In a press release, Eyeball Networks, a provider of standards-based voice over IP (VoIP) and video telephony software, announced today that is has been awarded a U.S. Patent for “Three-Dimensional Wavelet-Based Scaleable Video Compression.”

Features of the patent, which are included in Eyeball’s Any-Bandwidth™ Technology, include dynamic adaptation based on network resources, highly scaleable video coding, low computational cost and transmission error resilience. With Any-Bandwidth™ Technology, providers of VoIP and video telephony services can guarantee their end-users the best available service quality across any IP connection and firewall.

From this article at CodeGuru, get a sneak preview of the compression and decompression classes that are coming in the .NET Framework 2.0 due out later this year.

A poster in comp.compression wondered “where can I find C++ wrappers for Zlib?” A reasonable question, (although not very hard to answer!) Zlib maven Mark Adler answered with a pointer to the contributed software section of the zlib distribution, available on the zlib distribution site. I might also point out that I had an article called zlib - Looking the Gift Code in the Mouth back in the day that has a reasonably good wrapper class.

This definitely comes under the category of a FAQ. Fortunately, zlib is is simplicity personified, so it’s easy to create a good wrapper. So easy that everyone does it!

The BBC is quietly preparing a challenge to Microsoft and other companies jostling to reap revenues from video streams. It is developing code-decode (codec) software called Dirac in an open-source project aimed at providing a royalty-free way to distribute video.

Dirac is a video codec that provides general-purpose video compression and decompression tools comparable with state-of-the-art systems. Dirac is available for distribution under the MPL version 1.1 software license.

The sums at stake are potentially huge because the software industry insists on payment per viewer, per hour of encoded content. This contrasts with TV technology, for which viewers and broadcasters alike make a one-off royalties payment when they buy their equipment.

Borer’s team is trying to make project more accessible to open-source developers; lead Dirac programmer Anuradha Suraparaju is developing an interface to facilitate use of the module by C coders. ‘They can simply bolt on a software library to their existing application,’ said Borer, who hopes the developer community will write Dirac plug-ins for players such as Windows Media Player 9.

Read more here.

In a press release, On2 Technologies, Inc. (Amex: ONT - News), today announced it has significantly enhanced its flagship video compression software, TrueMotion VP7. With this enhanced version of VP7, On2 has claimed more than doubled two-pass encoding rates, greatly increased image quality, doubled decode speeds and boosted performance specifications of its real-time encoding capability. These benchmarks position VP7 as outperforming competitive codecs — such as Windows Media 9, Real 10 and most implementations of H.264 — by up to 30 - 50%.

ComputerWorld has this excellent article on the standards and how they are no longer what they used to be.

The increasing trend towards patenting and contributing IP to standards only to later extort money from all users is very disturbing. Author Robert L. Mitchell asserts that the good old days where companies cooperated and contributed to build successful standards like ethernet are just some golden memories.

And unfortunatly, data-compression has been no exception to this. (Forgent’s case with Jpeg, DRM patent issues with ContentGaurd etc…)

IT developer Blaze International Ltd hopes to have market trials this year of technology it says will enable mobile phone users to view a clear, smooth-running video on their handsets.

PIXe is a pre-compression filter that they claim can substantially boost the ability of other compression methods to reduce the size of video files. Blaze chief executive officer Peter Hartshorne said Blaze expected to be able to demonstrate the operation of PIXe on a mobile phone within the next month and have a market trial by year end.

More information here

Update : There is this comp.compression thread on this which you might want to read.

Hello,

Over the past several months. Our communications group has been searching for a better compression scheme then JPEG2000 provides.

We are looking for the best possible image file compression with the least amount of image data loss.
This codec will be used with HF Radio mail and data transfer applications such as SCAMP, WINLINK 2000 and DRM™ - Digital Radio Mondiale to transmit missing person and other image data via HF radio.

To our disappointment we have not been able to find anything better then JPEG2000 other then three companies that appear no more then snake oil salesmen.

Even Technologies

Let it Wave

ABO Image compression

The reasons I make such a comment are:

This sounds like snake oil to me unless.

a) You are starting with a small picture in the first place. 64*64 pixels for example would give a picture to match the main features of the person in question, but I sure would not want to use it for access control.

b) What is store is a ‘fingerprint’ or hash-value of the features of the photo. In that case you could not really recreate the photo from the compressed data. Rather you compare the hash-value of the original master
photo to any later photos supplied to see how close a match you can get

> CodecID implements a truly unique technology =
> by improving by more than a factor three the compression obtained with =
> JPEG 2000, which is the state of the art technology for photo =
> compression. It is the result of a research program in mathematical =
> image processing led by internationally renowned scientists, major =
> contributors to the JPEG-2000 standard.=20

Second snake oil moment. ‘internationally renowned scientists’ but no names that you can call and check up on. Still sounds like snake oil to me.

First, before you pay a cent of your money to any of these people, have them show you it working on YOUR equipment first. And have YOUR techs check the equipment before, during, and after the demo for tampering.

It will also help if the pictures are supplied by you, and they never get a copy of the pictures until the very last minute before them start the demo.

If there are any delays and you lose track of your data disk/stick insist on restarting the demo with a new set of pictures.

If there are more delay, start smelling a rat. At the very least ask why are you paying good money for software that is so hard to use.

We are still interested in finding something better then JPEG2000. But at this time JPEG2000 appears to be he best.

Thankyou

In this blog entry, Brian Dipert presents his thoughts on the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD standoff and what he feels might be the possible turns technology developers can take and how he feels that codecs may solve a part of this problem.

A good read for anyone interested in video compression.

Nero announced the availability of a 30-day free trial version of its Audio/Video compression codec, Nero Digital™.

Nero Digital™ includes three Nero applications: Nero Recode 2 CE, which allows users to create Nero Digital™ content; Nero ShowTime 2 CE, which allows users to play back Nero Digital™ content; and Nero MediaHome CE, which allows users to share Nero Digital™ content to any UPnP™ or DLNA compliant consumer electronics device, and to PCs and laptops in your home network.

Nero Digital™ is a complete Audio/Video codec solution, based on the MPEG-4 standard, but engineered to a level that breaks all previously seen quality and speed barriers. It delivers DVD-quality at a compression rate far greater than MPEG-2, enabling the complete contents of personal videos and movies of a DVD, to easily fit on a CD. It also increases the capacity of a DVD by factor 5 and higher. Nero Digital™ videos can be played back on PCs running the Nero Digital™ codec and on the fast growing number of certified Nero Digital™ consumer electronic devices.

The free trial of Nero Digital™ lets the user experience the newest technologies like MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, delivering a home entertainment experience in a quality no other compression technologies can match. Already adopted as a mandatory codec for next generation HD-DVD and Blu-ray standards, AVC/H.264 is set to have a major impact on the future of video broadcasting and content distribution.

Nero Digital™ co-developed by Nero and Ateme, is completely based on industry standard MPEG-4 Video (MPEG-4 SP/ASP and AVC/H.264) and MPEG-4 Audio (LC AAC, HE AAC and PS AAC) compression technologies, allowing the flexibility to play other popular MPEG-4 compliant content, yet offering advanced interactive features in unmatched audio and video quality.