Full-Screen Video Over 28.8k: The Claims Continue 459
gwernol writes "Over at Screen Daily they are claiming that an Australian company has demonstrated a high quality, full-screen video-on-demand service that is delivered over a 28.8k modem. They claim this will 'eliminate the need for broadband.' If this is true, then they'll change the world. Of course, the basic technology has been around for a while, see this article from 1998 or this one from earlier this year. I remain extremely sceptical. If this is real, why won't they allow proper independent testing? But it is interesting that they're getting funding. Could this be the last great Internet scam?"
Several readers also pointed out this brief report at imdb.com as well. We've mentioned this before, but the news here is the reportedly successful demo. It would be a lot easier to swallow if he'd let people test it independently, but video-over-28.8 sure is tantalizing.
Video over 28.8 (Score:1, Insightful)
Of course they have to innovate the dialup service in australia because of the broadband whoring that goes on in australia. 100 mb a month traffic limits and shit. I send more traffic than that per day of quaking.
Eliminate Broadband? (Score:5, Insightful)
With all the great things I have with broadband (at the same cost of 28.8 service), plus, if you can compress a stream for 28.8, imagine what you can do with broadband!
This won't eliminate broadband. It'll strengthen it!
End of Broadband? (Score:4, Insightful)
The real advantages of a broadband conneciton is that you are always connected; you are accessible to others via mail and messaging at all times (just imagine that you had to explicitly connect your telephone to use it, then disconnect it again afterwards). The speed, while very nice, is actually not as important.
/Janne
It's Not Only About Speed... (Score:5, Insightful)
People are going to want to send and receive video emails from their handhelds. We need a technology that will be able to strike a balance between energy required to transmit the signal (bandwidth) and the energy required to compress and decompress the signal (signal processing).
Smoke and Mirrors (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't even think it would be that hard to fake.
Proprietary 'secret' Technologies (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't help but think of 'The Spanish Prisoner.'
Neat, but it still doesn't solve The Real Problem. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's like choosing an O(exp) algorithm when you know an O(1) algorithm is available.
See, if I start broadcasting a signal, the more people that tune in, the more I can charge for pay-per-view or advertising. But the neat thing is that my cost is fixed; no matter how many people tune into that signal, it costs me the same amount to spray EM waves all over the place.
But with VoD, every new viewer means new bandwidth. Meaning that my costs go up with each new customer. And since the cost of additional bandwidth is not a linear equation, at some point there's diminishing returns, regardless of how small the stream is. My profit margins wither and die if there's enough demand for my video stream.
The only real solution for this from a business perspective is...get this...distributed file sharing, such as Napster or Gnutella. With tools like these, I'm able to avoid the added demands on my server by making the folks who want the service into servers themselves.
So the real technical problem to solve with VoD is not to make the streams smaller, although that certainly doesn't hurt, but to make money off of folks' file transfers. Obviously a direct tax on each transfer is going to cause problems, but an advertising-based model, where each transferred file has an advertisement attached with it, could work wonderfully.
Too bad for the RIAA and MPAA that they're too busy suing file-sharing users and pushing unsuccessful VoD goose-chases to figure this out, eh?
This is a cool technology if it's real. I wouldn't be surprised if it is real. But it won't make the internet into the great media-delivery tool the media corporations want it to be.
Re:MP3... (Score:1, Insightful)
How it works (pure speculation) (Score:2, Insightful)
Even if you take lossy compression such as DivX and reduce the video size, you're still talking about 100 k for decent video and 1 Mbit for anything close to full screen quality.
But we're talking data here... what about information? Data is bits. Information is the meaning of the bits, and a lot of information is highly redundant. Take english. I heard once that there are 1.2 bits per character in the english language; that's why text files get such good compression rates with gzip.
Video is not so highly compressible, mainly because the codec doesn't understand images. Codecs generally just split the image up into smaller and smaller blocks and look for exactly repeating patterns. Lossy compression allows them to look for roughly repeating patterns, and pretend they're exact. Not exactly rocket science.
Take a scene; any one. Like the one from the Matrix. Where Keanu Reeves is in his trench coat, black t-shirt, and black jeans, and an evil computer agent is standing in the background firing at him. You see Keanu bent over at the knees and there's 5 bullets coming at him with a particular trajectory pattern, with cool spiral air deformations coming off the back. Know the one I'm talking about?
Guess what? I just described it in 312 characters. About 400 bits. Through in another 100 to precisely place everything and another 500 to describe background scenery, etc. Sure, it was REALLY lossy compression, but that's an example of the kind of thing you can do if you have an understanding of what's in video. At the very least, you can decide WHAT you can ignore and focus on preserving the really important stuff.
Like, most people won't notice if the sky isn't the exact same shade of blue. Or if the flat blue areas of the sky have a slightly different texture applied to them.
Okay, this is all so far pure pie-in-the-sky theorizing so far... I just wanted to set all that up to point out that this seems possible. HOW could it be done? Well, this is pure speculation but...
A few years ago lots of people were looking at using various types of fractals to compress images down. This flourished briefly as the IFS file format (c. 1995), but the patents on the algorithm allowed the author to charge an exhorbitant royalty, so it never got off the ground other than for a few high-end video conferencing systems. These systems used (you guess it!) regular phone lines. Sure, maybe not 28.8 modems and maybe not full screen (though I distinctly remember that the frame rate was between 24 and 30 fps, depending on what kind of processor you used), but from there it's just process improvements.
Plus, I imagine that MP3 has taught us a lot about lossy compression that could be applied to this sort of thing. I don't personally know anything about the details of MP3, but assume that its methods can be applied to fractal compression with approximately the same rate, e.g. at 3x-6x compression at negligible quality loss and 12x at maximal compression... and that would be enough to take this technology to the levels this guy is talking about...
Ok, I'm done dreaming. Anyone have any comments? Does anyone remember this IFS format or have any more info on it than my hazy recollection?
Lets do the math... (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets assume a video frame size of 320x240x16bit. We can scale this up fairly well, however, its no where near TV quality.
Each frame takes 153,600 bytes per frame uncompressed. Now lets say you can get 80% compression on each frame. That would bring us down to 30,720 bytes per frame.
A typical 28.8K modem is going to see 2800 bytes a second (on a good day, more like 2400 bytes in the real world). Note: This is a 28.8K modem and not a 56K modem.
Based on these numbers, it would take about 10.9 seconds per frame (30,720 / 2800 = 10.9).
Obviously there are tricks that one can do such as deltas between frames rather than actual frames, etc...
However, in order to get 24FPS (3,686,400 bytes)in real time, they would have to get a compression rate of 99.93% (for the 24 frames).
It just doesn't add up. I think they are full of it and this product will never go beyond vaporware.
Bad news for the MPAA - Here comes DVDster! (Score:3, Insightful)
It's still fairly difficult for users to encode, post and/or download entire DVD movies. Most computer users wouldn't have a clue of where to being.
If this codec does what it proclaims to do, however, can you see this company *not* licensing encoders one way or the other? Real's Mpeg2-based compressor was pretty revolutionary at the time, yet they still offered a 'free' version.
DivX, which is free, but questionable, is even more revolutionary in terms of quality and filesize.
Both these codecs have drawn people into the whole movie/video trading scene.
If this codec *does* allow for compression of videos to make them the same size as the average MP3, (and think about that comparison... For this to work, they'll have to reliable encode video at a lower rate than MP3 audo), the movie trading scene will take off in a way that will make Valenti's asshole shrivel up.
Of course, this company can try to keep the codec and/or encryption secret. To that I have this to say... Jon Johansen and DeCSS
My guess: Foveated Imaging... (Score:3, Insightful)
My first guess it that these aussies have impressed clueless execs with ordinary tech.
My second guess is that maybe someone finally got around to applying foveation [nyu.edu] in a way that works really well.
Perhaps these aussies are hooking up test audiences to eye-tracking devices, and recording their average gaze during a film so that they can get even higher compression [stanford.edu] by throwing out what's outside most peoples field of view?
*shrug*
Old school compression for Video over Modem. (tm) (Score:2, Insightful)
Back in the good ole C64/apple days we wanted to stream gfx over a modem. With ASCII and reprogramming the characters into 8x8x2 bitmaps. Using characters mappings you could make little guys run, little cars drive, etc.
Then someone came up with Megabignum (no joke), used A-Z,a-z,0-9,!@#.,etc to have a large set of characters for use.
Then there was RLE type gfx which was black and white bitmaps. (I think 4 bits actually).
You map a 320x200 RLE into 40x25 ASCII type characters. So 1000 characters per frame or lets round up to 1K per frame. I don't think anyone did anything this big, maybe on some demos.
Using this character set mapping conversion was a simple trick, but it worked.
I don't see why you couldn't take this character set idea and expand it with compression and do larger 640x480 b/w 30fps images over a 56K modem.
Maybe someone smart could come up with a way to add color.
Re:If you believe that... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This could work... (Score:2, Insightful)
Umm, wait a sec -- in the VideoCD compression phase you've already taken all the advantage you can of the slop in the original NTSC. You're talking about 100X compression of an already tightly-compressed data stream, which is to say that you're going to find sufficient redundancy in the data to remove 99% of it.
Pull the other one.