Post subject: Object-based video compression arrives
Senior Moderator
Joined: 8/4/2005
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I guess this idea has finally been carried out! Let's see what we got here:
Euclid Discoveries (www.eucliddiscoveries.com), a video compression firm, announced that its technology has achieved compression ratios of 15,168 to 1 for certain videos. The technology, called EuclidVision™, greatly exceeds the current standard for digital video with a 460 percent improvement over MPEG-4, which implies more than a 600 percent improvement over DVD video format MPEG-2 for certain videos. […] “Because we’re building off the existing MPEG-4 standard extensions, we have video compression technology that will eventually work with the hardware and software that is available now.” […] EuclidVision uses a new generation of video compression known as “Object-Based Compression” or “OBC,” which refers to technology that analyzes shapes in the video to achieve higher compression ratios. This is a major departure from other compression technologies, including MPEG-4, which are based on “Discrete Cosine Transform” or “DCT.” The architects of MPEG-4 technology envisioned OBC as the future for this video standard but, before Euclid Discoveries, no firm managed to make it work. The MPEG-4 standard anticipates object-based compression through “Object Planes,” facial modeling, and 3D object modeling – providing only a definition of these concepts without providing the means of employing them toward the goal of high compression ratios. […] In the coming months, Euclid Discoveries expects to complete tests demonstrating its ability to process all video types including full-length movies, and at increased compression rates. Ultimately, EuclidVision should be able to reduce the current MPEG-4 attainable 700 MB file size for 2-hour long videos down to 50MB – finally making feature length movies as “swappable” as MP3s. “The potential of object-based technology is so great that it seems counterintuitive to what most people know about compression,” said Euclid Discoveries’ Chief Software Architect Chuck Pace. “By bringing Computer Vision algorithms into the video compression world we’ve taken this first, momentous leap, and anticipate even larger reductions in video file sizes are soon to follow.”
It already sounds great, I can't wait to see how efficient this thing can be. If everything will go perfect, it may be that we'll have 5—30 MB (and even less) excellent quality TAS videos instead of present 25—150 MB, since sprites and tiles are all objects.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Player (209)
Joined: 2/18/2005
Posts: 1451
This is awesome news! Reducing 700MB to just 50 MB with no quality loss sounds really impossible for me so I'm looking forward to the first release of this codec to test it.
See my perfect 100% movie-walkthroughs of the best RPG games on http://www.freewebs.com/saturnsmovies/index.htm Current TAS project (with new videos): Super Metroid Redesign, any% speedrun
Post subject: Re: Object-based video compression arrives
Joined: 3/7/2006
Posts: 720
Location: UK
moozooh wrote:
“The potential of object-based technology is so great that it seems counterintuitive to what most people know about compression,” said Euclid Discoveries’ Chief Software Architect Chuck Norris.
I wondered if this was ever going to happen. :) Object-based compression seems really obvious to me for compressing movies, I mean... all 2d games draw stuff by sprites, and some 2d games run on a Gameboy, for god's sake. If that's not evidence of great compression, I don't know what is!
Voted NO for NO reason
Senior Moderator
Joined: 8/4/2005
Posts: 5771
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I think the main reason for such a slow evolution pace is that there wasn't enough computational power and optimized enough algorithms to introduce such efficiency in normal use, and compressing video game movies isn't exactly what a present video industry would like to develop. :) All in all, nothing is going to evolve nowadays, until the industry approves it. Also, nice joke about Chuck Norris. :D
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Joined: 3/7/2006
Posts: 720
Location: UK
This reminds me of the whole furore about fractal based compression of images. Did that ever happen? Is it still being researched?
Voted NO for NO reason
Senior Moderator
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Yeah, AFAIR there were some working implementations… But they were either ineffective or extremely slow in encoding.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Joined: 12/14/2004
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And What's The Release Date?
Radz.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
I bet it'll cost an arm and a leg to be able to legally encode with it.
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Joined: 8/4/2005
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It seems like the date's not estimated yet. But Omega is right, the thing may cost pretty much. I hope there'll be some kind of a stripped-down "public" version of some sort.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Former player
Joined: 5/3/2004
Posts: 366
Yeah, reducing from 700mb to 50mb doesn't surprise me at all. I mean, if we can download the emulator+rom+movie file for ~1mb (in the case of some, maybe most, NES movies, for example) then that suggests that there's really not a whole lot of information in a 100mb AVI, just a little information and a lot of redundancies that current video compression technology simply doesn't recognize. It does sound cool, and it does sound like it's going in a good direction, but where it's coming from is what's worrying me.
Joined: 12/7/2005
Posts: 149
Location: Sweden
This is mostly marketing BS. Note for example how the 700 MB to 50 MB compression is something they "should be able to" attain, and note that they don't say anything about how much quality will be reduced. If quality was preserved, they'd surely say that in large bold letters. If you want good compression of game movies, emulator, rom, and input sequence is about as good as it will get. It seems silly to first record into video and then decompose the video into moving sprites -- it's just the information you had before converting into video.
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You can't compare video stream to programmed sequence anyway. But this site uses video streams for distribution anyways, so whether it is better to use rom+emulator+movie or not, this is not the case.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Player (67)
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjaví­k, Ísland
Sounds like vaporware to me. l I'll believe this when I see it. Although I see how this would be possible for 2D video games (but extremely hard to program), I can't imagine this technique being applied to anything else. But hey, I've been wrong before so I'll just wait and see. And even if it works as promised, the software will be highly proprietary and I doubt Bisqwit would use it.
Joined: 2/12/2006
Posts: 432
I'm sure someone will make an open source implementation. sure, it'll probably violate a hundred software patents, but emulation isn't exactly kosher either.