videsignline.com — "Digital noise follows a different distribution pattern and, more importantly, has a particular shape that the human perception finds unnatural. There are mainly two artifacts who present the latter characteristic when pushing the limits of MPEG-2 (or any DCT block-based codec): Mosquito noise and Blocking artifacts."
Feb 27, 2006 View in Crawl 4
brandondiehlFeb 27, 2006
actually it was 25 when it went on the front page
interiotFeb 27, 2006
Product placement. The suggested solution is to purchase an Algolith Mosquito processor for $3,000. Okay, it's kind of cool tech, but hopefully there's a better/cheaper long-term solution. Hopefully MPEG-8 video (or whatever) will, when compressed, degrade in slightly less intrusive and obvious ways.
gmorgFeb 27, 2006
Useless, There are better and free solutions for this problemin avisynthDeblock(quant=25)BlindPP(quant=2,cpu2="ooooxx")or just by putting video thurough ffdshow with SPP deblocking on.of course those are poor mans ways. Though sample screens from article are very unimpressive. especially one with mosquito noise is easy to process for any filter.
gmorgFeb 28, 2006
"I guess when we all have fiber who cares about compression?"We will care about compression, think about super-duper Higher Definition resolutions future will bring.
guspazFeb 28, 2006
Very interesting. I don't think I've ever seen a realtime postprocessing filter that can do even remotely as good a job as this. Of course, this requires expensive discrete hardware, which explains why I haven't seen such a filter; it is beyond the realtime processing capabilities of a computer.An interesting note, the company also makes a relatively cheap ($90) photoshop plugin that does this for still images (JPEGs). That could be very handy for cleaning up overcompressed JPEGs. They have a demo available on their site that you can download that allows previews but doesn't allow you to apply.
vtwinFeb 28, 2006
I remember years ago when my cable company internally switched to a compressed signal. (I guess this happened at the satelite provider level) My cable TV signal was still analog, but I started to notice compression artifacts, and being good at spotting those, I got really annoyed with it. Most MPEG artifacts were blurred thanks to the limitations of the NTSC analog signal, but some programs were particulary affected. Cartoons were the first place I noticed it, fade transitions show obvious defects and blockyness.I had a Sony (VHS) vcr, and it got problems with these artifacts for some reason. It kind of "amplified" the artifacts. Bright red things in particular, would get all blocky, and some kind of noise would appear on the blocky areas.So I didn't get any actual improvement from the digital aspect, but rather the image degraded! We got screwed :) The problem with compression is that it can bring savings to companies that are disproportionate to the degradation of quality. For example a provider can chose to cut the size in half, and get 75% of the quality, knowing that they won't get twice as many complaints... I find that cell phone companies are particulary abusive in this regard and collide to keep the average audio quality low so that they can fit 10x more users in the same equipment.