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.

Comments

Actually...

[Black Parrot]

They killed him because you could feed a random input into his decoder and the movie that came out would be better than anything Hollywood can produce.

Of course it didn't work

[Anonymous Coward]

Information theory stablishes what is really possible and that kind of compression is simply to much, even considering its lossy nature. Infomation entropy has very real limits no matter the encoder used in the data compression.

I love it that parent is modded "Insightful"

[mykepredko]

That really says a *lot* about the quality of today's movies.

Compression Tweaks

[Bruce Perens]

Sloot wasn't the only "Compression Tweak". This is someone who has compression "ideas" but can never get the product working. There was one in the US who wrote me for a long time in the 90's. One thing I remember is that he dropped hints about encoding data in the spaces in between bits. Of course this makes zero sense.

Re:Not so fast

[PopeRatzo]

Yep, an entire orchestra can play of a few pages of dead wood. Voila problem solved.

Sheet music as a form of compressed script is a very lovely image. Repeat signs, first and second endings, D.C. al fine are all ways to put more music on fewer pages. I have to give it to you, that's nice, and I plan to use it.

it cannot logically work. sorry.

[gl4ss]

You're forgetting that it's 8kB ... plus the 370MB of data preloaded in the de/compression engine.

look. it doesn't MATTER if it's 370mb of data or if it is 1000 terabytes of data. given a random movie file it would have to be able to tell apart the same movie but lets say a 10 seconds of it is just blacked out in the other version or replaced with a random text(this is to take out possibility of having the whole movie already in the 1000 terabytes of data). you cannot index chunks with such a little data to go match there. IT CANNOT BE DONE. if it could be DONE THEN THIS WOULD REVOLUTIONIZE HARDDRIVES AND ALL DATA TRANSFER - not just videos.

besides 8000 bytes / 120 min is about 66 bytes per minute. thats like a byte per second.

so basically, at least the claims are an order of magnitude more ludicrous than is possible at all.

also a few years ago I ran into some startup guys who were claiming that (among other things) they had a new compression algorithm that could do 1gig to 100kb or some such... I tried to explain them the theoretical maximum they could attain is way worse what they were claiming (due to simple logic)... they never did anything with it or showed it of course - even if it would have been 1000000x more valuable than what their current company was doing. kind of lost faith in that then.

furthermore you could embed 50 megs of data easily visually on a normal vcd movie of 650 megs. what this is suggesting is that you could embed any random data of 100 megs into 8 kilobytes. it doesnt add up. it cannot add up.

Re:it cannot logically work. sorry.

[gl4ss]

yes I know what demo guys have done, and it's done by hand, tweaked to produce something that looks nice, and by that I mean the procedural algorithms are written by hand to make something that looks nice - not something arbitrary they have in their mind.

it can look magical but really it is not. none of the demoscene demos break logical rules.

and yes, something like elite frontier fitted on a floppy and had a billion stars to explore with planets. but that is not an argument for this video encoding scheme at all - it's not like that on some planet in there you might find a tv playing jaws - it cannot have that and you can know it cannot have that.

however sloot claimed his video encoding to be so good that you could have on a floppy all the movies in the world- because recursion, if his scheme worked you could encode the next movie in the images in the credits scene of the previous movie - THIS SHOULD clue people in that it was just all bullshit, but for some reason doesn't? how hard is it for people to grasp this recursion problem of arbitrary information? it has nothing to do with if the compression scheme is procedural or not, it's just about if you can point to so much arbitrary data with so little data.

he was claiming benefits wayyy beyond of an automated mod/tracker creator.

look even if it was seeded with aqua teen hunger force episodes it still wouldn't be able to do the compression he claimed.

like come on dude, he was basically claiming that he could do better video encoding than what the best image encoding could do. if he had something that worked he would just have patented it and made a bank.

and if you're thinking of fractals - that too works only if you don't grasp bits and data, the pointers to the data in the fractal would have to have such a precision that it wouldn't be able to perform so well as he said. simply put, if you had kilobytes to represent a movie then that batch of kilobytes would have to represent multiple movies and that simply cannot work.

Re:Not so fast

[SlashDread]

Sheet music is not "the" music. Its merely a non complete representation, a suggestion if you will, how to perform the music.

If it would be the case, then MIDI files are all we would ever need.

Most of the music is how the director, and the musicians interpret it, and is not codified in the sheet.

An analogy would be that sloot compression would reproduce a decompressed movie about "a" cat, but it would not look like the homevideo of "your" cat.

Not an information theoreticus myself, but Im pretty certain that sloot compression went beyond what entropy would allow, aka more info was "supposed" to be there than entropy allows. I don't believe in violating the laws, of nature.