RIAA.
The quickest way to get to the living room is to make the technology useful for consumers. In the end, the computer companies work for the people who buy the machines, and the interests of the computer industry are served by serving the customers. Not Hollywood, not the RIAA, not anyone else.
This is exactly what intel and AMD need. A real reason for people to upgrade their hardware.
For most people even a 400Mhz system is enough.
Simply writing bigger and clunkier apps (a la microshaft) is not a good reason for me to dump[ my hardware.
It seems to me that the limits of compression technology are self inflicted. We don't do better compression because it takes too long to compress/decompress. However, with the improved speeds capacities of new hardware we can break those barriers.
When will we see this compression to allow more bandwidth down a dialup line?
Send me that a pair of 1Thz AMD CPUs!!!
comment directly in my journal
So much for hoping I'll ever be able to play my collection of DivX movies on anything other than a computer...
Most of them are in DIV3 (the original hacked Microsoft Codec), the more recent ones I've started using XVID. While I'd welcome a new codec for better quality, the chances of a dedicated DVD-like player that will play all the various DivX formats seems slim.
Don't even get me started on OGG...
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
At what point do we give up and realize that we can fit more data than real life on a DVD?
Someone screwed up on their math:
1mbps * 60 seconds/minute * 60 minutes/hour = ~325MB
So you could fit two full hours (+ a little - gotta love 700mb CD-Rs) on a standard 650 megabyte CD.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
There has been a lot of research in deriving 3d models from motion video. This would of course lead to dramatic reduction in bandwidth requirements by sending down a 3d model of the set to a renderer and then transmitting only motion through the set along with variations from the set projected to 2d. This requires huge amounts of processing up front but very little at the decompression/rendering end compared to a lot of other methods. The MPEG4 3d modeling codecs seem to be an after-thought based on provision of manually constructed 3d models (often the examples given are of rendering human faces from 3d models which is almost the opposite of what should be going on with motion video compression -- the sets should be 3d modeled leaving more problematic features like faces to the residue ) not a fundamental aspect of automatically constructed 3d models during compression.
Seastead this.
7200 (seconds in 2 hours) * 1000 Kbps / 8 (bites per byte) / 1024 (kbyte-> megabyte) = 878.9 megabytes. Or if 1Mbps = 1024kbps.. 7200 (seconds in 2 hours) * 1024 Kbps / 8 (bites per byte) / 1024 (kbyte-> megabyte) = 900 megabytes. It'd appear that your math is slightly incorrect.
Back in the days of MPEG-1, and to a lesser extent, MPEG-2, software patents and related licensing fees were hardly known about, and even less enforced.
Loads of people wrote MPEG-1 decoders - you could download one for just about any computer popular at the time - Amiga, Atari ST, etc, etc.
Similar situation with MPEG-2.
Now, with MPEG-4, there won't be the support from free software - the people who would like to support it will support one of the Xiph video codecs instead.
Without this support from free software, MPEG-4 just won't gain acceptance.
Serves them right, as well - standards should be free.
An open source implementation is already in the works.
This could make Tivo devices even better! Dunno if it could save the company though. Just a thought.
R4NT.com - A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
Hmm, 1Mbit / sec = .125MByte/sec. .125MBytes/sec * (60 sec * 90) = 675MB
675MB is the theoretical best for one of these new movies, correct? How can you fit two of those on one CD?
although 1.5mbit DTS is VERY hard to find the fist dozen dvd's or so was 1.5mbit DTS, all the new dts releases are all 768.
:)
You wno't find me using any streaming technology, I quite enjoy superbit dvd's on my projector
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
The Pentium 4 really does make the internet faster!
Well, since the size of movies is down, and the size of harddrives up...
200gb Firewire HD- $450
Cheap Boxen to run it with (not Dreamcast)- $200
Decent Broadband connection w/ huge upstream- $99
Linux- $Free
Setting up an FTP Server- Your time
The look on the Judge's face when you get busted for serving out everything to hit to box office for the past 8 years- Priceless...
Tibbon
tibbon.com
From the article: MPEG-2 provided the technical standard for most digital cable set-top boxes and for DVDs. The numbers then skip--there is no MPEG-3 standard.
I happen to be using the MPEG-3 standard right now; I'm listening to REM - It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) with it.
Dumb shits. MP3 is MPEG-3.
Wait, check that... MP3 stands for MPEG Layer 3, doesn't it... Hmmm. Somebody want to clear that up for me? Is MP3 MPEG Layer is MPEG-3, or no?
Matthew G P Coe
http://mgpcoe.blogspot.com/
Finally someone is developing codecs that are the best quality for size, and fuck CPU power. The point is, design the software for the future, when cpu power isn't an issue (future meaning a couple years). Even DVD quality at this bitrate is going to be manageable.
Nice.
Instead of wasting your time posting an uninformed comment on Slashdot, you could actually look for the answer yourself instead of calling the writers 'dumb shits' and turning out to be wrong.
MP3's are MPEG-1, Layer III. There has also been a layer 2 and 1, which both operated at higher bitrates than their successors.
While few doubt the power of the new format, its emergence could complicate the landscape for MPEG-4's video format offers, which presently consist of two implementations: Simple Profile (SP) and Advanced Simple Profile (ASP).
And I thought VHS SP EP and SLP was confusing enough...
So what about my Digi001, or the Event Layla system that I built for a friend. Both have the most beautiful sounding converters (The Layla has the best I've ever A/B'd), and I'd put money on the fact that they're better than most AC3 amps.
/* FUCK - The F-word is here so that you can grep for it */
A couple of guys from Hardforums and I played with this codec back in early July. There is a writeup here about how to create a file. At the time we were using it, it was a pain to compress and decompress. At the time the encoder required a YUV file and the decoder produced a YUV file. On a 1.2 TBird it took about 14 hours to encode the Final Fantasy - The Spirits Within Trailer. It was about 2:45 I think. The file produced was 11.2MB. A comparable (quality as best we could tell) Divx 4 encoding was about 35MB, both started from DVD and contained no audio. Decoding was about 2fps on my machine. Remember that these times are using files that were written to be correct, with no efficency added in. In fact, one of the guys on the JVT team told us if we were able to improve the compression at all to let them know.
;)
/.ed to be able to still see it, just at a lower quality.
Btw, JVT stands for Joint Video Team, which is the group resposnible for developing the standard. It used to be H.26L, and looks now to be called H.264. The ftp below is the once that is used by the people developing the standard, so don't hit it too hard
And here's what you all have been waiting for. the Source Code to it. I dunno how it's changed since I used it last, but the newest version we had available was 3.2 and they are now on 4.2. Version 3.7 came out shortly after we finished our tests, but there were no compression speed changes from the few quick tests we ran on it, as well as no file size changes.
Also, one intereting thing that I didn't see when glancing over the linked article was that the server's software will monitor the connection and playback and if there are too many dropped frames it will decrease the quality. The opposite is true as well, the quality will increase based on the connection and playback. Of course the server would be able to disable this as well, but would be nice if a video stream got
Realvideo9 (helix) or RealONE, looks good at even 100kbps, how do they compare?
And btw what happened to wavelets? or JPEG2000? doing a MJPEG2000 would look good and small, even a properly made wavelet version of MPEG4? is it mpeg7?
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Old Press release says Real
submitting components of RealVideo 9 to the Joint Video Team, a joint working group of MPEG and VCEG that will create the next version of MPEG-4.
You seem to imply that due to patent issues MPEG4 was DOA.
DivX anyone? The original DivX codec was just a hacked MS MPEG-4 codec that removed a few recording restriction flags.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I just assumed that was implied. Esp. now that that "It's getting hot in here" song plays every 10 seconds on the radio...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Project status is pre-alpha, no files yet.
Look around on Sourceforge - Probably 50% or more of the projects there never get off the ground.
I see the most likely open-source implementation coming from the guys developing XviD, since this new codec is an MPEG-4 variant, which means the XviD guys have a huge headstart.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?