H.264 dead?

"Ivan" wrote in message
...

"Agamemnon" wrote in message
news

"David Glover" wrote in message
...
Agamemnon wrote:
[Snippety snip]

H.264 is a required blu-ray codec (as is AAC), and so neither are going
anywhere.

Blu-ray is already dead. Why would anyone buy a Blu-ray player for their
computer when they can get a 1TB drive for £60 now which will store over
30 times as much information as a Blu-ray disc which costs £20 and is
faster to access. In a few months the cost of 32GB data sticks will fall
to less than a Blu-ray disc so Blu-ray will be well and truly buried.
Soon people will be downloading almost all HD movies over the internet.
With wavelet based compression you should be able to fit a 2 hour HD
movie into 6 GB.



I increasingly tend to use SD cards, especially as my local Novatech now
sell 4GB ones for around £8.. As very compact DVD players with SD card
slots, USB connectors and HDMI outputs can be purchased for around £30
I've managed to persuaded several friends and family to invest in one (I
have also given a couple as presents) as it makes a reasonable substitute
for the now almost defunct VHS when exchanging programme material, the fly
in the ointment of course being the inconvenience of transferring data,
which usually requires the use a computer.
I can't really see any technical reason why PVRs don't have the ability to
be able to transfer program material onto SD cards using an agreed
standard such as mp4 or divx, something which probably could be easily
incorporated in the main menu software for a few pounds extra.

Even if they could achieve a double real-time compression rate it would
still take hours to transfer all the data. What they need to do is record
directly onto the SD cards or external drives and be equipped with a Gigabit
LAN port, Firewire 800 or even ESATA so they can transfer data to a PC as
fast as possible an not some substandard USB connection that is 10 times
slower the USB2.

"Agamemnon" wrote in message
. uk...

"Ivan" wrote in message
...

"Agamemnon" wrote in message
news

"David Glover" wrote in message
...
Agamemnon wrote:
[Snippety snip]

H.264 is a required blu-ray codec (as is AAC), and so neither are going
anywhere.

Blu-ray is already dead. Why would anyone buy a Blu-ray player for their
computer when they can get a 1TB drive for £60 now which will store over
30 times as much information as a Blu-ray disc which costs £20 and is
faster to access. In a few months the cost of 32GB data sticks will fall
to less than a Blu-ray disc so Blu-ray will be well and truly buried.
Soon people will be downloading almost all HD movies over the internet.
With wavelet based compression you should be able to fit a 2 hour HD
movie into 6 GB.



I increasingly tend to use SD cards, especially as my local Novatech now
sell 4GB ones for around £8.. As very compact DVD players with SD card
slots, USB connectors and HDMI outputs can be purchased for around £30
I've managed to persuaded several friends and family to invest in one (I
have also given a couple as presents) as it makes a reasonable substitute
for the now almost defunct VHS when exchanging programme material, the
fly in the ointment of course being the inconvenience of transferring
data, which usually requires the use a computer.
I can't really see any technical reason why PVRs don't have the ability
to be able to transfer program material onto SD cards using an agreed
standard such as mp4 or divx, something which probably could be easily
incorporated in the main menu software for a few pounds extra.

Even if they could achieve a double real-time compression rate it would
still take hours to transfer all the data. What they need to do is record
directly onto the SD cards or external drives and be equipped with a
Gigabit LAN port, Firewire 800 or even ESATA so they can transfer data to
a PC as fast as possible an not some substandard USB connection that is 10
times slower the USB2.


I'd certainly agree with that, especially the bit about being able to record
directly onto SD cards, and going by the way prices have been dropping over
the last year or so my guess is that decent 8 GB cards will eventually be
almost as cheap as good quality VHS tapes, with the bonus of being able to
hold much more information at vastly superior quality.
I would have thought by now that some enterprising manufacturer would have
come up with a tiny and compact SD card based video recorder offering all of
the same facilities as a PVR, I actually know of a number of people who will
not switch from tape to hard drive recording simply because the media is not
transferable, however I reckon that before much longer the days of
mechanical storage devices will be well and truly numbered, I notice that
Novatech is selling a Samsung 64GB 2.5" SATA-II MLC Solid State Hard Drive
for £99.00.. so give it another two or three years and let's see what kind
of performance, storage capacities and prices are on offer then.

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?SAM-SSD64M

In article , Agamemnon
writes
Blu-ray is already dead. Why would anyone buy a Blu-ray player for
their computer when they can get a 1TB drive for £60 now
Duh!!
P E R M A N E N C E ! ! !

In real time, why would anyone sane commit their memories, or prised
video to anything a drunk teenager can overwrite.

Agree with the sentiment though. Blu-ray is dead for its originally
intended market.
--
Kennedy
Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he's ****ed.
Python Philosophers (replace 'nospam' with 'kennedym' when replying)

In article ,
J G Miller wrote:
On Mon, 02 Mar 2009 18:35:56 +0000, Agamemnon wrote:

Why would anyone buy a Blu-ray player for their computer when they can
get a 1TB drive for £60 now which will store over 30 times as much
information as a Blu-ray disc which costs £20 and is faster to access.

Two reasons --

1) To play Blu-Ray discs purchased or rented at the supermarket / video
store. Many people are still on 2 MB/s broadband or less and have no
desire to pay for a faster speed, even if there telephone line will
support a higher speed, or for connecting to cable TV Internet if
available.

2) Portability of data to take around to a friend or send in the snail
mail.

And it should be remembered that data sticks are not reliable long term
storage devices.

You say that they are not reliable long term storage devices. . . can you
say (or point me at information) that gives some idea of what sort of safe
storage life a data stick will give???

Peter

--
Peter Gillett :
Totnes : South Devon

On Feb 28, 5:53*pm, "Agamemnon" wrote:
No sooner have transmissions in H.264 began that H.264 looks like it is soon
going to be replaced by a derivative of MJPEG2000 .mj2 compression, the new
standard in professional video and movie production, but which unlike
MJPEG2000 compares differences in motion between frames.

JPEG2000 already offers a 20% improvement over JPEG which is the root
compression system of H.264 but unlike the nasty blocky artefacts left by
over compressed or even moderately compressed JPEG images, the artefacts
created by JPEG2000 are closer to analogue blurring in optical systems,
which are a hell more desirable than the block and phantom colour
distortions of JPEG and H.264.

Click on these images for comparison.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:JP...Comparison.png

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:JP...onstration.png

Now whereas the blocky artefacts produced by JPEG based video compression
are totally intolerable in shows like the Eurovision Songs Contest, ringing
artefacts caused by JPEG2000 would barley be noticeable on the Eurovision
Songs Contest because they would be masked by the motion blur of the
performers which would have caused huge blocking artefacts on JPEG based
compression.

So what are the chances of an open source project creating a motion
estimation enabled JPEG2000 wavelet compression based video codec before the
digital switchover in 2012 thus rending everyone's new HD equipment
obsolete?

Your understanding of JPEG2000 is as pathetic as your understanding of
history. JPEG2000 is patented, which is why open source decoders for
it tend to be rather thin on the ground. It is also a completely
different format than JPEG (the HDR nature being one example), making
a percentage comparison meaningless between the formats.

On Feb 28, 11:57*pm, Peter Watson wrote:
Agamemnon wrote:

Snip

So what are the chances of an open source project creating a motion
estimation enabled JPEG2000 wavelet compression based video codec before
the digital switchover in 2012 thus rending everyone's new HD equipment
obsolete?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/projects/dirac/index.shtml

Dirac (and the high-performance version, Schrodinger) is excellent. It
is surprising it has had so little usage to date, though that will
doubtless change with time. I'm also a bit surprised that OpenEXR is
still only a still-image format - a bloody good one, but normally
after this length of time, people have started experimenting with ways
to compress between images as well as just the images themselves.

On Mar 6, 12:53*pm, Peter Gillett wrote:
In article ,
* *J G Miller wrote:

On Mon, 02 Mar 2009 18:35:56 +0000, Agamemnon wrote:
* Why would anyone buy a Blu-ray player for their computer when they can
* get a 1TB drive for £60 now which will store over 30 times as much
* information as a Blu-ray disc which costs £20 and is faster to access.
Two reasons --
1) To play Blu-Ray discs purchased or rented at the supermarket / video
* *store. Many people are still on 2 MB/s broadband or less and have no
* *desire to pay for a faster speed, even if there telephone line will
* *support a higher speed, or for connecting to cable TV Internet if
* *available.
2) Portability of data to take around to a friend or send in the snail
mail.
And it should be remembered that data sticks are not reliable long term
storage devices.

You say that they are not reliable long term storage devices. . . can you
say (or point me at information) that gives some idea of what sort of safe
storage life a data stick will give???

Peter

--
Peter Gillett * * * : * * *
Totnes * * *: * * *South Devon

Depends on the sort of memory used. A memory stick using core would
last 100+ years. Mind you, you'd also need a double trailer to move
it. Conventional memory sticks burn out after more than a few writes
and probably don't have a hell of a long life expectancy if there's no
activity on them at all.

On Fri, 06 Mar 2009 20:53:43 +0000, Peter Gillett wrote:
You say that they are not reliable long term storage devices. . . can
you say (or point me at information) that gives some idea of what sort
of safe storage life a data stick will give???

I should have made it clear that the main issue is more to do with
repeated writing of data to the device.

http://4sysops.COM/archives/usb-memory-stick-lifespan-the-different-service-lives-of-slc-and-mlc-flash-drives/

As to write once, come back in N years, and hope you data is still there,
I do not know if anybody has actually tested that aspect of their reliability.

Another issue to keep in mind is the mechanical quality of the memory stick
body to USB plug.

One thing is for certain though -- they are much more reliably than floppy
diskettes.

"imipak" wrote in message
...
On Feb 28, 5:53 pm, "Agamemnon" wrote:
No sooner have transmissions in H.264 began that H.264 looks like it is
soon
going to be replaced by a derivative of MJPEG2000 .mj2 compression, the
new
standard in professional video and movie production, but which unlike
MJPEG2000 compares differences in motion between frames.

JPEG2000 already offers a 20% improvement over JPEG which is the root
compression system of H.264 but unlike the nasty blocky artefacts left by
over compressed or even moderately compressed JPEG images, the artefacts
created by JPEG2000 are closer to analogue blurring in optical systems,
which are a hell more desirable than the block and phantom colour
distortions of JPEG and H.264.

Click on these images for comparison.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:JP...Comparison.png

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:JP...onstration.png

Now whereas the blocky artefacts produced by JPEG based video compression
are totally intolerable in shows like the Eurovision Songs Contest,
ringing
artefacts caused by JPEG2000 would barley be noticeable on the Eurovision
Songs Contest because they would be masked by the motion blur of the
performers which would have caused huge blocking artefacts on JPEG based
compression.

So what are the chances of an open source project creating a motion
estimation enabled JPEG2000 wavelet compression based video codec before
the
digital switchover in 2012 thus rending everyone's new HD equipment
obsolete?

Your understanding of JPEG2000 is as pathetic as your understanding of
history. JPEG2000 is patented, which is why open source decoders for
it tend to be rather thin on the ground. It is also a completely
different format than JPEG (the HDR nature being one example), making
a percentage comparison meaningless between the formats.

Just as always you don't have the remotest clue of what you are talking
about and you cant even read or understand English. The original basic
profile and patents of the technologies used in JPEG2000 were made public
domain by its developers and copyright holders so that it could be used by
anyone that wanted to without a licence. Get an education you ignorant fool.
I already made it perfectly clear that JPEG2000 is based on wavelet encoding
whereas JPEG is based on DCT encoding.

You clueless stalking IMBECILE!