Euclid Discoveries, far from throwing in the towel, continues to push the envelope on the their claims for incredible compression.

As reported in this article on the Sys-Con Media (publisher of a zillion minor trade rags) web site, Euclid now says their Object Based Compression technology can be applied to any type of video, including standard video from TV shows and DVDs.

This is a big step up from their previous announcements, which limited the use of their codec to talking-head style video conferencing.

And what do you get by using this Object Based Compression technology? Oh, perhaps a 460% improvement over compression using MPEG-4, the current state of the art.

How They Do It

This OBC stuff is not total hocus pocus, and Euclid would be happy to give you a bit of an explanation of how it’s done:

Euclid defines OBC as technology that analyzes salient structure in the video to achieve higher compression ratios. This application of OBC is a major advancement when considering other compression technologies, including MPEG-4, which is based on “Discrete Cosine Transform” or “DCT.”
…
The architects of MPEG-4 technology anticipated OBC as the future video standard but, prior to Euclid Discoveries, no firm had managed to make OBC commercially viable. The MPEG-4 standard describes the parts of a rudimentary form of object-based compression through “Video Object Planes,” facial modeling, and 3D object modeling — providing only a definition of these concepts without providing the means of applying these directly towards the goal of high compression ratios.

For those who aren’t familiar with the Euclid Discoveries, they’ve been raising money from Angel investors as described here, and I’ve had plenty of voodoo curses pointed at me from their investors. Despite the years of promises, they haven’t delivered anything approaching a demo yet, and it seems that with this most recent announcement, the trend continues. As we say here in Texas, big hat, no cattle.

But that doesn’t stop Richard Wingard, Founder and CEO from doing a little chest-thumping:

“Our recent accomplishments should effectively silence the naysayers who said that EuclidVision was a one-trick pony that would only work with video-conferencing type applications,” said Euclid Discoveries President Robert Werner. “Now that we have shown the breadth of EuclidVision in tackling different video types, we plan to go deep, achieving further breakthroughs in compression rates.”

But who knows, their web site could have a player and some sample video posted for the world to see tomorrow.

Or not.

Dr. Dobb’s Portal August, 2006 Article on DDJ site

Over the years I’ve spent quite a bit of time and money experimenting with the best ways to implement networked music and video in my home. Back in 2004 I showed you how to build a home video jukebox, albeit with a few compromises. Today you might think the best way to get this done is with a Windows Media Center Edition PC (or perhaps its recent competitor, Front Row). I’d like to offer up an alternative solution that offers a feature set that competes, and in some case beats the PC-based solution for a lot less money: the GalaxyMetalGear TVisto media player.

The TVisto Concept

The TVisto media player is basically nothing but a souped-up hard drive enclosure. GMG was already in the enclosure business when it must have occurred to them that adding a lightweight Linux distribution plus a little more CPU power, a media processor, and a remote-control driven UI would give them a box that could:

• Play video files encoded in MPEG-2 or DivX formats
• Display picture files
• Act as a music jukebox
• Fill in as a removable hard drive

In other words, do everything that a Windows MCE PC can do with the exception of recording live TV.

GMG sells this box without a hard drive, and with a little shopping you can find it for under $130 – I paid $125 for mine. Add the 5.25″ hard drive of your choice and you are in business. My choice was a 300G Maxtor drive purchased at Fry’s for $80 – making my total investment just a little over a couple hundred dollars. Because this is a simple hard drive enclosure, you also don’t have to worry about a lot of the negatives associated with Media Center PC: no fan noise, small footprint, instant boot time – all big pluses in my book. Once I hooked it up and put it through its paces, I was sold on the value of this as a Media Center Edition replacement.

Setup

The hardware setup for the TVisto is identical to that for any hard drive enclosure: take out a few screws, open the case, connect the power and data cables to the drive, close the box up and you are done. I found the enclosure to be a bit cramped, and I was worried about damaging cables as I forced the drive in, but all went smoothly and that part of the setup took just 10 minutes. If you are comfortable with cracking the case on your PC to install drives or memory this will be a cake walk.

Once you have the drive installed, you connect it to your PC via a USB cable, power it up, and it should quickly appear as a removable drive. You can then format it as an NTFS, Mac OS Extended, or FAT32 drive (yes, this means you can use it with virtually any O/S.)

The next part of the setup gives you a hint about the simplistic nature of the software driving the TVisto. The instructions make it very clear that you have to create the folders shown in the figure below with exactly the correct names: Firmware, Movies, Music, and Pictures. As you will see when using the TVisto, there isn’t a complicated database for music and video like you have with iTunes or Windows Media Player – the TVisto simply browses through folders, and it expects your media to be stored in the folder with the appropriate name.

Figure 1
The mandatory folder layout

Once you have the folders created, copying media from your PC is simply a drag and drop project, copying media files of the appropriate type to the correct folder. As you’ll see later, large collections need to be organized at this point using a system of nested folders, and that is entirely up to you to do.

Figure 2
Copying media files to the TVisto

The TV Connection

After following safe ejection procedures from your PC, you can power down the TVisto and connect it to your TV. The unit ships with all the cables you need for NTSC viewing in stereo, and again, you should have no trouble connecting these standard inputs to your home video system.

One of the really great things about the TVisto was finding out that this little box also supports high quality audio and video. The standard unit ships with support for everything from Composite NTSC video up through 1080i, (although you need to purchase an optional cable for component HDTV connections). It also supports 5.1 audio via an SPDIF connector. Combining these two features means you can watch your stored DVDs without compromising on audio or video quality.

I purchased the add-on component cable so I could get the benefit of higher resolution DVD viewing – am annoying $30 expense, but if you have an HDTV it is well worth it.

Figure 3
The $30 component cable

Once you connect the TVisto to your TV, you may find that the default video settings aren’t correct – this can be remedied by simply cycling through the various possibilities by repeatedly pressing the TV Out button on the remote. Eventually you’ll see the menu shown in Figure 4. (Please note that these are low-res 640×480 screen captures – your HDTV viewing will be much crisper than what you see here.)

Figure 4
The intro menu for the TVisto 3500

A nice, simple interface. The place where you will spend most of your time is in Movies, Music, and Pictures. The only thing I’ve done in the Settings menu is pin down my video output settings, but you also have a few other options, such as Languages, ScreenSaver, and so on.

The three media buttons, Movies, Music, and Pictures, all have what amounts to nothing more than a folder browser interface. You plow through the files that you have loaded in the appropriate folder and select what you want to see, hear, or look at. Once you are in playback mode there are naturally quite a few more options, but the selection process is dead simple.

Movies

Even if you never use the TVisto 3500 for anything but a video jukebox, I think you’ll find that it is worth the money. It supports multiple video formats, but I chose to go with the simplest and easiest format. I used the banned program DVD Decrypter, and told it to rip my DVD to an ISO image. (By the way, if you want a good answer to the question “Is this legal” you might want to see what the Electronic Freedom Foundation has to say about it.) I then simply copied those ISO images to my TVisto in the Movies folder, and was then able to browse them as shown in Figure 5:

Figure 5
Selecting a Movie

As you can see, selecting a movie is done simply by browsing file names, so you will want to be careful about naming your ISO files before installing them on the hard drive. There is no horizontal scrolling, either, so if your names are too long you will be in real trouble – the end of a title will simply be unreadable.

You can also see at the bottom of the list of files that I have put these six DVDs into a separate folder – I’m using a hierarchical storage system to make the navigation process a little easier to follow.

While all this may be a little crude, once you hit the play button the remote in order to start a movie, you will beging enjoing exactly the same playback experience you get from your DVD player – the full set of menus and features you expect:

Figure 6
The Main Menu for Alias, Season 3, Disc 2

Figure 6 shows you a playback in progress, looking just as you would expect at the given resolution, with the English subtitles being overlaid on the screen. (Looks like Sydney is in the middle of a big operation!)

Figure 7
Full Feature playback

I couldn’t be happier with this DVD emulation mode of the TVisto 3500. It does exactly what I want, the way I’m used to doing it. The ripping process is one-button-click simple, and I don’t have to give up anything in terms of features or performance.

Music

I have to confess that I actually purchased the TVisto first as a music player. I like to have access to my entire music collection in my media room, and despite the efforts of all the manufacturers out there, have yet to have a satisfactory experience with a networked player. For example, the Linksys Wireless-B Media Adapter seems like solid product from the spec sheet, but it suffers from such a litany of shortcomings that I found it completely unusable. (Disclosure: I work for Linksys – or at least I did before this article was published.) My Windows Media Center Edition experiences were even more frustrating, again using a Linksys product, the Dual-Band Wireless A/G Media Center Extender (which notably seems to have stopped shipping.) In this case I blame most of the woes on Microsoft, not Linksys, for the unfriendly music experience.

So instead of hassling with a remote box that has to talk to a server, (always including some required server software), the TVisto offers an easier to manage remote experience with less hassle on my part. All I have to do is copy files to my Music Folder, and I’m in business.

Figure 8 shows the music navigation system in place, and just as you might have expected, it is simply a folder browser. This is both a strength and a shortcoming of the TVisto. Since it doesn’t have to maintain a big database of titles, it is much simpler and more reliable. At the same time, that database of titles that you get with iTunes or Windows Media Player does make it easier to navigate through your songs.

Figure 8
Navigating through the music collection

Note that again, in order to bring some help to the navigation problem of working through several hundred CDs, I’ve gone hierarchical, with each family member having their own folder, with artists under those, then albums under those. This is okay, but not optimal. If you want to play a specific CD it means you either have to know whose folder it is in or else spend a lot of time browsing – no search function available.

If your needs are restricted to listening to one CD at a time, you will find yourself in hog heaven. When you select a CD, you can either play individual songs of your selection or with one button press instantly play the entire CD.

Figure 9
Music plaback in progress

The one place where the GalaxyMetalGear team could really afford to work on firmware improvements would be here. Feature competition from Microsoft and Apple has really raised the bar on music playback, and a simple file-folder oraganized MP3 playback experience won’t cut it for a lot of people. Things I’d like to see in updates to the current product would include:

• Big improvements in navigation, with an eye towards speed – pressing the page button 20 times to get to the end of a list is pretty annoying.
• Support for playlists, ratings, and searching
• Support for ID3V2 tags, including multiple Genres per song
• Shuffle options
• Display of album artwork and lyrics
• Visualization options

Despite these missing features, make no mistake about one thing, this is still an excellent replacement for the CD player in your media room. It performs the same function, but allows you to quickly access your entire collection and frees up the space that was occupied by that ugly CD rack you bought at Target 10 years ago.

Pictures

I consider the picture album feature almost a throwaway – it was easy to add, so it was included, but I don’t know anyone who actually uses their TV to browse through their photos (my apologies to those of you out there who do!)

Basically, the photo album feature operates identically to the music feature, meaning you get to view one folder at a time. Figure 10 shows this in play on my TV, and its certainly nice, but the lack of tagging and organization makes it a bit lame compared to a web site like Flickr.com.

Figure 10
Viewing Photos

Conclusions

If you’re looking at price performance, I think the TVisto can’t be beat. I won’t be surprised if an iPod will be able to do all of these things soon (except for playing DVDs you’ve ripped yourself), but even then, the form factor will always mean you are paying a huge penalty for disk space. My $200 TVisto has 300G of disk space – an iPod with 1/5 that space costs twice as much.

The one thing that would take this product from second base to home would be network access. Given that it is running a standard Linux distribution, I have to believe that it would be fairly easy to support a USB network interface. If I could load new media on the TVisto without having to lug it from one room to another, I think I would then be able to say the TVisto 3500 is feature complete. (Opening this box up for community software development might be one way to get those new features in more quickly.)

A few notes on pros and cons to help you with your buying decision:

Pro:

• No fan
• Small footprint
• Very inexpensive
• Plays ISO-ripped DVDs
• Plays DivX compressed video
• OS independent

Con:

• No protected music
• No network access
• Lots of UI limitations – slow scan through music and photos
• No playlists
• No shuffling across folders
• Doesn’t read ID3V2 tags

Look at it this way – in the worst case, you’ll still get to use it as a portable hard drive!

Incredible video compression claims are a morbid fascination of mine – usually it’s obvious that the claims are going to go down in flames, and it’s just a matter of watching for the inevitable disaster. I’m using the term incredible in its literal sense, a synonym for unbelievable, which comes in to play when somebody comes out of nowhere to say they can improve the state of the art by a factor of 10:1.

So when I saw this press release from CipherFlux, I couldn’t help having that same feeling of “here we go again”. CipherFlux seems to be saying that they can pull off a roughly a 6:1 improvement over the best quality DivX encoding, a feat that would have to be considered remarkable.

Interestingly, I found that CipherFlux’s founder Jerzy Urbanik, was very happy to talk with me about what his team has been working on. Since this is blog format, and we don’t suffer from space constraints, I’ll go ahead and give you the bulk of our Q&A.

Interview

The following is the transcript of an email interview with Jerzy Urbanik, President and founder of CipherFlux:

Mark: Your company seems to specialize in optimized security algorithms. How did you get sidetracked into video coding?

Jerzy: We founded CipherFlux with one premise: we decided to challenge the concerns of speed in the field of cryptology, and at the beginning that was our primary area of research. One day, while having a video conference, one of our engineers said: “Well, it would be nice if we could apply our method to improve the quality of video transmission”. “Why not” I said. That is how it all started.

Most of us have interdiscipilinary knowledge which helped us with finding solutions in areas that are seemingly isolated, video compression and cryptology. Traditionally these fields were developed separately because the problems they examined were very different and the techniques they used appeared unrelated. Recently there is a growing consent among the research community that the two fields are quite closely related.

Mark: You’re claiming that you have higher quality than the best MPEG-4 type decoder (comparing to DivX) with compression ratios four times greater. What’s the secret that allows you to do this? You must be using some new techniques, right?

Jerzy: Yes we are, but at this moment we don’t want to disclose any technical details since our research relates to cryptography and this is a sensitive subject. Our technology implementation into video compression allowed us to achieve greater results and to be sure that nobody approaches compression from this angle we have kept it secret. At this point our method is totally lossless. To prove to ourselves that we are going in the right direction we used a simple 197MB video file and we compressed it down to 90KB. But that is just the beginning. There is still a lot that can be done in the area of lossless compression before we move on to lossy compression. For comparison purposes we compressed the same video using the latest version of DivX (ver. 6.22) which utilizes MPEG4 LOSSY compression. The results were impressive, of course, and to our benefit.

Mark: As far as you know, are you in danger of stepping on anyone’s patents?

Jerzy: Our method/algorithm applied to cryptology is totally unique. We did our homework and as far as we know nobody approaches video compression from that angle.

Mark: If this pans out to be as good as you claim, how do you think you will be able to commercialize it? This is the notoriously tough part of the business, turning a good algorithm into a standard that lots of people use.

Jerzy: This is a very good question. It’s true that turning any algorithm into a standard has always been an issue, especially for a new technology. But we believe that as long as the greatest hurdle for efficient data transmission is bandwidth capacity – that limits speed, size, and quality of any transferred music, voice or video file – the industry will welcome our solution when presented with a tool to overcome those limitations.

Mark: When can we expect to see some demos?

Jerzy: We estimate that demo will be available in 2007.

Analysis

So there are a couple of red flags here, not surprisingly. The first is that Jerzy takes his press release one step further by saying that his algorithm is completely lossless. To be claiming a completely lossless algorithm that bests DivX best quality by 5:1 is truly incredible, and will definitely require big-time scrutiny.

Second, the press release (as of this writing) says:

Our newest tests and the possibility of independent tests will be avaliable after July 15 2006.

In the interview, Jerzy backs off that and says 2007. I wish I could tell you how many times I’ve heard of an incredible compression technique that just “needed a little bit of tweaking” and never managed to ship.

As always, my final analysis in a case like this is extreme skepticism. But I won’t say that these claims are impossible, just incredible. The acid test for CipherFlux, just like anyone else, is to provide reproducible benchmarks using standard video tests that let us perform apples-to-apples comparisons against state-of-the-art compressors. In general, most incredible claimants never get that far. Jerzy says they will, and until then, we’ll remain skeptical but open-minded.

There are a lot of video codecs in the world, and the competition is pretty fierce. Is there any room for a newcomer to claw out some market share? There are lots of pretenders, but few who actually succeed in making a dent in the marketplace.

Let’s look at what’s already out there and in wide use:

• MPEG-2
• MPEG-4/DivX
• H.263
• H.264/Sorensen 3
• RealVideo
• Windows Media Video

And let’s not forget the up-and-coming AVS coding standard from China.

All of these have their place, and all struggle to win market share. In every case they either have a huge standards body like the ISO or a heavyweight company behind them.

But that didn’t stop Paris-based Actimagine from deciding that they, too, needed to create a video codec. And as reported by Converge!, they’ve managed to snag a few million Euros from investors to try to make this a big deal in the mobile and handheld market.

And apparently with some success so far. Their press release history shows that they’ve been able to at least cut a few deals with this codec. Maybe the claims that they can distance themselves from patented technology like MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 has convinced buyers that this is a good place to be.

Of course, 3 million Euros is not exactly a big funding step, so it’s not like anyone seems to be expecting a home run. I suspect the funding is mostly based on the fact that they’ve shown enough smarts to be able to sign a few licensing deals already – it means they at least understand the business and are doing more than making big talk.

Still, I’ll be surprised if you look back 10 years from now and see Actimagine as anything more than a blip on the curve. They would have to go a long way to make anything approaching a significant impact. They one thing they have going for them is the continued perception that current attempts to deliver video to mobile devices sucks big time.

Byte.com February 9, 2004 Article on Byte.com

I’ve been an ardent proponent of server-based digital media for a long time. Way back in 1999, technology finally reached the point where I could migrate my music collection from CDs to a server, with the result chronicled here. Once that was accomplished, I naturally begin work on moving my video collection to a home server as well.

In the millenial year 2000, I found that creating a video server was impossible on nearly every front. My home network couldn’t handle the bandwidth. I didn’t have decent client devices to play stored video. And my server didn’t have the storage capacity to hold my entire video catalog.

I’m happy to report that at the outset of 2004, all of these problems have vanished, and it’s now completely feasible to store your entire video collection on a home server. This article is going to tell you how to do this, step by step, in a simple and easy fashion.

In order, you’ll learn how to rip your DVD content to your hard drive, convert that content to the super-efficient DivX format, and how to play those videos using off-the-shelf players, over either a wired or wireless network.

The methods I’m describing here aren’t necessarily for everyone. This article intends to provide a simple and straightforward solution for folks who want the benefits of a jukebox, but don’t want to invest days and weeks learning how to use complex tools. You might want more. Check the disclaimer to see if you should take the path less traveled.

Grabbing the Content

Those DVDs stacked up in your entertainment center have digitized video stored in an encrypted MPEG-2 format. The actual size of the movie varies depending on length, screen size, and compression settings, but most feature films clock in somewhere between 3 and 5 Gigabytes.

No doubt your Windows PC is able to see those files without any trouble. If you insert a standard title into your PC’s DVD drive, you’ll see something like the listing shown here.

Directory listing of Erin Brockovich

Grabbing that data off of a DVD is a bit problematic. Yes, your PC can easily read those files, but unfortunately the MPEG-2 content has been encrypted so that it can only be played through a licensed piece of hardware.

Fortunately, there are a few excellent programs that are able to bypass this protection, allowing you to decrypt the data and copy it to your PC simultaneously. The program I recommend for this purpose is called DVD Decrypter. It’s a completely free piece of software for Win32 PCs, and you can download it here.

A couple of notes about DVD Decrypter. First, if your PC is in the Win9X train, you will also need to download ASPI drivers for your DVD-ROM. (You can get these from the Adaptec ASPI download site.) Second, it is illegal to distribute this program in the United States! Yes, that’s right, it is not legal to sell software that accesses the DVD content that you paid good money for. A more detailed discussion of this can be found in the DMCA sidebar.

Ripping your DVD

Installing DVD Decrypter is a straight-ahead process, and I won’t go into any of the details here. Once you have the program installed, start it up, and select the Mode menu option. Set the mode to the IFO setting. This is the most straightforward way to pull the correct VOB files from the DVD.

Selecting IFO mode in DVD Decrypter

DVD software installer

DVD Decrypter selects the longest program

Ripping the disk is really not much more than just copying the files from your DVD drive to your hard drive, so the process will go pretty quickly, especially if you have a nice high-speed DVD-ROM. The figure below shows what things look like while the extraction is in process. If you love details, be sure to turn on the log window so you can get the works.

The DVD Rip in progress

The optional log window

Verifying Your Rip

Once DVD Decrypter finishes its work, you will have a nice collection of files in your destination directory. You should have one IFO file, a collection of VOB files that are each up to 1 GByte in size, and a text file. A sample of that is shown here.

The results of the rip process

To do this, I like to use another great piece of free software, the VLC media player from Videolan.org. Follow the links from Videolan.org home page, download and execute the install package, and you’re in business. Once you’ve done that, just start the player, and one by one drag the VOB files from their target directory right onto the VLC control panel. I usually do a quick check to make sure that I’ve got a series of VOB files that start at the beginning of the movie, end with the credits, and appear to have some reasonable content in the middle. A typical view of the process is shown below.

The VLC Media Player in use