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.

They have a website. That’s a plus. I am trying to find something to corroborate their fabulous claims, such as media samples and standalone or plugin binary decoders to play the content. But these are the main ideas that I take away from their website:

1. their video compression technology totally r00lz over MPEG-4
2. they’ve patented every single line of computer code they’ve ever written
3. most of their “service providers” are law firms specializing in intellectual property

Euclid does have a software package you can download located at http://www.eucliddiscoveries.com/information.php. The included readme.pdf file is dated July, 2004. In fact, none of the timestamps on any of the files in the download package are later than 2004. The information page says something about providing source code but it is not in this download package. The package contains a standalone application and a number of support DLLs and ActiveX plugins. The app, according to the documentation, is some kind of testbench for the algorithm.

All I can tell you about the application itself is that it doesn’t work. You need to register the .ax plugins with a provided batch file. This results in:

The standalone app crashes without the 2 ActiveX support files. I guess they just couldn’t make Windows installation simpler, even in this day and age. My theory is that their phalanx of IP lawyers has advised them that providing a simple, useful end-user experience would infringe on hundreds of patents.

Euclid claims that this codec can perform up to 460% better than MPEG-4 and 600% better than MPEG-2. This may be a good opportunity to re-read “The 6 Steps to Claiming Bogously High Compression Ratios”, part of the MPEG-2 FAQ: http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/research/mpeg/faq/mpeg2-v38/faq_v38.html.

I have started the requisite Wiki page on the subject. Not much to report yet.