MPEG4 closer to reality? Too good to be true?

[pofnlice]

well...

surfin the web, found this article from the boston globe which was published in April this year.  I remember it was all the attention not long ago and then just kind of died out. But here it is again. What do you think?

Firm squeezes films into a download
News could be bane or boom for movies

By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff  |  April 10, 2006

A Concord company called Euclid Discoveries says it has invented a video-compression technology that could spawn a lucrative new market for Hollywood or a major new crisis.
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The firm says its EuclidVision system can compress digital images to make them much smaller than today's most common compression technologies, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4,which were created by the Motion Picture Experts Group. MPEG-2 is the compression system used on today's DVD movie disks. MPEG-4 is a next-generation system that can reduce the size of a movie even further.

But EuclidVision promises to squeeze video files more than ever before. Euclid Discoveries chief executive Richard Wingard said EuclidVision will let movie companies shrink a video so small that it becomes easy to distribute films over the Internet. He said that his company has filed 15 US patents on its compression system and is in discussions with a number of companies to bring it to market.

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. But it could also popularize Internet movie piracy, just as MP3 music compression caused a global boom in illiicit music downloads.

EuclidVision uses ''object-based compression," which identifies individual objects shown in a video, then calculates the optimum level of compression for each of them. 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.

Wingard thinks his 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," he said. 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.

As a result, Euclid Discoveries says a full-length movie that requires 700 megabytes of storage when compressed using MPEG-4 would use just 50 megabytes when compressed with EuclidVision. At that size, 14 movies could fit on a standard CD-ROM disk. As for video downloading, it would take an hour for someone with a 1.5 megabit-per-second broadband connection to download a 700-megabyte file. But 50 megabytes would take less than five minutes.

''It would solve a big bottleneck," said Christopher Chute, senior research analyst at IDC Corp. in Framingham. ''One of the reasons video has always been cumbersome . . . is it requires so much storage space."

Patti Reali, research director in the communications group at Gartner Inc. in Philadelphia, said that EuclidVision could also have major effects on the television industry. ''It would change dynamics in the satellite industry," she said. ''It would change what would happen in cable."

For example, cable providers are struggling with limited capacity, which prevents them from carrying all their programs in a high-definition format. Better compression could solve that problem, helping cable compete against satellite television.

Smaller movie files could be a boon to major Hollywood studios, which have begun to embrace Internet movie downloads. Last week, two online companies, MovieLink and CinemaNow, began selling downloadable copies of popular films. Downloads can take as long as two hours. EuclidVision could make the process far faster.

''I think we look at this as opportunities to deliver content," said Kori Bernards, spokeswoman for the Motion Picture Association of America.

But making movies easier to download could inspire piracy. Asked if Hollywood was worried, Bernards was noncommittal.

''We have no reason currently to believe that Euclid seeks to facilitate copyright theft," she said. ''We continue to look at Internet piracy and figure out how to fight it at all levels."

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at [email protected].

[Calum]

fourteen movies on a disk? there is a limit you know. personally, i suspect vapourware.

i can't see the motive though. anybody else care to think of one?

[Orethrius]

My major complaint is with the "remembering the actor's face" bit.  I would think that would have the potential to ruin scenes, where lighting and subtle expressions really make all the difference in the world - not to mention the range-of-motion.  However, if it's really THAT great, then I'd expect most scene groups would be using it by now.  Vaporware?  Maybe.  Cool thought?  Definitely.  Potentially ruinous to quality films?  Unquestionably.

[pofnlice]

weird isn't it?

I remember all the arguements about mpeg4 and how it was going to seriously reduce quality because it was overcompressed. Anf a quick way to make 4gb out of one is to recode an mpeg to and mpeg2 for dvd burning.

So what would happen, I wonder, with euclids 50 meg movie? Would it burn and be playable as is, or would it have to be re-encoded as well? How big would it end up?

The amount of download time it could save me!

[WMD]

This = not gonna happen.

[H_TeXMeX_H]

What's the point of HD-DVD and Blu-ray if they are doing this as well ? To put a movie library onto a single disk ? Like 100 movies on 1 disk ? Would that profitable ? Would movie quality be affected ? (I think it will)