Category Archives: Multimedia PressWatch

Random articles relating to multimedia technology.

DoubleTwist Ventures

DVD Jon reports that he is joining up with a curious Bay Area outfit (or, for all we know, perhaps he IS the outfit) named DoubleTwist Ventures, an organization that explains its charter as focusing on:

the development of interoperability solutions for digital media and the reverse engineering of proprietary systems for which licensing options are non-existent or impractical.

Sounds suspiciously similar to what we multimedia hackers do purely for our leisure-time programming. Live the dream, Jon. Get paid for what you love to do!

All I know about the company is what the front page of the website reports, which is a text blurb pasted on a picture — very 1996. Seems out of place in this day and age. The mailto: link has a bad email address, too (though it may be a counter-spam measure and the text in the picture looks valid).

Ever-Emerging Digital Theater Technology

IMDb Studio Briefing has another in a long line of articles detailing how all movie theaters are about to go digital anytime now. Paramount Going Digital with ‘M:I 3’. I remember about the time that Star Wars Episode 1 was coming out in 1999, George Lucas was promising that by Episode 2’s release in 2002, everything would be digital.

Has anyone thought about what this means to unauthorized distribution (colloquially referred to as piracy)? If the studios think it’s bad with the current 0-day distribution, wow…

Seriously, does anyone give any thought to how this would work, the technologies driving it all, and weaknesses in the chain? I just want to think out loud here for a moment.

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Moving Objects Video Codec

Breathless stories of new movie downloading servies are all too common on the IMDb Studio Briefing. However, this story stands out due to the claims it makes regarding fundamental video codec technology: Coming Soon: Instant Movie Downloads.

Euclid Discoveries…claims to have developed a technology that can compress a feature film into a file so small that it can be downloaded over the Internet in five minutes. …the system employs “object-based compression” that remembers recurring objects and stores them in memory. …a movie requiring 700 megabytes of storage with the established MPEG-4 compression technology uses just 50 megabytes under the new one.

FMV built using a series of moving objects is, of course, nothing new. In fact, that’s how video animation was performed in video games well before enough capacity was available to feasibly transport frames of compressed video. I know of several video codecs that contain provisions for moving sprites around the video field, including Duck TrueMotion 1 and ISO MPEG-4 (which makes it especially ironic that they should specifically mention the latter in the article). I imagine that both of those technologies were developed as vehicles to deliver video that was developed as layers of sprites on backgrounds. The challenging problem is to examine existing video and find discrete objects that move around from frame to frame.

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