Predict: The Next Generation Console Tech

[eastmen]

50% better compresion would bring a 20 gig file down to 10 gigs. Seems like it be a huge boon for streaming video. So much so that once again we don't need optical movie formats

 

[Xenus]

Yeah I'll believe it when I see it. They have been working on video compression for a long time now. So much so that someone who get's 5% more compression with the same quality just earned them selves millions of dollars. So I'm going to doubt they find a magical way to compress it 50% more without loss.

 

[eastmen]

Yeah I'll believe it when I see it. They have been working on video compression for a long time now. So much so that someone who get's 5% more compression with the same quality just earned them selves millions of dollars. So I'm going to doubt they find a magical way to compress it 50% more without loss.

we are talking a long time here. The xbox 360 was deisgned in 2004 and a 2012 system would be 8 years of hardware advancement. I'm not sure but i would think its easier to gain better compression with 8 years of hardware power increases than it is trying to get 5% more compression with the same hardware which is more of what your talking about.

Mpeg 1 , mpeg 2 and mpeg 4 were all capable of large gains because of the vast changes in computer hardware. I believe now esp there are alot more companys and money out there to push compresion foward. Heck sony didn't even want new codecs for bluray as I recall they were quite happy designing based on mpeg 2 and only adopted the new codecs to try and bring the media war to an end (and they most likely would have lost if they excluded them from the bluray specs)

 

[jonabbey]

we are talking a long time here. The xbox 360 was deisgned in 2004 and a 2012 system would be 8 years of hardware advancement. I'm not sure but i would think its easier to gain better compression with 8 years of hardware power increases than it is trying to get 5% more compression with the same hardware which is more of what your talking about.

Yeah, but compression isn't magic. There are fundamental limits to the effectiveness of compression based on the entropy of the source data and the physiology of human perception.

All the computation in the world can't do more than asymptotically approach these limits.

Mpeg 1 , mpeg 2 and mpeg 4 were all capable of large gains because of the vast changes in computer hardware. I believe now esp there are alot more companys and money out there to push compresion foward. Heck sony didn't even want new codecs for bluray as I recall they were quite happy designing based on mpeg 2 and only adopted the new codecs to try and bring the media war to an end (and they most likely would have lost if they excluded them from the bluray specs)

True, but the more codecs improve, the less low-hanging fruit remains to improve them further.

h.264 AVC is far better than mpeg2, but that doesn't mean that there must exist something that far superior to it.

 

[jonabbey]

That said, according to that wikipedia page, they think they can do it, so who am I to quibble.

 

[Xenus]

Not really eastman anyone who knows computers knows video quality getting better is much more likely to happen because oi better hardware and more storage space rather then some magical algorithm. Take search/sort algorithms anymore a gain of a few percent can make you billions in the algorithm department. Better hardware is increasing search speed far more then any magical algorithm is.

 

[N00b]

Yeah I'll believe it when I see it. They have been working on video compression for a long time now. So much so that someone who get's 5% more compression with the same quality just earned them selves millions of dollars. So I'm going to doubt they find a magical way to compress it 50% more without loss.

Apparently they have already achieved 30% better compression (i.e. 30% less data) with their first test model. The linked article is in german, the source is german c't magazine, which is very reliable.

 

[Xenus]

I'd be rather impressed if that becomes verifiable by outside sources because as stated earlier low hanging fruit should be pretty much gone by now which means such large jumps are rare.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

If they're going out of their way to reach the high-up fruit though... I mean c'mon, this is a worldwide consortiuum of boffins who's only job is to develop cutting edge video compression for use by every digital media industry. It's not like they're a bunch of student undergrads poking around in their dorm finding whatever little optimisations they can in existing algorithms!

 

[N00b]

I'd be rather impressed if that becomes verifiable by outside sources because as stated earlier low hanging fruit should be pretty much gone by now which means such large jumps are rare.

Well you can look at the proposals if you want, they are available here.

If they're going out of their way to reach the high-up fruit though... I mean c'mon, this is a worldwide consortiuum of boffins who's only job is to develop cutting edge video compression for use by every digital media industry. It's not like they're a bunch of student undergrads poking around in their dorm finding whatever little optimisations they can in existing algorithms!

Ironically the arguably best H.264 encoder, x264, is an open source project made by enthusiasts.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Ironically the arguably best H.264 encoder, x264, is an open source project made by enthusiasts.

Well I never said the best achievements aren't always the biggest companies with the most to invest. The point is when there aren't low haning fruit, that doesn't mean the high fruit are inaccessible. They will be picked by either small people working hard to build a human pyramid, or rare freaky tall people who can just reach them, or maybe some dumpy guy who runs into the tree and makes them fall. So your pont that there are no longer low-hanging fruit doesn't logically lead on to there being no substantial advance to be made - only that substantial advances aren't obvious and will need a shift in methods to achieve them if they exist.

 

[Rangers]

It's funny how this thread is so large and we have yet to see our first semi-hard rumor of actual next gen hardware, and none seems in sight...cant wait for that day

 

[N00b]

So your pont that there are no longer low-hanging fruit doesn't logically lead on to there being no substantial advance to be made - only that substantial advances aren't obvious and will need a shift in methods to achieve them if they exist.

I think you just confused me with either Xenus, jonabbey or eastmen. Anyway I wasn't trying to argue, I just thought that it was an amusing ancedote.

 

[MfA]

I'd be rather impressed if that becomes verifiable by outside sources because as stated earlier low hanging fruit should be pretty much gone by now which means such large jumps are rare.

Of my head I can see a couple of areas where significant gains can be made ... as long as you don't mind a little slowdown and more passes.

For instance, the single biggest gain in x264 was in using temporal importance of blocks ... but the way that's done is still rather limited. Exact rate changes in dependent blocks isn't used during motion refinement for instance ...

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I think you just confused me with either Xenus.

Yeah, sorry, I saw the name you quoted, Xenus, and attributed the post to him.

 

[Xenus]

Shifty all I'm saying is as technology advances in a certain field those types of leaps become more and more rare thus I'm skeptical of any claimed radical performance leap. That's all I was really trying to get out there. It's possible certainly but as time goes on it becomes less and less probable.

 

[aaronspink]

Mpeg 1 , mpeg 2 and mpeg 4 were all capable of large gains because of the vast changes in computer hardware. I believe now esp there are alot more companys and money out there to push compresion foward. Heck sony didn't even want new codecs for bluray as I recall they were quite happy designing based on mpeg 2 and only adopted the new codecs to try and bring the media war to an end (and they most likely would have lost if they excluded them from the bluray specs)

I have several early mpeg 2 BR and the AVC DVD-HDs of the same movies. And the AVC version with almost 1/2 the space is generally much much higher quality. Mpeg2 WAS a monumentally bad idea, we won't even get into the fact that it too Sony 2+ years after BR release for their encoding tools to not suck.

The reality is there is still a decent amount of quality/bandwidth left in AVC. Really it all comes down to how money computation you can throw at the encoding and decoding. A lot of devices still don't support the higher end features of AVC which can make a significant difference in bit rate per quality.

 

[aaronspink]

Apparently they have already achieved 30% better compression (i.e. 30% less data) with their first test model. The linked article is in german, the source is german c't magazine, which is very reliable.

any idea what subset of AVC they are comparing against? There is a significant difference between the low end and high end specs for AVC.

 

[aaronspink]

Shifty all I'm saying is as technology advances in a certain field those types of leaps become more and more rare thus I'm skeptical of any claimed radical performance leap. That's all I was really trying to get out there. It's possible certainly but as time goes on it becomes less and less probable.

You have to realize that mpeg4/avc were fairly limited by assumed computational performance in both encode and decode. We are currently sitting an order of magnitude or two beyond the assumed performance for H.264. Its only been fairly recently that we've even seen people taking advantage of the higher end features in 264. If you assume an order of magnitude higher performance is available both in encode and decode, you can make a whole lot of options available that were known about before but simply not practical. Fundamentally we aren't seeing any totally new or revolutionary technology (and we didn't see it in mpeg4/AVC either), but rather applying ever more computationally intense transforms and coding.

 

[N00b]

any idea what subset of AVC they are comparing against? There is a significant difference between the low end and high end specs for AVC.

Sorry, don't know. But you could write the author of the c't article I linked to a mail. The e-mail adress is a the end of the article and these guys are usually helpful.