Slashdot Mirror
China to Promote Own Alternative to DVDs, EVD
supermanksu writes "Seeking to compete on its own terms in the lucrative entertainment industry, China announced a government-funded project Tuesday to promote an alternative to DVDs and 'attack the market share' of the global video format." This has been an ongoing project.
China licensed VP5 and VP6 for use in the EVD standard, at least according to On2 themselves. However, Ogg Theora is based on VP3 but is not perfectly compatible.
I would imagine tapes went quicker; there were very few cars manufactured eight track players, and probably none with LP's.
Actually...
Seems like a disaster in the making to me, but people gotta have their tunes!
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I looked into this a bit. Apparently Chinese manufacturers are starting to balk at the ~$350M going out to Japanese DVD patent holders, and the government is listening.
Remember -- fifty years ago, Japan tried to colonize Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia is still pissed.
Anyway, the video codec appears to be On2's VP5 and VP6 -- which, being much newer codecs than MPEG-2, support HDTV resolutions and DVD bitrates -- supposedly with quality as good, if not better, than Microsoft's solution. (Caveat: I was not impressed with VP3, the algorithm open sources by On2 and being tweaked heavily into Ogg Theora.) Not said is what's being used for the audio codec. While audio compression and video compression are two very different things, it's problematic when the two are grown utterly separate from one another. DVD has this problem -- MPEG-2 and AC3 (Dolby Digital) have slightly different frame sizes, making it much more awkward to edit accurately.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Er, sounds good, but you actually don't really know what you're talking about.
A well encoded DVD has very high quality, certainly on par with Betacam SP, the high end analog broadcast production format before digital took over. A well encoded disc won't show significant artifacts.
HDTV resolution goes up to 1920x1080, which is about 6.5x the pixels of DVD (720x480). How high do you want to go? The cheapest displays that can meaningfully do more than 1920 lines wide on a largish screen are awesomely expensive.
Today's displays are crappy? Compared to what? A tapestry? IMAX? We're really at the beginning of a golden age for consumer video technologies. The quality you can buy for $5000 is vastly improved in the last three years, let alone the last 30. Most people don't have eyes good enough to appreciate anything beyond a good 1920x1080.
Lastly, fractals are really the Grassy Knoll of video compression. Yes, Iterated was created to make products on them. No, fractals didn't work. I spent a lot of the mid-late 90's working with Iterated's stuff in different forms. Bitrate scalability was interesting (you could truncate the file at any point, and the more bits you grabbed, the better an image you got). Compression ratios were somewhat better than JPEG. They scaled pretty well. But the net gains were too small to overcome the market share advantages of lowly JPEG.
Iterated simply couldn't make a business around fractal compression. They sold their stuff to AltaMira, who still are selling their fractal compression stuff. Iterated morphed into a company providing image management solutions for the prepress industry. There was still some fractalish stuff underneath, but that wasn't where the value was really added.
The big thing about "fractal" compression is that it wasn't really fractal - its ability to take advantage of self-symmetry was very limited. Heck, even with today's computer power, a "true" fully automatic fractal compressor would take unbelievable amounts of CPU power - many orders of magnitude beyond what realistic video codecs do today. You're basically extending motion search into so many axes.
The only fractal video codec was ClearVideo, which was interesting I suppose, but was roundly stomped by both DCT H.263 derived codecs, and VQ derived codecs like Sorenson Video 1.
Almost everything good about fractals has been inherited by wavelets. And wavelets have also inherited fractal's difficulty in handling motion estimation. That's why DCT and DCT-derived codecs still rule the roost today. Wavelets are great for still image, but no one has come close to devising a really competitive wavelet motion codec.
Maybe someday we'll have a revolution in codecs, but DCT-based codecs like WMV9 and AVC keep on trucking in providing excellent compression efficiency, scalability, and decoder performance.
My video compression blog
Worse, the light would hit the media at an angle. The reflected beam from the surface would then bounce off at an equal angle (pointed away from the source). In order to pick up the reflected beam you would then have to do a 2D raster scan with the detector. Unless you are prepared to do that scan over an area twice as wide as the actual CS, the detector has to be closer to the surface than the source is. This can be worked out but you will lose some storage area in the middle of the surface due to the need to avoid having the detector block the beam from the source.
It's a lot simpler to mount the source and detector together such that the beams are perpendicular to the surface and the surface spins underneath. The technology for this is well established and mature so there is no need to reinvent the wheel.