{"id":225,"date":"2006-03-16T21:06:10","date_gmt":"2006-03-17T05:06:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/?p=225"},"modified":"2006-10-04T21:27:34","modified_gmt":"2006-10-05T04:27:34","slug":"life-recorder-codecs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/life-recorder-codecs\/","title":{"rendered":"Life Recorder Codecs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Security guru Bruce Schneier writes of “The Future of Privacy”<\/a> in his latest Crypto-Gram newsletter. He hypothesizes on the future feasibility of a sort of “life recorder” that can serve as an absolute audio & video recorder for everything you see, say, and hear. Leave it to me to completely gloss over the dystopian sci-fi implications and go straight to the question that weighs heavily on the mind of a multimedia hacker– “What codecs will this device use?”<\/p>\n

Let’s look at some numbers first: Schneier estimates 700 GB per\/year would be required for constant video recording. The Rent<\/em> soundtrack<\/a> informs us that there are 525,600 minutes\/year. Multiplied by 60 seconds\/minute yields 31,536,000 seconds\/year. Assuming a base-10 gigabyte the device will have 700 billion bytes at its disposal. That gives us a video bitrate of around 178 kbits\/second. I’m not so sure about the quality there. Let’s assume that citizens are allowed to disable the life recorder during the nominal 8-hour sleep cycle. That brings the total yearly seconds down to 21,024,000. This brings the average bitrate up to around 266 kbits\/second. This might be plausible, by today’s video codec technologies. The audio constraint of 200 GB\/year would have no trouble encoding audio at a reasonable bitrate.<\/p>\n

I can’t wait until the day when the best privacy advice we can give someone is to shake wildly and constantly in the hopes that the video encoder will have a poor chance of coping with the rapid scene change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What will the privacy-invading technologies of the future be?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t