Movie downloads in minutes
p2p news / p2pnet: Online movie ‘pirates’ will be delighted by a new technology able to, “shrink a video so small that it becomes easy to distribute films over the Internet,” as the Boston Globe describes it.
Euclid Discoveries’ EuclidVision uses “object-based compression” to identify individual objects shown in a video and then, “calculates the optimum level of compression for each of them,” says the story.
A full-length movie needing 700 Mb of storage, “when compressed using MPEG-4 would use just 50 megabytes when compressed with EuclidVision”.
Fourteen movies could fit on a standard CD and it would take an hour for someone with a 1.5 megabit-per-second broadband connection to download a 700-megabyte file, says the Boston Globe.
“But 50 megabytes would take less than five minutes.”
Euclid Discoveries has filed 15 US patents on its compression system and is in discussions with a number of companies to bring it to market, says the story. And that could be good news for Hollywood, “which launched new services last week to sell downloadable copies of recent films. Reducing the size of these downloads could boost Internet movie sales.”
Good news?
The Big Six movie studios’ MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) is already bleating endlessly about imaginary losses it says are down to the fact flics appear on the p2p networks, never mentioning that many ‘pirated’ movies show up online through the efforts of Hollywood insiders.
Imagine what’ll happen with mini-movies.
“The current generation of EuclidVision is designed for videoconferencing over telephone lines with limited bandwidth. Euclid Discoveries says its scientists compressed a 25-megabyte conference video to just over 8,000 bytes using MPEG-4, but EuclidVision did four times better, shrinking the file to about 1,800 bytes.”
And Euclid Discoveries chief executive Richard Wingard believes the system will work even better with full-length movies.
”We believe that because it’s object based, the longer the video . . . the better we’ll do,” the Boston Globe has him saying.
“That’s because the compression system can remember objects that appear frequently in the video, such as an actor’s face, and can store such images in memory after reading them from the disk just once. Thus, many objects need to be recorded just once in the digital file, instead of every time they appear in the film.
Defiitely stay tuned.
Also See:
Boston Globe – News could be bane or boom for movies, April 10, 2006
April 12th, 2006 at 1:21 pm
Link?
April 12th, 2006 at 1:27 pm
The ratio is just amazing. If this provides bug free and excellent PQ, these people are billionaires.
April 12th, 2006 at 1:34 pm
Was the original written by a technical person?
What is the resolution?
I find it hard to believe a codec could compress a movie to 50Mb and for it to be still watchable, like a Divx movie is, which is the comparison they make.
April 12th, 2006 at 2:24 pm
What a revelation! By doing more processing, we can more intelligently decide what to throw away/reuse. Wake me up when we have enough bandwidth to download lossless video.
Oh wait, we do have enough for audio, but barely anybody is providing lossless content. Certainly none of the RIAA channels.
April 12th, 2006 at 2:31 pm
It’s totall crap trust me, the sample video that they use to demonstrate there codec is a news woman reading something for about 20sec at 1fps. This file is 3kb, when the same video is in xvid it comes out to be about 10kb. The only reason euclid’s codec has any rela adavantage is because its totally optimized for ultra low crappy bandwith. On any normal video and AVS codec would certianly win
April 12th, 2006 at 3:53 pm
Actually it is not total crap. Euclid’s Studio on their website is two years old and has not been updated. The demo was demonstrated to Hiawatha Bray technical writer of the Boston Globe. We asked him if he saw the demo, he said he did. He admitted that he only say a small demo not long enough to evaluate in a full length movie, but enough to see that quality compared to H264 with a much small bandwith and appreciably smaller file size.
April 12th, 2006 at 6:37 pm
so send jon details. hell probably use it
April 12th, 2006 at 8:08 pm
The way I understand this technology, it’s not a new concept. Adobe ImageReady uses this technique to keep file size down when creating animated gifs. I just don’t see it happening with an action flic where the background and faces change on every frame. For webcam or talking heads news, maybe.
April 12th, 2006 at 9:03 pm
All of you naysayers will eat crap when this technology is sold. It is for real and as advertised. Did I mention Euclidvision? Oh, I didn’t!
April 13th, 2006 at 2:57 am
It’s vaporware. Doom9 forums confirmed it. o.o
April 13th, 2006 at 11:39 pm
To be fair though – 700mb for near dvd quality seemed unlikely a while back