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  • Bijective BWT (7 Comments)

    David Scott has written a bijective BWT transform, which brings all the advantages of bijectiveness to BWT based compressors. Among other things, making BWT more suitable for compression-before-encryption and also give (slightly) better compression.

  • Asymmetric Binary System (116 Comments)

    Jarek Duda’s “Asymmetric Binary System” promises to be an alternate to arithmetic coding, having all the advantages, but being much simpler. Matt has coded a PAQ based compressor using ABS for back-end encoding. Update: Andrew Polar has written an alternate implementation of ABS.

  • Precomp: More Compression for your Compressed Files (3 Comments)

    So many of today’s files are already compressed (using old, outdated algorithms) that newer algorithms don’t even get a chance to touch them. Christian Schneider’s Precomp comes to rescue by undoing the harm.

  • On2 Technologies is Hiring

    There aren’t too many companies working on cutting edge codecs, and of those few this one is hiring. Best of luck.

  • China’s AVS Specifications Available (2 Comments)

    Its old news that China has developed their own Advanced Video Standard to avoid high licensing fees. English translation of the standard is now available, along with the IPR policy. Finally something technical that you can get your hands on to feed your appetite.

Nero Flogs Video Coding Package

Posted by Mark Nelson on 24th June 2005 | Permanent Link

Some of you might know of my long term struggles to get the perfect home jukebox for my audio and video needs. Life in the audio world is getting better all the time, but video is still a problem. I was pretty happy ripping my DVDs and encoding them with DivX 5, and I’ve been tinkering with Windows Video 9, but nothing is a clear winner yet. Probably the biggest issue is that there is no winning option for cheap device playback. I’ve got a KiSS player that plays DivX streams, and a Linksys box that plays Windows media, but to be honest, they both suck.

Nero has been in this market for a while with a proprietary system to encode DVDs using MPEG-4. It costs real money, so I’ve been reluctant to try it, and I don’t think it has any device support. But now PC Mag tells me that I can get a 30 day trial for Nero. Maybe I’ll give it a shot. They’ve got some sort of system for home video distribution, and I can’t help but be a little interested because of that.

Note in the article that there is lots of hemming and hawing from Nero about royalty payments to the MPEG-4 consortium. I don’t know if this is a real issue or not, but as far as I know, one cannot distribute an MPEG-4 codec without paying a royalty, so it’s kind of tough for Nero to give anything away. Maybe they have a special deal with MPEG-LA that lets them off the hook for demoware.

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 24th, 2005 at 10:10 am by Mark Nelson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.