digitaltvdesignline.com — "New video compressions standards demonstrate...higher compression rates in comparison to older video compression standards. This leads to smaller storage capacity requirements and lower bandwidth needs. Since the applications overlap...there is a strong trend towards multi-standard compliant solutions."
Mar 8, 2006 View in Crawl 4
jayd31603Mar 9, 2006
I don't see a very good place for satellite TV companies when telephone, hi-def TV, and internet will all eventually be served up as a bundle over fiber/cable. Is this possible using satellite? I don't think it is, but I could be wrong.
geminitojanusMar 9, 2006
You might not get it, but it's HUGE news. They're talking about building a Microchip that has both SIMD instructions and MIMD instructions, with a VLIW archetecture. While this might be technobabble to you, I'll try to explain it in terms anyone on a computer can understand.Normal computers are what we call "von-Neumann" machines, or Single Instruction, Single Data machines. They take one piece of information, apply a change to it, and put it back in memory. A few years ago, Intel decided to upgrade this archetecure by adding the first SIMD extensions to their general purpose processor (it should be noted SIMD was done by plenty of companies before Intel, but it didn't catch on in desktops until this event). SIMD stands for Single Instruction, Multiple Data. This means in the time you would ordinarily do one operation on one piece of data, you can do one operation to 2, 4, 8, even 16 pieces of data. This chip takes us the next step; doing Multiple Instructions on Multiple Data at the same time. If we put this in a performance window..(disgregarding latency)The SISD chip takes 64 cycles to perform 4 operations on 16 pieces of data.The SIMD chip takes 4 cycles to perform 4 operations on 4 sets of data (each set containing 4 datum).The MIMD chip takes 1 cycle (or so, maybe a bit longer) to perform 4 operations on 4 sets of data (each set containing 4 datum).Here's what it comes down to; this chip is currently being considered for use inside of devices right now that need high speed compression, like digital video cameras. But, as the price comes down on this chip, we should start to see it replacing DVD-decoding logic onboard current video cards (and yes, from reading the documents, the only thing I could see keeping it from doing decoding and encoding is simply cost). In fact, this same chip, with it's incredibly low thermal output of 270mW, could find itself inside XRay machines, cellphones, and anything that needs to encode/decode a large set of data on the fly (be that data Voice, Video, Music). The biggest thing they're trying to push is how scalable the archetecure is (meaning that instead of this small unit that can only work on 16 datums and 4 instructions now (theoretically, going to above; I have no idea what this chip is actually capable of), could scale up to working on 64 datum and 8 instructions at a time). It'll be really interesting to see if it catches on in place of the CELL or CELL-Derived processors, or one of Texas Instrument's DSPs.
coolbruMar 9, 2006
Not true. If you save out of QT Pro as standards compliant MPEG-4, it will have an mp4 extension (or m4a or m4v etc). For example you'll find that iTunes files (which are all handled by QuickTime) are .m4a because they are standard MPEG-4 AAC compressed. If you have a QuickTime movie that uses any of the MPEG-4 codecs but is not otherwise an MPEG-4 movie, then it should be saved as a .mov. This is much the same story as most DivX movies found in the wild - they are mostly found in hideous AVI wrappers, when their video content is MPEG-4 compliant (though the audio is usually not).You also need to remember that though mp4 is based on QT's .mov file format, for the most part mov is a superset of mp4, so it's perfectly possible for a QuickTime movie to contain elements that are not expressible (or are not compliant with the declared MPEG-4 profile) in an mp4 file.If you have ever had to handle subtitles with DivX/AVI, you'll know that it's a complete mess of incompatible standards, iffy and multiple files. .mov could make it all go away and just work, but everyone seems happier to have to hack everything from scratch every time.There is no format even remotely close to approaching the professional flexibility of .mov. No-one even tries to get close either - AVI is the absolute bottom of the barrel, and Real and WMV are pretty much play-only formats. mp4 has a chance, but the tools and momentum are not there yet.
stokestackMar 10, 2006
Heaven forbid that better compression be used at current or HIGHER bit rates to deliver watchable quality. Picture quality is going in one direction: DOWN. If you've watched DirecTV, you know that all the money spent on HD TVs is wasted. Is that grass on the football field, or a layer of green paper pulp? There's no way to tell.