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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."
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!
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.
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.
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
The statement is of much more importance to consumer electronics manufacturers, as they try to go with the cheapest possible chips in their products, and "3-4 times more" means "lots more $$$". When features are dropped due to too high processing speed requirements (in the "it'd take a CPU USD 3$ more expensive" -sense), the statement clearly says "in technofreak expensive products only".
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
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.
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
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.
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