Online movie ‘pirates’ will be delighted by a new technology able to, “shrink a video so small that it becomes easy to distribute films over the Internet,” as the Boston Globe describes it.
Euclid Discoveries’ EuclidVision uses “object-based compression” to identify individual objects shown in a video and then, “calculates the optimum level of compression for each of them,” says the story.
A full-length movie needing 700 Mb of storage, “when compressed using MPEG-4 would use just 50 megabytes when compressed with EuclidVision”.
Fourteen movies could fit on a standard CD and it would take an hour for someone with a 1.5 megabit-per-second broadband connection to download a 700-megabyte file, says the Boston Globe.
“But 50 megabytes would take less than five minutes.”
Euclid Discoveries has filed 15 US patents on its compression system and is in discussions with a number of companies to bring it to market, says the story. And 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.”
Good news?
The Big Six movie studios’ MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) is already bleating endlessly about imaginary losses it says are down to the fact flics appear on the p2p networks, never mentioning that many ‘pirated’ movies show up online through the efforts of Hollywood insiders.
Imagine what’ll happen with mini-movies.
“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.”
And Euclid Discoveries chief executive Richard Wingard believes the 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,” the Boston Globe has him saying.
“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.
Defiitely stay tuned.
