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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
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?
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.
Sloot was nothing more than another of a long line of scam artists (or delusional inventors) who claimed to have created a "magic" compression scheme. In his case, he said he could compress an entire movie down to 8 kilobytes.
Simple mathematics show why such schemes don't work. 8 kilobytes = 8192 bytes = 65536 bits. 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.
Engineers and mathematicians have been debunking these claims for decades, but they still occasionally pop up. I remember one scheme that got some press about 30 years ago. A guy claimed to have a compression program that could take any data file and compress it down to about 1 kilobyte. And it seemed to work, according to several people who tried it. As it turned out, the "compressed" file was nothing more an alias pointing to the original file, which was hidden from directory view by the program. When you "uncompressed" the file, the original file was unhidden. But it was a neat trick as long as you didn't try to copy the "compressed" file to another disk.
Sloot's program was "lost" because it never existed, just like the magic 300 mpg carburetors where the plans were "lost".
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.
The conspiracy theory ignores Jevon's Paradox. As computing efficiency goes up, people buy more computing/storage/bandwidth since the increased demand driven by new applications swamps the decreased demand from greater efficiency. So Sloot's compression algorithm (if it really worked) would have likely driven demand up, and killing him would have made no sense.
Disclaimer: I didn't kill him, and this post is not an effort to cover up the conspiracy.
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?
Adam Clarks Adams Platform:
https://www.itwire.com/opinion...
http://www.smh.com.au/business...
Now you might think ok, this one was a scammer, but people vet those things, cant fool me twice, right?
http://v-net.tv/2015/10/09/unk...
5 years later VERY SAME "The company’s senior development team comprises: Adam Clarke" :)
Adam Clark, of Adam’s Platform Technology (2004) "transfer a 1.3 gigbyte video file to a 1.4 megabyte floppy disk." strikes again in another scam
Another one is Madison Priest's Zekko Corp: :D
http://www.bizjournals.com/sac...
http://jacksonville.com/tu-onl...
http://jacksonville.com/tu-onl...
Magic video compression turned out to be buried cable
Want more video compression scams? Check out V-Nova Perseus - they promise 3x smaller files than h.264, but somewhat independent tests show 20% bigger files at same quality :) and the real kicker is Perseus is really just reencapsulated h.264 video with resize filter on top :D multi million dollar scam, they even scored one Sat TV network contract.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
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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