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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.
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.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
That really says a *lot* about the quality of today's movies.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
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.
Bruce Perens.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.