Video compression is and has for a long time been an intersting subject on the side of audio compression. Lately there have been discussions about what video compression technologies Blu-ray and HD DVD will use, MPEG-2 or MPEG-4, where the latter offer considerably better compression ratio. Shrinking the size of a movie without losing too much quality is of course the goal here and so far MPEG-4 has been one of the most efficient methods. Now it seems that a new technology is on the way that offers even better ratio than MPEG-4. Euclid Discoveries, is the name of the company behind the new compression technology and it claims that it has created a technology that makes it possible to shrink the size of movies considerably, which is of course interesting news to those who wants to distribute videos over the Internet. Euclid Discoveries‘ compression technology, known as EuclidVision, will work with any kind of video and use an “object-based” compression technology.
“EuclidVision uses a new generation of video compression known as “Object-Based Compression” or “OBC,” which refers to technology that analyzes shapes in the video to achieve higher compression ratios. This is a major departure from other compression technologies, including MPEG-4, which are based on “Discrete Cosine Transform” or “DCT”.
For streaming commentator video, Euclid can reduce a 23 MB video file to a 1,519 byte file – effectively enabling sub-4Kbps, low-bandwidth streams for wired and wireless applications. The streaming commentator application provides a rigorous proving ground for EuclidVision.”
The compression will apparently work even better with film material as you should be able to shrink a whole movie down to 50MB, less than a tenth of MPEG-4.
“In the coming months, Euclid Discoveries expects to complete tests demonstrating its ability to process all video types including full-length movies, and at increased compression rates. Ultimately, EuclidVision should be able to reduce the current MPEG-4 attainable 700 MB file size for 2-hour long videos down to 50MB – finally making feature length movies as “swappable” as MP3s.”
This new compression technology sounds very promising and we are looking forward to hearing more about EuclidVision. More details about the image quality vs. size ratio would also be nice as it is in fact the most important here.
Source: Euclid Discoveries
