Well, unskilled labor manufacturing is leaving in droves, and has been for decades. This is probably a good thing in the long term - you want pollution producing industries here?
The way American companies compete against foreign companies is the same way we have for centuries - innovation and productivity. Even though Ford could build a car plant in Mongolia and pay 1% of UAW wages, they'd lose their shirt. Shipping costs to consumers and from suppliers, lack of a trained labor force, etcetera would cost them much more than they'd save.
Now, making plastic toys? Yeah, that's in China now, for the reasons you cite. But how is that a bad thing? Have you SEEN the toys you can buy for $20 now? Unbelievable! What do you think it'd cost to build, say, a Hoberman Sphere with US labor? How many fewer would get sold at that price. Not a lot of US jobs saved, but Hoberman is a lot poorer. And he lives in the USA.
As for environmental protections, we certainly need better global environmental controls. But trade isn't the problem or the solution there. Even if we had complete trade barriers, greenhouse gasses don't know borders.
Yes, moving a car factory to El Salvador will cost some US jobs in the short term. But no, there will be a price drop (or a price/performance improvement) in cars available in the USA. There is the idea floating around that outsourcing means that companies just keep the profits, and that money just vanishes from the economies somehow. However, in a competitive market like cars, some company is always willing to trade lower profits for increased market share. This can take the form of selling the same car for less, or more car for the same price. But this puts pressure on everyone else to lower prices.
For example, compare how much car you can get for 1/4th of the median family income today compared to a few decades ago. A 2004 Civic is a vastly better car than anything one could buy in 1972.
And look at how much better US made cars got in the decade after the Japanese import boom started. While it might have been painful for the workers in Detroit, for the vastly greater number of US car drivers, imports and outsourcing have been a HUGE gain.
The thing about free trade is that the pain is concentrated, but the benefits are diffuse. But the aggregate benefits always (and yes, I mean ALWAYS - I don't know of a single counterexample in the last few thousand years) outweigh the aggregate losses.
The wage differential between the USA and India is a reflection of our greater wealth and productivity, not a threat to our wealth and productivity.
I've got an Athlon MP 2600+ workstation with an Intel gigabit card, which connects via a $199 LinkSys Gig switch to an ancient Mac OS X dual 450 box running 10.3 Server. I get ~470 Mbps copying from the server to the workstation, which is a heck of a lot better than I had with 100Base.
I'm probably unusual in that I work with uncompressed HD files from home:). My current project is 2 TB.
Actually, the 533 MHz Xeon bus means a dual Xeon system is likely memory bound for a lot of video tasks, which are bandwidth-critical, or a mix of bandwidth and CPU bound. Single-processor P4 is a lot faster than Xeon for video decoding, for example, since the bus is 2/3rds faseter. Dual G5 and Dual Opteron provide way more bandwidth per processor than Xeon in dual configurations, and so win for a lot of media processing tasks.
Ah - the selection process was insufficiently political for you.
The DVD Forum was instructed to pick the technically best codecs for the job, and made a reasonable selection on that basis. They're going back 60 days later to review the intellectual property status of the codecs, and may drop one or more based on that.
You seem rather confused on how licensing works. MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC, and VC-9 all have license costs. If anything, VC-9's are cheaper and more flexible.
And why pick now? It takes years to get these things done. And their current pace, HD DVD won't be in products until 2006, at which point it'll probably be hard to find new standard definition large-screen televisions.
And yes, broadcasters are already planning on how to get away from MPEG-2. I did a presentation at NAB last year about the use of alternative codecs within ATSC data. And Cablevision has already announced their MPEG-2 HD satellite system.
Well, once they've locked down the bitstream, folks can start innovating on building better encoders compatible with the bitstream format. 2-pass encoding would be an obvious initial step.
Codecs can get a LOT better due to encoder innovation. MPEG-2 has roughly tripled its compression efficiency since standardization.
Well, Real is ADDING Theora support, but it's like like it threatens their own proprietary codecs. The new RealVideo 10 is excellent. Backwards compatible with RV9, but with a much enhanced new codec. Better motion searching, and an innovative preprocessing engine coupled to the codec where it basically smoothes out areas in the video that would result in artifacts. The resulting video can look abnormally "clean" but almost never has blocking or ringing artifacts at reasonable data rates.
DivX has the largest market share for pirated content distributed via P2P networks. But it isn't a meaningful player in commercial markets.
Among other things, since DivX is based on the AVI file format, it doesn't have native support for streaming. It's really a CD-ROM format at its heart.
Also, DivX uses the MPEG-4 part 2 video codec, which is being superseded.
For commercial codecs, MPEG-2 is probably 95% of the market today. And the battle is now raging between Microsoft's VC-9 and MPEG-4 AVC (aka Part 10 aka H.264) as to which will replace MPEG-2 over this decade.
DVD Forum announced provisional support for three video codecs:
Microsoft's VC-9 MPEG-2 MPEG-4 AVC (aka H.264)
Both VC-9 and AVC have substantial, provable enhancements in compression efficiency over the MPEG-4 Simple Profile used in DivX's HD profiles. What's your issue here?
Also, QuickTime is a file format, not a codec. One could easily implement any of these three codecs inside a QuickTime file.
Bear in mind that VHF/UHF are spread over a WIDE area. Assuming that they're using 35 full bandwidth 19.2 Mbps ATSC signals, that's only an aggregate 672 Mbps. Over an entire city, that's nothing - 10,000 simultaneous users gets you down almost to modem data rates. Also, these are VERY high power transmissions, and so unidirectional. So there would still need to be some kind of backchannel to request data.
My wife and I have run a home-based consulting business together for three years now. The business is going quite well. I have a few suggestions that seem to make a difference.
First, it isn't going to work to have your significant other as an employee. She'll need to be a partner. A power inequality in the business side isn't going to work well with what should be an equitable relationship otherwise. This doesn't mean that everything has to be done by consensus - each party can have their area of responsibility (for our company, my wife does the books and infrastructure, and I do the sales and actual consulting. We supervise marketing jointly, since it isn't something either of us is that strong in).
If your SO is really an employee, how are you going to be able to negotiate a raise, or vacation time, or whatever? You won't be able to treat her "just like an employee" at work and then not elsewhere, and even if you could, you wouldn't want to.
Also, if you work and live together, you'll need to make sure to get some time apart in your lives. It can be rather hermetic to spend all day with the same person in the same place. This has gotten a lot more complex for us now that we have kids.
WMV9 isn't MPEG-4 derived. MS MPEG-4v3 was, but that forked into WMV7 years ago. WMV9 is quite different than MPEG-4 now.
QuickTime encodes and decodes Simple Profile MPEG-4
DivX did Simple in V4, and V5 added support for Advanced Simple.
Most of this will be moot soon, since the MPEG-4 Part 10/AVC/H.264 codec is way better than the old Simple or Advanced Simple, and will rapidly replace the old versions in the next couple of years.
Well, that's their conclusion. But given that they didn't publish the settings for either compression, I'm rather confident that they used sub-optimal settings in both cases.
Divx can be decent, but assuming equally competent compressions, WMV9 should come out measurably better.
Also, none of this says much of anything about consumer devices. Divx supports a subset of codec features at HD resolutions, and the flavor of WMV9 the DVD Forum is talking about using (the SMPTE VC-9 submission), has features that aren't in what they tested. Plus consumer media wouldn't ever use bitrates this low.
RealVideo 10 is really quite impressive from a user perspective. They have an integrated preprocessing mode, so it softens the image anywhere that it would produce artifacts. So, with hard content, the video just loses detail in a natural way, instead of getting blocky.
But if you want to preserve details like film grain, nothing beats WMV9.
The article you're thinking of said that they encode different segments with different parameters, but they exclusively use Sorenson Video 3 Pro for the video codec.
Audio codec is the ancient QDesign Music 2 Pro, instead of the much better, and Apple-savvy AAC-LC. I don't know why.
I teach a week-long intensive compression seminar at Stanford each summer, and the students can do about as well after that week. Compression isn't THAT hard - it's more about not getting any one thing wrong than having to do lots of hard things right.
Beyond the skill of the compressionists, the other thing Apple has going for them is perfect quality uncompressed source.
Apple's MPEG-4 decoder is very good and fast, for Simple Visual profile. Their encoder is what's lacking, being 1-pass only, and tuned for speed instead of quality.
Most MPEG-4 professionals would use something like Squeeze or Compression Master instead to make a.mp4. Way better results with identical compatibility.
It's easy to get high quality sources - just ask video producers for elements from their demo reel. I've done lots of codec review articles, and content providers fall over backwards to get their stuff in. ArtBeats, a stock video house, has always been very helpful for m e.
Any difference in the affinity of the different codecs for MPEG-2 recompression (which is likely to be slight) would be erased by the use of the wholly inappropriate Indeo 5.1 for intermediate. That uses YUV-9 colorspace instead of 4:2:0, throwing away 75% of the color information of the MPEG-2 source, Indeo is also wavelet-based, and so doesn't match well with the DCT or DCT-like transforms used by the codecs in contention (well, I'm not sure what Sorenson 3 uses as its base transform - maybe it's something else).
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Well, unskilled labor manufacturing is leaving in droves, and has been for decades. This is probably a good thing in the long term - you want pollution producing industries here?
The way American companies compete against foreign companies is the same way we have for centuries - innovation and productivity. Even though Ford could build a car plant in Mongolia and pay 1% of UAW wages, they'd lose their shirt. Shipping costs to consumers and from suppliers, lack of a trained labor force, etcetera would cost them much more than they'd save.
Now, making plastic toys? Yeah, that's in China now, for the reasons you cite. But how is that a bad thing? Have you SEEN the toys you can buy for $20 now? Unbelievable! What do you think it'd cost to build, say, a Hoberman Sphere with US labor? How many fewer would get sold at that price. Not a lot of US jobs saved, but Hoberman is a lot poorer. And he lives in the USA.
As for environmental protections, we certainly need better global environmental controls. But trade isn't the problem or the solution there. Even if we had complete trade barriers, greenhouse gasses don't know borders.
Er, no, that's no the way it works.
Yes, moving a car factory to El Salvador will cost some US jobs in the short term. But no, there will be a price drop (or a price/performance improvement) in cars available in the USA. There is the idea floating around that outsourcing means that companies just keep the profits, and that money just vanishes from the economies somehow. However, in a competitive market like cars, some company is always willing to trade lower profits for increased market share. This can take the form of selling the same car for less, or more car for the same price. But this puts pressure on everyone else to lower prices.
For example, compare how much car you can get for 1/4th of the median family income today compared to a few decades ago. A 2004 Civic is a vastly better car than anything one could buy in 1972.
And look at how much better US made cars got in the decade after the Japanese import boom started. While it might have been painful for the workers in Detroit, for the vastly greater number of US car drivers, imports and outsourcing have been a HUGE gain.
The thing about free trade is that the pain is concentrated, but the benefits are diffuse. But the aggregate benefits always (and yes, I mean ALWAYS - I don't know of a single counterexample in the last few thousand years) outweigh the aggregate losses.
The wage differential between the USA and India is a reflection of our greater wealth and productivity, not a threat to our wealth and productivity.
Eh, that doesn't match my experience.
:). My current project is 2 TB.
I've got an Athlon MP 2600+ workstation with an Intel gigabit card, which connects via a $199 LinkSys Gig switch to an ancient Mac OS X dual 450 box running 10.3 Server. I get ~470 Mbps copying from the server to the workstation, which is a heck of a lot better than I had with 100Base.
I'm probably unusual in that I work with uncompressed HD files from home
Actually, the 533 MHz Xeon bus means a dual Xeon system is likely memory bound for a lot of video tasks, which are bandwidth-critical, or a mix of bandwidth and CPU bound. Single-processor P4 is a lot faster than Xeon for video decoding, for example, since the bus is 2/3rds faseter. Dual G5 and Dual Opteron provide way more bandwidth per processor than Xeon in dual configurations, and so win for a lot of media processing tasks.
And Apple also licenses the MPEG-4 file format, which is based on their own QuickTime file format.
Well, maybe that's what people who don't work professionally with digital media mean by it, but that's kind of like calling Explorer "The Internet."
Ah - the selection process was insufficiently political for you.
The DVD Forum was instructed to pick the technically best codecs for the job, and made a reasonable selection on that basis. They're going back 60 days later to review the intellectual property status of the codecs, and may drop one or more based on that.
You seem rather confused on how licensing works. MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC, and VC-9 all have license costs. If anything, VC-9's are cheaper and more flexible.
And why pick now? It takes years to get these things done. And their current pace, HD DVD won't be in products until 2006, at which point it'll probably be hard to find new standard definition large-screen televisions.
And yes, broadcasters are already planning on how to get away from MPEG-2. I did a presentation at NAB last year about the use of alternative codecs within ATSC data. And Cablevision has already announced their MPEG-2 HD satellite system.
Well, once they've locked down the bitstream, folks can start innovating on building better encoders compatible with the bitstream format. 2-pass encoding would be an obvious initial step.
Codecs can get a LOT better due to encoder innovation. MPEG-2 has roughly tripled its compression efficiency since standardization.
Well, Real is ADDING Theora support, but it's like like it threatens their own proprietary codecs. The new RealVideo 10 is excellent. Backwards compatible with RV9, but with a much enhanced new codec. Better motion searching, and an innovative preprocessing engine coupled to the codec where it basically smoothes out areas in the video that would result in artifacts. The resulting video can look abnormally "clean" but almost never has blocking or ringing artifacts at reasonable data rates.
DivX has the largest market share for pirated content distributed via P2P networks. But it isn't a meaningful player in commercial markets.
Among other things, since DivX is based on the AVI file format, it doesn't have native support for streaming. It's really a CD-ROM format at its heart.
Also, DivX uses the MPEG-4 part 2 video codec, which is being superseded.
For commercial codecs, MPEG-2 is probably 95% of the market today. And the battle is now raging between Microsoft's VC-9 and MPEG-4 AVC (aka Part 10 aka H.264) as to which will replace MPEG-2 over this decade.
DVD Forum announced provisional support for three video codecs:
Microsoft's VC-9
MPEG-2
MPEG-4 AVC (aka H.264)
Both VC-9 and AVC have substantial, provable enhancements in compression efficiency over the MPEG-4 Simple Profile used in DivX's HD profiles. What's your issue here?
Also, QuickTime is a file format, not a codec. One could easily implement any of these three codecs inside a QuickTime file.
However, looking at the announcement in more detail, it looks like it's less bandwidth than that. They're using parts of only 11 digital.
Also, most TV markets are a LOT larger than 50,000 people. There are plenty of transmitters in the NE which can get over 1M viewers.
Bear in mind that VHF/UHF are spread over a WIDE area. Assuming that they're using 35 full bandwidth 19.2 Mbps ATSC signals, that's only an aggregate 672 Mbps. Over an entire city, that's nothing - 10,000 simultaneous users gets you down almost to modem data rates. Also, these are VERY high power transmissions, and so unidirectional. So there would still need to be some kind of backchannel to request data.
My wife and I have run a home-based consulting business together for three years now. The business is going quite well. I have a few suggestions that seem to make a difference.
First, it isn't going to work to have your significant other as an employee. She'll need to be a partner. A power inequality in the business side isn't going to work well with what should be an equitable relationship otherwise. This doesn't mean that everything has to be done by consensus - each party can have their area of responsibility (for our company, my wife does the books and infrastructure, and I do the sales and actual consulting. We supervise marketing jointly, since it isn't something either of us is that strong in).
If your SO is really an employee, how are you going to be able to negotiate a raise, or vacation time, or whatever? You won't be able to treat her "just like an employee" at work and then not elsewhere, and even if you could, you wouldn't want to.
Also, if you work and live together, you'll need to make sure to get some time apart in your lives. It can be rather hermetic to spend all day with the same person in the same place. This has gotten a lot more complex for us now that we have kids.
Yep. I've had a web-site redesign in progress for ages now. It should be done in a few weeks, I keep telling myself.
WMV9 isn't MPEG-4 derived. MS MPEG-4v3 was, but that forked into WMV7 years ago. WMV9 is quite different than MPEG-4 now.
QuickTime encodes and decodes Simple Profile MPEG-4
DivX did Simple in V4, and V5 added support for Advanced Simple.
Most of this will be moot soon, since the MPEG-4 Part 10/AVC/H.264 codec is way better than the old Simple or Advanced Simple, and will rapidly replace the old versions in the next couple of years.
Well, that's their conclusion. But given that they didn't publish the settings for either compression, I'm rather confident that they used sub-optimal settings in both cases.
Divx can be decent, but assuming equally competent compressions, WMV9 should come out measurably better.
Also, none of this says much of anything about consumer devices. Divx supports a subset of codec features at HD resolutions, and the flavor of WMV9 the DVD Forum is talking about using (the SMPTE VC-9 submission), has features that aren't in what they tested. Plus consumer media wouldn't ever use bitrates this low.
RealVideo 10 is really quite impressive from a user perspective. They have an integrated preprocessing mode, so it softens the image anywhere that it would produce artifacts. So, with hard content, the video just loses detail in a natural way, instead of getting blocky.
But if you want to preserve details like film grain, nothing beats WMV9.
The article you're thinking of said that they encode different segments with different parameters, but they exclusively use Sorenson Video 3 Pro for the video codec.
Audio codec is the ancient QDesign Music 2 Pro, instead of the much better, and Apple-savvy AAC-LC. I don't know why.
I teach a week-long intensive compression seminar at Stanford each summer, and the students can do about as well after that week. Compression isn't THAT hard - it's more about not getting any one thing wrong than having to do lots of hard things right.
Beyond the skill of the compressionists, the other thing Apple has going for them is perfect quality uncompressed source.
Apple's MPEG-4 decoder is very good and fast, for Simple Visual profile. Their encoder is what's lacking, being 1-pass only, and tuned for speed instead of quality.
.mp4. Way better results with identical compatibility.
Most MPEG-4 professionals would use something like Squeeze or Compression Master instead to make a
It's easy to get high quality sources - just ask video producers for elements from their demo reel. I've done lots of codec review articles, and content providers fall over backwards to get their stuff in. ArtBeats, a stock video house, has always been very helpful for m e.
VP4? I don't believe that was ever released. I had a review copy of it, but they quickly superseded it with VP5.
VP3 was the one that was open-souces, and is used as the basis of Ogg Theora.
The current On2 codec is VP6, which is free for personal use.
Any difference in the affinity of the different codecs for MPEG-2 recompression (which is likely to be slight) would be erased by the use of the wholly inappropriate Indeo 5.1 for intermediate. That uses YUV-9 colorspace instead of 4:2:0, throwing away 75% of the color information of the MPEG-2 source, Indeo is also wavelet-based, and so doesn't match well with the DCT or DCT-like transforms used by the codecs in contention (well, I'm not sure what Sorenson 3 uses as its base transform - maybe it's something else).
The MPEG-4 encoder would have been quite a bit faster on Mac, since it is AltiVec optimized on Mac, but probably scalar code for x86.
Sorenson optimizes their own codecs, and have done both AltiVec and SSE optimizations to their codec, so speed would have been more comparable.
The quality should be virtually identical - the algorithms are the algorithms.
Quality limited encoding is great if you care about quality more than bitrate.
Bitrate limited is great if you care about file size or bitrate more than quality.
Each has its place. Real-time streaming obviously has a hard requirement for the latter.