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Streaming DVD Video over the Internet 197

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-thats-what-I'm-talking-about dept.
Sexy Commando writes "According to this article on ZDNet, the new codec, H.264, is able to stream DVD quality video using bandwidth as little as less than 1Mbps. The new codec requires 3 to 4 times as much CPU power than MPEG-2 to process the video. Now we can have two movies on 1 CD. Cheers."
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Streaming DVD Video over the Internet More

Streaming DVD Video over the Internet

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  • But this is very cool. No more having to go sub-700kbps for movies over 2 hours! :-D

    • Hmmm... DVD quality at lower filesize than divx and all those codecs... this means that ALL those ripped movies are going to be worthless... people will have to re-encode it all AGAIN to H.264 and just chuck all those old "unwatchable" divx rips...

      • ".. this means that ALL those ripped movies are going to be worthless... people will have to re-encode it all AGAIN ..."

        Shit. Hadn't thought of that. It's going to be like all the ogg files that are converted MP3s, complete with generation loss...

    • Re:FP!!! (Score:4, Informative)

      by dougmc ( 70836 ) <dougmc+slashdot@frenzied.us> on Sunday October 13, 2002 @11:30AM (#4440886) Homepage
      But this is very cool. No more having to go sub-700kbps for movies over 2 hours! :-D
      Actually, you'll still have to reduce your bitrate for movies that are that long.

      Bitrate * Time = total size.
      Merely having a spiffy new codec won't change that simple equation :)

      It's just that the lower bitrate will still get you good quality encoding, where before your quality went to hell as your bitrate went below 700 kbps.

  • Beautiful! (Score:5, Funny)

    by kir ( 583 ) on Sunday October 13, 2002 @09:43AM (#4440548)

    That's a LOT of pr0n!

  • This is great however ... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 13, 2002 @09:45AM (#4440552)
    This is great however if it requires 3 to 4 times as much CPU power as mpeg 2 then i don't think it will gain widespread adoption among computer video enthusiest mainly because it would take them a very long time to convert any reasonably sized movie.

    I wonder what the mpaa's reaction will be to this
    • From another article [eetimes.com]:

      "To date, LSI Logic has not outlined the company's plan for how and when to introduce silicon capable of handling H.264. Umesh Padval, LSI Logic's senior vice president of broadband entertainment division, acknowledged that Bob Saffari's group - responsible for professional video market - has seen a growing demand for H.264. But as far as the volume consumer H.264 market is concerned, he said: "The actual deployment for H.264 is not solidified at all."

      Padval predicted that the volume market for H.264 won't emerge before early 2005."

      • Re:This is great however ... (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        It's just software. One good content "trigger" and distribution becomes a non-issue. For example, imagine that Apple puts h.264 into QuickTime 4.1, and puts out the next big trailor or streamed event out in h.264. This worked for MPEG4 quite nicely -- millions of user installs in a week.

        If the question is whether consumer computers are fast enough to support h.264, well, I haven't heard anything yet to indicate that would be an issue. The only devices so far discussed as not having the muscle to support h.264 were PDA's and wireless devices.

        What fun!

    • Re:This is great however ... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 13, 2002 @09:56AM (#4440583)
      how much processing power did divx and mpeg2 require compared to good old mpeg, anyway?

      the ones encoding always have time to wait a little longer, and mpeg2/divx already requires quite a lot of processing power for playback...

      what people want is a quality:space ratio as high as possible, and considering the fact that very many actually have a new pentium 4 or athlon xp anyway, they don't mind watching good quality movies.

      remember moore's law...if this codec is getting widespread adoption 3 years after mpeg2, the processing power availible is already 4x what it was...
    • If DivX/mpeg2 decoding works fine on my 300 mHz machine, I imagine my 2.4 gHz machine will be fine with 3-4 times the CPU needed.

    • Re:This is great however ... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Zeinfeld ( 263942 ) on Sunday October 13, 2002 @10:32AM (#4440685) Homepage
      This is great however if it requires 3 to 4 times as much CPU power as mpeg 2 then i don't think it will gain widespread adoption among computer video enthusiest mainly because it would take them a very long time to convert any reasonably sized movie

      I don't thinkk the CPU is going to be the issue, more likely that the patent license terms will make or break it. If the holders try the stupid stuff they did for MPEG4 then this is going to be Dead on Arrival.

      Problem is that people get this idea 'people are going to use my stuff and make $$$$ so I should get $$$'. Only thing is that if you want $$$ and there is an alternative only half as good that costs only $$ then you are going to get 0$.

      I suspect that MPEG2 is going to be acceptable for some time yet and that there will be no switchover until acceptable license terms are offered.

      • You seem to imply that due to patent issues MPEG4 was DOA.

        DivX anyone? The original DivX codec was just a hacked MS MPEG-4 codec that removed a few recording restriction flags.
    • This post was intended to be modded as "funny" -- thats why they AC'd it.
      Its typical /. drivel -- indicating no real knowledge of codecs/how things work/mentioning the mpaa.
      *sigh*
    • Except that the movie only has to be encoded ONCE and shared. As long as the decoding is easy enough for an average computer it will be widely adopted.
    • It says 3-4 times to process the video? Does that mean just to encode or encode and decode? If it takes 3-4 times as much to both, then the CPU will be an issue. An 800MHz PIII will not be able to handle it well and chances are only dual systems of any kind will be able to handle it very well. There's a reason why Appple went to dual processor configurations. DVD encoding/decoding takes a lot of CPU usage as is.
    • I disagree. Now people are encoding to divx in better than real time on some machines so i dont think its a problem to take 8 hours to encode a movie. I remember when i did 20 hour encodes back in the day. Its really not a big deal.
    • From occasional obvservation, I have come to the conclusion that Divx requires AT LEAST %50 more CPU power than MPEG2 software decoding.

      Now, mind you, these number are not at all easy to come by because most people don't use the same quality levels as a standard MPEG2 DVD.

      Most people use a slightly lower resolution, this will definitely save you some CPU cycles decoding the video.

      Another thing most people don't think about is that the actual video data used to describe the scene is directly related to the processing power required to decode the scene. Finer detail reflective of a true MPEG2 stream will use a lot more processing power than your standard "movie on a disk" Divx encode.

      If you use dual-pass, you can approach MPEG2 quality @ 720x480 at approximately 2mbit. Accomplishing the same at 1Mbit is a great acheivement.

      You people seemed to have missed the major point of this codec, and that is we finally have a code capable of delivering TV over DSL, or other low-bandwidth LANs like 802.11b. There are movements in place to create real-time encoders from MPEG2, and this is where the REAL market acceptance will be.

  • hmm? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by scalis ( 594038 ) on Sunday October 13, 2002 @09:47AM (#4440556) Homepage
    Well, I've got no phd in DVD technology, but the AC3 sound alone would take up far more than 1mbit all by itself right?

    One of the reasons im not into watching movies on my PC is that I cannot take advantage of my DTS gizmos.
    If this is just for video quality - Count me out.....

    • Re:hmm? (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      When i watch movies on my computer i never notice the sound, even if it had mp3 quality sound i wouldn't care. The video is the most noticed aspect.

      • Re:hmm? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by scalis ( 594038 ) on Sunday October 13, 2002 @10:04AM (#4440613) Homepage
        When i watch movies on my computer i never notice the sound, even if it had mp3 quality sound i wouldn't care. The video is the most noticed aspect.

        Yes, well one of te reasons I rather rent/buy the DVD is that my TV screen is LARGER than my monitor. I also have a remote. But that really doesnt matter since other people may have plasma screens of 62"... Besides that the top reason is that I *cannot* take afvantage of the sound since:

        1: The sound is encoded with something that sounds like mp3 if I got the article correct. MP3 is stereo (dolby Pro-Logic) and most sound cards are stereo although some new ones are actually 5.1

        2: My AC3 amplifier is better than ANY soundcard you can possibly come up with in the near future

        The sound may not matter when watching on your computer with headphones but my guessing is that they are actualy trying to develop technology to change the way we rent DVD's and watch TV. They can't do this until the experience gets better than it is with the old technology. Im sorry, just because it's new, it isn't better in my oppinion.

        • Re:hmm? (Score:2, Interesting)

          by xswl0931 ( 562013 )
          This 24/96 sound card: http://www.digitalconnection.com/products/audio/ap 2496.asp has less than 0.002% THD, DTS/DD decoding is done via software. Most likely your receiver has more distortion and costs many times more.

    • Re:hmm? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Karpe ( 1147 ) on Sunday October 13, 2002 @09:56AM (#4440586) Homepage
      No. Dolby AC3 would take 384 kbit/s, for all channels.
      • No. Dolby AC3 would take 384 kbit/s, for all channels.

        If that was the case, no one would be happier tha me but as far as I know an AC3 (encoded Dolby 5.1) stream (48kHz, 16bit) uses roughly around 1.5 mbs of bandwidth. This is according to some online test results i have read, but if you know otherwize, please convince me!
        If you do a 6-channel, 96kHz, 24bit, uncompressed audio stream, it uses roughly 13Mbs of bandwidth.
        This is all dependant on the compression ofcourse, but I cant find anything more than the standard includes a broad range of audio and video technologies that allow a wide variety of different applications, online and offline. about audio in the article. After that they go on to discussing MPEG-3 type sound....

    • Hey Moderators!

      This should be moderated -5, wrong. Mod up the guy who knows 384 kbps and 448 kbps.

      • the guy was trying to confirm the truth of his statement. Regardless of the actual bandwidth, the guy brought up an interesting point. Would you sacrifice audio quality to watch a streamed DVD? I personally would, but I've still got my pair of $50 speakers from when I got a gateway four years ago.
    • the AC3 sound alone would take up far more than 1mbit all by itself
      Amazing -- this comment was scored 4.

      When we say 1 Mbps, we mean "1 megabit per second." If the movie is 90 minutes long, it takes 90 * 60 * 1Mbit = 675 Mbytes.

    • Check out the Extigy. Its an extra thing to lug around, and you need a power source for it (which sucks for portability or watching on a plane or in a car or whatever) butyou get the dolby out of it.

  • Yeah shure. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by The J Kid ( 266953 ) on Sunday October 13, 2002 @09:48AM (#4440563) Homepage Journal
    Quote:
    [..] making the size of video files a top hindrance to Hollywood's Internet video-distribution plans.

    Yeah Right. Just like the Music Industry's plans for Internet music-distribution...dream on.

    • Re:Yeah shure. (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      exctly, there is no way that the MPAA will broadcast movies to whoever pays a small fee for them. The encryption that they design may be good but for every genius they have there are 100 hacking the fuck out of everything they make (remember how fast CSS was cracked)

      • Re:Yeah shure. (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        remember how fast CSS was cracked

        Yeah, I remember. DeCSS came out end-1999, years after DVDs were released until. And it was only possible because a DVD player manufacturer screwed up in their design and allowed their private key to be sniffed out, allowing them to generate all the other "secret" keys.

        • It's not like there's been a team sitting around since the first implementation of the DVD standard. The CSS key is 40-bit, and that is small enough to brute force. Besides, if they weren't able to get it out of the Xing player, they could've decompiled any of few dozen DVD players out there.
          • The CSS key is 40-bit, and that is small enough to brute force. Besides, if they weren't able to get it out of the Xing player, they could've decompiled any of few dozen DVD players out there.
            But, FWIW, those 40bits are split into 16 and 24 bit pieces and the system is so weak it can be brute-forced on the 16bit section.

  • I think.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Skyshadow ( 508 ) on Sunday October 13, 2002 @09:49AM (#4440564) Homepage
    I'm reasonably sure that I just heard Jack Valenti spinning in his grave. The MPAA thought they had problems before...

  • Calculations (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jon Chatow ( 25684 ) <slashdot@jdforrester.org> on Sunday October 13, 2002 @09:49AM (#4440565) Homepage
    Average film > 2 hours = 7200 seconds; assuming constant bandwidth @ 1Mbps gives a size >=~ 858 MeB per film. I suppose you could go lower than DVD quality, but personally I just dump VOBs to my harddisc, as ripping to a compression algorithm like DiVX takes far too long, so 'two movies on 1 CD' sounds, well, a bit far fetched...

  • VideoLocus (Score:5, Informative)

    by masterkool ( 550633 ) <masterkool@hotmail.com> on Sunday October 13, 2002 @09:52AM (#4440572) Homepage
    Here [videolocus.com] is the VideoLocus press release for H.264/MPEG-4 AVC.

  • Finally !! (Score:5, Funny)

    by dr.Flake ( 601029 ) on Sunday October 13, 2002 @09:53AM (#4440574)
    Finally a consumer need for CPU horsepower !

    he: Hey babe, wanna watch a movie ??
    she: sure
    he: wait till i boot the player
    she: ??????
    he: here we go...
    she: is it me, or is it getting hotter in here??
    he: thats just my dual XEON box chewing....

    • Re:Finally !! (Score:4, Funny)

      by netsharc ( 195805 ) on Sunday October 13, 2002 @10:11AM (#4440633)
      wow, you missed mentioning the advantage that the heat might make her take off more and more of her clothes. :P
      • I just assumed that was implied. Esp. now that that "It's getting hot in here" song plays every 10 seconds on the radio...
    • he: Hey babe, wanna watch a movie ??
      she: sure
      he: wait till i boot the player
      she: ??????
      he: here we go...
      she: is it me, or is it getting hotter in here??
      he: so take off all your clothes!
      she: I am getting so hot, I'm going to take my clothes off!

  • And the compression? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by neoform ( 551705 ) <djneoform@gmail.com> on Sunday October 13, 2002 @09:56AM (#4440589) Homepage
    if it takes 3 to 4 times more cpu power just to decompress it, how long does it take to actually make these files? I've done some DivX-ing and 16 hour compression sessions are too long.

    • Re:And the compression? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ergo98 ( 9391 ) on Sunday October 13, 2002 @10:40AM (#4440713) Homepage Journal
      I'm going out of a limb here, but I'm guessing that they really aren't all that concerned with the ripping/P2P crowd. Instead this is intended for media companies that'll make one master digital MPEG4p10 stream, and cable companies can use it for PPV streams/movies on demand, etc. Digital boxes right now are being sent dozens of streams in, I believe, MPEG2, and the bitrate cannot keep up with fast action, and there are significant artifacts in parts. By going to the new codec, not only will they improve the video, they'll lower the bitrate as well, allowing them to fit more "channels" in a given frequenecy.
      • I think there is a big misconception about how good MPEG-2 can actually be.While it's true that lots of cable companies have artifacts in their streams, they are probably using crappy encoders.

        I've seen domo's of Thomsons DBE encoders' that have been optimised for low bitrate, they were pretty darn good at ~1-1.5Mbs, not fantastic for sports but ok for movies/news/sitcoms etc. Even the normal DBE's with the "SuperEncoder" board blow away a most of the competition.

        The point is that MPEG-2 still has a way to go before the format is maxed out. MPEG-2 is cheap to decode and there are a lot of STB's out there that arn't going to be replaced any time soon.
      • I disagree.

        I have used HBO-ON-Demand and even iControl which are both streamed to my set-top box (Pioneer). Never have I had any problems except maybe the expected slow response to the controls.

        When you hit stop or pause it may take a second and while you fast forward you kind of need to anticipate when you want it to stop. But even watching "G-string Divas"; when they come down the pole fast nothing is lost.

        Movies are good also on iControl. I recently watched Corky Romano and we were debating on if the quality was as good as the DVD. We got Dolby Digital from the stream, but we lacked the TV to test actual video quality so I guess it isn't. But it wasn't noticable on a standard 32" TV.

        Actually now we have BBC on demand, Comedy Central and even Cartoon Network and more. I can't wait to check those out.

        (also note, that even downloading at 250K [my max'd speed] doesn't affect the quality which I suspected it might. I know it's a different stream, but I thought they would encroach on my modems bandwidth to provide the extra audio etc.)

        Digital Television is good on Time Warner (IMHE). BTW, we were the first city to get these on-demand services.

  • I'll believe it when I see it (Score:5, Informative)

    by pla ( 258480 ) on Sunday October 13, 2002 @10:00AM (#4440602) Journal
    H.264 exists as MPEG-4 part 10, basically using the AVC rather than the ASP profile for encoding.

    Supposedly, it offers up to 2-4x size reduction over the MPEG-4 ASP.

    However...

    For anyone who has extensively played with the existing ASP codecs available (basically XVID, DIVX, RV9, and WM-whatever), the quality matters a *lot* based on the implementation. And not in any consistent way, letting you pick "codec X does the best job". Nope, more like "on low-motion sequences, codec X does best. For detail, codec Y. For minimal artifacts but some bluring, codec Z", and so on.

    I see no reason to expect H.264 will follow any substantially different path. In another 5 years, it might well let us get a DVD quality movie onto 1 CD. For now, don't hold your breath about this changing the scene overnight. By the time this really does make good on its potential, we'll have the bandwidth and storage to make it unnecessary.

    • Re:I'll believe it when I see it (Score:4, Insightful)

      by sam_handelman ( 519767 ) <samuel.handelmanNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Sunday October 13, 2002 @11:40AM (#4440940) Journal
      we'll have the bandwidth and storage to make it unnecessary

      That's like saying mp3s are unnecessary if you have broadband.

      Yes, I'm perfectly capable of downloading (and storing) most of the songs I want as .wav files. However, I still get them as mp3s, because a tenth as long is a tenth as long.

      Also, if we're talking p2p distribution, the bandwidth hog has an UNLIMITED appetite. If movies are a tenth as big you can get ten times as many.

      • The little problem is when you get more storage or more bandwidth, you tend to find ways to use it to the max...

        I set up a file server for my brothers' MP3 archive (he is a DJ and a few use mp3's on an external drive and laptop for gigs, just because you don't have to lug hundreds of CD's around), and it has 240GB of RAIDed storage, that lasted 6 weeks... it's been teetering around the 10GB mark for a while)... plus a 5Mb broadband doesn't help in keeping the HDD free! We're just saving up for another storage upgrade.

  • Two movies on 1 CD? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by mseeger ( 40923 )
    I doubt it. A bandwidth of 1mbps means about 8MB per minute. On a 700MB CD you'll have around 90 minutes video. This is one movie (and not even that with LoTR).

    I think someone was a little bit overoptimistic :-).

    Yours, Martin

    • 1 Mb/s of needed bandwidth does not mean 1 Mb/s of actual video data transfer at 1 Mb/s for the full length of the movie. I have not read the codec spec, yet, but, perhaps the codec needs the next, say, 30 secs of video to decode the current frameset. So, under this codec, for a 90 minute video, perhaps 1Mb/s is necessary only for the first 60 minutes.

      The point being, it can be very difficult comparing the needed bandwidth for streaming to the size of data sitting latent in storage (like on a CD).

  • They should be worried (Score:5, Insightful)

    by shoemakc ( 448730 ) on Sunday October 13, 2002 @10:17AM (#4440650) Homepage
    Although two movies on a cd sounds farfetched, even a single dvd-quality movie on a cd would be a big jump. Yes there have been lots of improvements in Divx, but on single-disc movies it's still quite clear at times that you're watching a divx and not a dvd.

    The way I see it, Divx needs 3 things before it becomes a major threat to DVD.

    1-Players capable of playing multiple soundtracks, for multiple languages and/or commentary.

    2-Componant Divx Players, or more likely DVD players that can also play DIVX content. People want to watch movies on their tv, not their computer, and only geeks have good tv-output capabilities.

    3-Able to fit even longer movies on a single cd with near dvd-quality. No one like changing (or flipping) disks in the middle of a movie.

    Meet these demands and allow even a layman to pop a DIVX disk into their dvd player and sit back with a bowl of popcorn, and the MPA has a major problem on their hands.

    -Chris

    • 2-Componant Divx Players, or more likely DVD players that can also play DIVX content. People want to watch movies on their tv, not their computer, and only geeks have good tv-output capabilities.

      if you fly a lot then putting movies on your hard disk makes perfect sense, just because of the battery life you save. many flights don't allow cd players or dvd players on board, but you can almost always be using a computer in-flight. i love the idea of loading up 10 or so movies, even at 1/2 size for watching in-flight on long haul flights, or boring train rides.

      most computers have some sort of output to TV don't they? mine always have

      • I take my portable mp3 player (Which to the airline security people is a cd player), and a portable dvd player on every flight I go on (2 a month or so) I have never had any trouble, just one time they made me turn on the dvd player to make sure it wasn't a bomb.

        I actually have more trouble with the laptop, and my ipaq than with the dvd player.

        Where have you ever heard of a policy against DVD players on board?

        Of course, there are the normal restrictions on electronic devices during take off and landing, but thats it.

    • most computers have some sort of output to TV don't they? mine always have

      They do, but most people don't know how to use them. Also, the vast majority of outputs out there are based the Brooketree chipset....which really, really stinks.

      Compare that to the simplicity of popping a disk into a player and pressing "play".

      -Chris

    • Re:They should be worried (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      1-Players capable of playing multiple soundtracks, for multiple languages and/or commentary.

      That has nothing to do with divx. There are other audio codecs out there that support multiple soundtracks. I have a film that has the normal soundtrack and you can take the codec configuration and swap it to the "making of" soundtrack. Another film has two languages. This isn't popular yet, but you can definitely do it.

      • It's not a matter of being unable to do it, heck just save an extra mp3 on the cd and syncronize playback. It's just an issue of players supporting this with a single button.

        -Chris
    • go get yourself an old dreamcast, about $50-65, then get this DivX on Dreamcast [dcemulation.com], burn your disk right, pop it in and press play

    • The way I see it, Divx needs 3 things before it becomes a major threat to DVD.

      1-Players capable of playing multiple soundtracks, for multiple languages and/or commentary.

      Well, I don't know about 2 and 3, but you can do that one now - you just need to put the DivX video into an OGM (Ogg Multimedia) container rather than an AVI container. Then you can have multiple soundtracks (and they can be VBR audio too, whereas AVI only works properly with CBR).

  • The article is somewhat vague... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Guspaz ( 556486 ) on Sunday October 13, 2002 @10:17AM (#4440655)
    It claims this new codec can get the same quality at 33% lower filesizes than other MPEG-4 codecs, but it doesn't say WHAT MPEG-4 codec. There is more than a 33% difference between existing MPEG-4 codecs alone! Are they comparing this to DivX 5.x, arguably the current leader in quality? Or are they comparing it to Microsoft's ISO MPEG-4 encoder, with it's horrid quality?

    Regards, Guspaz.

  • I just want good videos @ launch.com (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cybrthng ( 22291 ) on Sunday October 13, 2002 @10:25AM (#4440668) Homepage Journal
    I like watching dvd's when i want and how i want, and they're already an affordable 9 bucks at alot of stores.

    What i want to see is Launch.com use this for high quality VIDEOS as i'm sick of vivendi pushing the crap they want us to see and luanch.com is an awesome place to see videos of the songs we love.

  • From the Summary:

    The new codec requires 3 to 4 times as much CPU power than MPEG-2 to process the video.

    Talk about lazy, noninformative writing. Rather than say that it requires 3-4 times more processing power, how about just giving a minimum 86 or powerpc processor speed that would support this format?

    The fault here isn't with the person who wrote the summary. That vital piece of information isn't contained in the source article, either. Appalling.
    • Uh...probably because they're generally talking about DVD players/set-top boxes? You know, devices that don't have x86 or PowerPC processors, and are generally spec'd to have a processor that is barely adequate for the job (for power, heat, and cost issues, they usually only want a tiny headroom, hence why the current crop of set-top boxes would largely be insufficient for this new codec).
    • Talk about lazy, noninformative writing. Rather than say that it requires 3-4 times more processing power, how about just giving a minimum 86 or powerpc processor speed that would support this format?

      The fault here isn't with the person who wrote the summary. That vital piece of information isn't contained in the source article, either. Appalling.
      That "vital" piece of information isn't relevant to most. Modern PCs (and Macs) are powerful enough to decode in realtime, no doubt, if the software implementation of the codec is even halfway decent.
      The statement is of much more importance to consumer electronics manufacturers, as they try to go with the cheapest possible chips in their products, and "3-4 times more" means "lots more $$$". When features are dropped due to too high processing speed requirements (in the "it'd take a CPU USD 3$ more expensive" -sense), the statement clearly says "in technofreak expensive products only".

  • mpeg-4 patents (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by gooofy ( 548515 )

    well, I guess this will add a few more entries to the mpeg-4 patentlist [mpegla.com].

    Let's just hope some day theora [theora.org] will be at least as good.

  • Streaming DVD Video? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Zakabog ( 603757 ) <.john. .at. .jmaug.com.> on Sunday October 13, 2002 @10:37AM (#4440698)
    The new codec requires 3 to 4 times as much CPU power than MPEG-2 to process the video.

    Long ago, in the before time, when I had an Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73 GHz, before I fried it and got thrown back to a 1.4 GHz athlon and then I fried that and got thrown back to a 600 PIII) I was able to rip DVD's and convert them to DivX in real time (a little faster actually, around 34 fps.) Now I don't know the differences between MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 but 3 to 4 times as much CPU power doesn't sound too pleasing. Right now I'm riping a DVD, err wait no, I don't do things like that it's illegal. Hypothetically speaking, if I were ripping a DVD right now, there would be 20 hours left because on a 600P III DVD's take a long time to convert to DivX (or so I'm told.) It takes all day for me... err not me, it takes all day for a person with a 600 PIII to convert a DVD to DivX. *shudders thinking about when that person ripped the Matrix for 30 hours and had 3 files, 2 700 meg files and one 50 meg file*
    • it's not like you have to sit there with a pencil and do all the math yourself...

      Speaking of which....what tool is he using that requires 30 hours on a PIII 600? MS Paint?

      -Chris

  • Great Codec overview in The Economist (Score:5, Informative)

    by Dr.Luke ( 611066 ) on Sunday October 13, 2002 @10:43AM (#4440718)
    The economist has a great article reviewing the latest codec offerings from different players. Specifically DivX 5.0 "is said to be particularly good at preventing tearing, a playback error that occurs when the software cannot render the video for display at the same pace that it is being decompressed and fed into the media player. And a new codec from supersecretive Pulsent claims to be object rather than block based. Whereas block-based compression and object-oriented codecs slice up backgrounds and foregrounds into grids, the Pulsent approach actually pinpoints real-world items in the frame--such as a person, tree or building--and processes each element separately. story here [economist.com]
  • Dot boom, Cisco acquires, dot bomb, Cisco dumps. Dot slump, interesting things start to happen.

    I'm somewhat familiar with these folks. They are ex PixStream, who one time they were rumored to be about to "do big stuff in video" with Bell (telephone) Canada. PixStream got juicy and suffered "death by acquisition" [siliconvalleynorth.com].

  • I can encode a DVD down to a single byte! Yes, that's right, stream a single 8-bit byte from the internet to your computer and watch a DVD! However, the media cartels have already gotten to this one, so it requires a copy of the DVD in your drive for "verification" purposes. People will definately pay for this invention!

    Seriously, though, I think this is great. Now I'll be able to store all of my porn, I mean movies in less disk space - a valuable commodity when your main computer is a laptop with a 20gb drive.
  • Many DVDs are already coded at a fairly minimal 2Mbps or so*, so this really isn't as big a deal as people might think. If someone developed a truely intelligent encoder (for starters, one that didn't follow a static frame type pattern such as I-B-P-B-I) and fed it a really clean signal then we could really make progress.

    * ZThe bitrate is according to an industry insider who gave a talk at UC Berekeley. The bitrate is low so that they can fit all the extras on a DVD, which most consumers value more than movie quality.

  • This is Great but (#2) (Score:4, Insightful)

    by eno2001 ( 527078 ) on Sunday October 13, 2002 @11:22AM (#4440859) Homepage Journal
    Do you think that "Joe Computer Geek" is going to be able to get his hands on this to stream his own DVDs? Probably not. There will probably be some sort of DRM built in because the MPAA (as well as the RIAA) is too busy focusing on a few potential lost sales vs. the big revenues that could be had if they just opened their stuff up to internet distribution. They are looking at everything through an outdated selling concept. Not everyone thinks this way though... Peter Gabriel has his entire new album (UP) available to listen to in a streamable format as well as the video for his first single. The quality is low, so it encourages people to buy the real deal, but it's the entire album, so it allows for "try before you buy". The same could be applied to DVD pre-release and this technology would be great for it. But, it's still not going to be something that you or I can legitimately use to stream our own DVDs unless there are a LOT of restrictions. I for one am no longer sure of the legality of me streaming my MP3s to myself at work with icecast and not paying the RIAA those stupid broadcaster's fees. Discuss amongst yourselves.
    • The H.263 codec has been included with QuickTime for quite some time, perhaps this new version will be as well. That would put it in the hands of millions of "Joe Computer Geeks."
  • The computer industry is in the doldrums because people don't have a solid need to upgrade. The computers that they already own are fast enough to do what they want to do.

    These codecs take a lot of processing power. The ones that will follow, that will presumably be even tighter, will probably need even more power.

    This is the application that will drive future upgrades. Most adults don't play video games, but everyone watches TV.

    By getting in line behind palladium, MS and Intel are putting Hollywood's interests ahead of their own. Why buy a $1200 computer to watch video when an $80 DVD player will do it just as well? If you can't do more with the video -- record it, archive it, copy it, etc. -- there's no compelling reason. Why not keep your 300Mhz box for email and web surfing, and keep your DVD player for movies?

    MS and Intel are undoubtedly backing palladium to get Hollywood onboard, to secure their cooperation in the grand campaign to bring computers to the living room, to home entertainment. This is what they don't understand -- that outcome is inevitable, and Hollywood will have little to say about it one way or another. It's the way the technology is evolving, just like music distribution is moving online, with or without the RIAA.

    The quickest way to get to the living room is to make the technology useful for consumers. In the end, the computer companies work for the people who buy the machines, and the interests of the computer industry are served by serving the customers. Not Hollywood, not the RIAA, not anyone else.

  • Finally, a reason to upgrade to faster systems (Score:5, Funny)

    by emptybody ( 12341 ) on Sunday October 13, 2002 @12:24PM (#4441115) Homepage Journal
    This is exactly what intel and AMD need. A real reason for people to upgrade their hardware.
    For most people even a 400Mhz system is enough.

    Simply writing bigger and clunkier apps (a la microshaft) is not a good reason for me to dump[ my hardware.

    It seems to me that the limits of compression technology are self inflicted. We don't do better compression because it takes too long to compress/decompress. However, with the improved speeds capacities of new hardware we can break those barriers.

    When will we see this compression to allow more bandwidth down a dialup line?

    Send me that a pair of 1Thz AMD CPUs!!!

  • So much for hoping I'll ever be able to play my collection of DivX movies on anything other than a computer...

    Most of them are in DIV3 (the original hacked Microsoft Codec), the more recent ones I've started using XVID. While I'd welcome a new codec for better quality, the chances of a dedicated DVD-like player that will play all the various DivX formats seems slim.

    Don't even get me started on OGG...
    • A majority of my movies are in Divx3. A few are in Divx4, no real difference than Divx3, qualitywise. Now, I'm doing dualpass Divx5. Granted, it takes upwards of 8hrs to do both passes on my AthlonXP 1.53. So what, start a compress when I go to sleep or go to work. It's done when I'm back home.

      Am I going to go back and re-rip and recompress all my Divx3 movies? Nope. The quality is ok for me. If I want a movie in a higher quality, then I buy it on DVD. For most movies, Divx is fine.

      And, yes, I prefer to watch movies on my PC. My 19" monitor is much higher quality than my TV, my desk chair is comfy, and I don't even watch television programs. All I need is my computer.

      Hmmm, maybe that's why my marriage is in trouble, you think?
    • Get yourself a Sigma Designs XCard and dump a low power PC near your TV.

  • Automatic 3D Model (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Baldrson ( 78598 ) on Sunday October 13, 2002 @01:28PM (#4441353) Homepage Journal
    There has been a lot of research in deriving 3d models from motion video. This would of course lead to dramatic reduction in bandwidth requirements by sending down a 3d model of the set to a renderer and then transmitting only motion through the set along with variations from the set projected to 2d. This requires huge amounts of processing up front but very little at the decompression/rendering end compared to a lot of other methods. The MPEG4 3d modeling codecs seem to be an after-thought based on provision of manually constructed 3d models (often the examples given are of rendering human faces from 3d models which is almost the opposite of what should be going on with motion video compression -- the sets should be 3d modeled leaving more problematic features like faces to the residue ) not a fundamental aspect of automatically constructed 3d models during compression.

  • Get your source code here (Score:4, Informative)

    by Wesley Felter ( 138342 ) <wesley@felter.org> on Sunday October 13, 2002 @02:38PM (#4441651) Homepage
    An open source implementation is already in the works [sourceforge.net].
    • Project status is pre-alpha, no files yet.

      Look around on Sourceforge - Probably 50% or more of the projects there never get off the ground.

      I see the most likely open-source implementation coming from the guys developing XviD, since this new codec is an MPEG-4 variant, which means the XviD guys have a huge headstart.
  • Well, since the size of movies is down, and the size of harddrives up...


    200gb Firewire HD- $450
    Cheap Boxen to run it with (not Dreamcast)- $200
    Decent Broadband connection w/ huge upstream- $99
    Linux- $Free
    Setting up an FTP Server- Your time
    The look on the Judge's face when you get busted for serving out everything to hit to box office for the past 8 years- Priceless...

  • Nothing new (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 13, 2002 @08:32PM (#4442948)
    A couple of guys from Hardforums and I played with this codec back in early July. There is a writeup here [hardforums.com] about how to create a file. At the time we were using it, it was a pain to compress and decompress. At the time the encoder required a YUV file and the decoder produced a YUV file. On a 1.2 TBird it took about 14 hours to encode the Final Fantasy - The Spirits Within Trailer. It was about 2:45 I think. The file produced was 11.2MB. A comparable (quality as best we could tell) Divx 4 encoding was about 35MB, both started from DVD and contained no audio. Decoding was about 2fps on my machine. Remember that these times are using files that were written to be correct, with no efficency added in. In fact, one of the guys on the JVT team told us if we were able to improve the compression at all to let them know.

    Btw, JVT stands for Joint Video Team, which is the group resposnible for developing the standard. It used to be H.26L, and looks now to be called H.264. The ftp below is the once that is used by the people developing the standard, so don't hit it too hard ;)

    And here's what you all have been waiting for. the Source Code [imtc-files.org] to it. I dunno how it's changed since I used it last, but the newest version we had available was 3.2 and they are now on 4.2. Version 3.7 came out shortly after we finished our tests, but there were no compression speed changes from the few quick tests we ran on it, as well as no file size changes.

    Also, one intereting thing that I didn't see when glancing over the linked article was that the server's software will monitor the connection and playback and if there are too many dropped frames it will decrease the quality. The opposite is true as well, the quality will increase based on the connection and playback. Of course the server would be able to disable this as well, but would be nice if a video stream got /.ed to be able to still see it, just at a lower quality.

  • Benchmarks (Score:3, Insightful)

    by wahay ( 12517 ) on Sunday October 13, 2002 @11:07PM (#4443434) Homepage
    When are we going to see a good Codec benchmark? This codec is 42% accurate, that codec is 53% accurate. There's gotta be a couple of ways of _measuring_ the quality of a codec. When can we put a couple of video files through a utility and see how well they compare to the original?

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