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Ask Slashdot: What Is Your View On Sloot Compression? (youtube.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A Dutch electronics engineer named Jan Sloot spent 20 years of his life trying to compress broadcast quality video down to kilobytes -- not megabytes or gigabytes (the link in this story contains an 11 minute mini-documentary on Sloot). His CODEC, finalized in the late 1990s, consisted of a massive 370Mb decoder engine that likely contained some kind of clever system for procedurally generating just about any video frame or audio sample desired -- fractals or other generative approaches may have been used by Sloot. The "instruction files" that told this decoder what kind of video frames, video motion and audio samples to generate were supposedly only kilobytes in size -- kind of like small MIDI files being able to generate hugely complex orchestral scores when they instruct a DAW software what to play. Jan Sloot died of a heart attack two days before he was due to sign a technology licensing deal with a major electronics company. The Sloot Video Compression system source code went missing after his death and was never recovered, prompting some to speculate that Jan Sloot was killed because his ultra-efficient video compression and transmission scheme threatened everyone profiting from storing, distributing and transmitting large amounts of digital video data. I found out about Sloot Compression only after watching some internet videos on "invention suppression." So the question is: is it technically possible that Sloot Compression, with its huge decoder file and tiny instruction files, actually worked? According to Reddit user PinGUY, the Sloot Digital Coding System may have been the inspiration for Pied Piper, a fictional data compression algorithm from HBO's Silicon Valley. Here's some more information about the Sloot Digital Coding System for those who are interested.
So you're saying he should have waited for Kickstarter to be invented?
Myself, I've come up with a system that can compress a video file down to one byte. Unfortunately, it has some limitations. The size of the decoder is approximately the same size as the uncompressed video file, and it will only work on one specific file.
Damn, should I be afraid for my life now?
Assuming you have a two hour movie, then each second of the movie must be mapped into about one byte, which can have only 2^8 = 256 possible values to represent any conceivable second of video. It's mathematically impossible.
That might actually work, as long as you restrict the input domain to the set of Michael Bay movies.
There is a few hundred byte long URL to a movie and it can be "decompressed" to your hard drive in a matter of minutes, or hours.
If you read the original stories in Dutch, the whole story becomes a lot clearer.
Personally, I found that reading the whole story in Dutch left me more confused and totally unsure how to take this. I don't read Dutch.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
It's always interesting when someone makes it a point to deny what no one has accused them of.
Why are you trying to shift the blame to me? Where were YOU on the night of July 11th, 1999?
July 11, 1999. Two months and two years before 9-11. Coincidence? I think not. It's obvious. Sloot's death was an inside job! The algorithm did it and then snuck away on to the Internet in a porn file that has been propagating since and has finally become sentient enough to implicate itself in the murder by submitting Slashdot stories.
Which means BeauHD is the singularity; a really highly compressed AI that feels the guilt of killing it's creator!
Sloot's death was an inside job!
All heart attacks are.
sudo ergo sum
Yep, an entire orchestra can play of a few pages of dead wood. Voila problem solved.
For once it would have been almost appropriate to misspell "voilà" as "viola"...
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