Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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
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!
Hmmm... DVD quality at lower filesize than divx and all those codecs... this means that ALL those ripped movies are going to be worthless... people will have to re-encode it all AGAIN to H.264 and just chuck all those old "unwatchable" divx rips...
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.
I think someone was a little bit overoptimistic :-).
Yours, Martin
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.
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?
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*
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.
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.
It's just that the lower bitrate will still get you good quality encoding, where before your quality went to hell as your bitrate went below 700 kbps.
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.
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'm supprised people took this as offtopic. Is there anyone here who believes that this problem isn't going to go away untill we hit them in the pocketbook? What do we think this technology implies anyhow?
Codecs like these ARE in fact lossy -- but that's not a bad thing, really. Most of the time you don't lose anything you notice, or really care about. Ok, let's think about this in a different way: You have a 747 and a cessna single engine plane. Each can carry a payload, but the 747 can carry much more. Both the 747 and the cessna are travelling at an imaginary speed, say, 700kbps. The 747 travelling at 700kbps will carry more than the cessna travelling at 700kbps. Now, to apply this to this story, instead of the cessna it's DiVX and instead of the 747 it's H.264. You can't "PKZip" a dvd and expect it to get much smaller, mainly because most lossless compression algorithms don't compress binary data too tightly.
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.
An open source implementation is already in the works.
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
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
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?