Didnt found anything interesting today, seems like a slow weekend.

A comp.compression post by nightlight discusses a page which links to about 70 online papers & books on the topics of enumerative (combinatorial) coding, arithmetic coding, universal codes…

There are here some hard to find papers, Ph.D. theses (#23,#36,#42), books (#3 Abramson 1963 classic on Inf. Theory and coding, #37, #38 combinatorics textbook).

Among the online papers: #27 from Rissanen (who invented arithmetic coding in 1976) on math of arithmetic coding (dual radix representation). Also interesting and hard to find #28,#33, #11 (Schalkwijk on lattice walks on Pascal triangle for enum. coding), #61-#62 on potentially fast combinatorial codes, #60 fast unranking … etc.

Truly a gem.

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.

Real has issued a patch set for the ever popular free Real Player. Apparently the Mac, Linux, and Windows versions all have a few vulnerabilities including the scary “ability to execute arbitray code.” Check the bulletin to see just how you are affected. I’ve seen lots of patches over the years for media players, but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of anyone actually launching an attack via this avenue. Have you?

Driven mainly by a need to cost-effectively deliver high-definition (HD) television, many telco TV providers are now preparing to use the more cost-efficient MPEG-4 video compression standard. LightReading has a nice article on this.

There is this thread started at comp.compression on XML/RSS compression.

The thread is triggered by this article.

In a press release, Pegasus Web Services, Inc. announced that it is creating the HyperDrive Modem(TM) with its patent-pending Digital Data Compression Method. This algorithm adds a third dimension to data transportation and storage(like storing/transporting parallel data on serial devices).

“This invention is expected to significantly change the way we use computers in the future. We will no longer be constrained by the box; i.e. the number of slots in the computer backplane. The network becomes the computer backplane. The total computing power available is the sum of the parts of all computers on the network,” noted Jeff Fries, President of Pegasus Web Services, Inc.

A data-management startup says its information engine offers a better way of managing RFID data collection than the use of data-filtering middleware.

They have reduced storage requirements by a large extent by storing references to a single data instance rather than storing each data instance itself. Now this sounds like real compression at a higher level. (Doesnt it sounds mysteriously similar to LZ algorithms)

Read more here.

Although it’s not yet an official standard, China’s AVS codec is gathering support—including silicon—as an alternative to H.264 in consumer designs.

More details here.

There is this excellent review of “Sorenson Squeeze” at MacDesignPro. The new release 4.0 really comes loaded with goodies.