in five years' time...

[temporance]

So let's try to guess where the world of codecs, containers and amateur PC video will be in five years time.

DVDs will be so cheap that Blockbuster will be struggling to stay afloat. CDs also, but most people will not be buying their music in a physical format by then. Movies will be available cheaply online - but I'm not sure of the format. It will be possible to order VoD movies to a clever set-top-box with a hard drive and DSL/cable-modem connection. So perhaps the format will be the one with the most hardware support (looks like this will be MPEG-4). Your set-top box will also download movies that it thinks you might like to watch (and it will do this via p2p networks, although you might still have to pay to activate the DRM.

So, I reckon MPEG-4 (DivX,xvid) will still be going strong. Chipsets and videocards supporting H.264 will becoming standard (and these will support all formats up to HDTV). But encoding H.264 at home will still be slower and not much better quality than xvid API9. Oh yes and open-source project hdot264 will have reached version 1.0 :)

There will have been one or two huge lawsuits, probably involving Microsoft... this might kill a standard or two.

So, my guess doesn't give much away... but i'd love to hear yours :)

[RathO]

People will finally stick to one standard for A/V... there will be no more confusion around the DVD format...

Yeah yeah, keep dreaming Sly... :(

But more seriously... DVD players will support Matroska, whatever the video or audio will be encoded to. :p

We'll have access to legally downloadable movies for couple $$.. with best quality available.

Regards

[deXtoRious]

No, no, no.
It'll be like this:
1) Windows Media Video 11/12 (partially based on h264) will rule the world.
2) DRM will be cracked and we all will have optical cables, which will allow us to get new movies in about 5 mins or so.
3) No one will care about software piracy

The future looks pretty bright to me ;)

[TheXung]

Someone will make a player that allows me to play movies faster by an arbitrary percentage (~20%) with pitch correction on the sound.

DVD burners will finally be able to burn 9 gb discs.

h.264 will not be adopted in hardware players yet.

[jollytim]

I believe the price of CD's may be rising a little in 5 years as the price of DVD's have dropped drastically making less demand for CD's with a following drop in production. Somewhere along the line, a standard favorite format for DVD R's will exist (+/-).

I think Microsoft will still be a big name in video compression just due to the sheer amount of money they can dump into development (and litigation against competition).

Divx will also be a household name as they are commercial and will be developing more and more hardware players. Their codec should be good too but I think somewhere along the way there will no longer be a 'free' version, hence Xvid and others will surpass them in this area.

I think there will be a container similar to Mostroska but for commercial use that one would have to pay for initially and would self destruct after so many uses (but the programmers of the world will already have hacked the destruction mode, as this is what happens when one tries to corner the market).

For the do-it-yourselfers there will still be developments in h.264, realmedia, Xvid, perhaps Divx, and probably a couple of new compression formats as well as containers (hopefully there will be something so innovative that it will breath new life into the mix).

[MfA]

The US will be renamed Disneyland and the US military turned into a copyright enforcement police force. Devices capable of playing A/V will be illegal to operate without a network connect, and they will all have mandatory blackboxes which will legally allow the incorporated government to observe anything you do on them at any given time to make sure you arent infringing copyrights. Production of media without Hollywood supplied encryption and watermarking will be illegal, we will watch low quality mpeg-1 movies and like it.

[Joe Fenton]

Originally posted by TheXung

DVD burners will finally be able to burn 9 gb discs.


DVDs and CDs will be sold only on eBay as curios as Blu-ray drives take over the market. 27G on a 12 cm disc and 1G on a 3cm disc.

The MPAA and RIAA finally go bankrupt and people throw a week-long party.

[Riley]

We had better be encoding at hi def resolutions in 5 years time.

[mf]

Originally posted by TheXung
Someone will make a player that allows me to play movies faster by an arbitrary percentage (~20%) with pitch correction on the sound.
*COUGH* Intervideo Timestretch DMO *COUGH*

[General Lee D. Mented]

DVDs will be cheap and auto-destructing (see disney's latest move). Blockbuster will be hurting due to lost revenue from overdue movies, as they now don't need to be returned, ever. They just oxidize in 7 days. To compensate they'll try and affiliate with large chains like walmart and 7-11 to do point of sale disposable rentals. Netflix will be the main competitor, and doing better as they now no longer need to pay return postage on destructable DVDs.

H.264 set top boxes will be being discussed by industry magazines, with maybe one or two expensive ones actually available on the market. The content base will be nonexistant because 99.99% of the public believes "DVD is good enough." There will be discussion of upcoming blu-ray disc HD players that use H.264 as their native format due in 2 years (7 years from now).

In the DVD "backup" (snicker) scene, MPEG and derivatives will have been crushed by advanced supertemporal wavelet codecs and adaptive codecs. $1 256MB solid state MRAM cards will be the portability medium of choice for video, which people like to watch on PDAs and laptops on the go (if you're at home, why not just burn the damn dvd without reencode and watch it on tv?). DVD burners software will have heavy copy-protection circumvention features, much like CDR software does now. This will be useful for people who just brought home a stack of $2 self destructing rental DVDs and want to "back them up in case the layer oxidizes before my legal rental window expires." The "We have too much free time" scene will be hacking ways to get movies to play on portable game systems, popularized by sony's playstation portable.

Software app development will have moved on to editors, and new apps that not only encode but peform functions equivalent to Premiere and in some cases beyond will be in various stages of completion.


Filesharing apps will be smarter and still rampant. Various security measures will be integrated (see earthstation 5) to provide anonymous downloading. Cable modem providers will be losing customers to DSL as they block more ports and throttle more bandwidth, aggrivating users. DSL providers that are hurting now will be gaining customer base by advertising openness of access and "Guaranteed bandwidth that's never capped."

mf will have a girlfriend, who may or may not be an actual biological girl. :P

[unmei]

where was digital video in 1998 ?

i did not research it and cannot remember very well as i only started encoding in 2001.
But i think mpeg-1 and -2 existed but mpeg-2 was near-to-not-used (PCs too slow, no codec available) and first DVDs were hitting the market, mpeg-4 was nowhere to be seen. Real Networks was really strong in both audio and video, especially when streamed. Indeo was widely used as mpeg(-1) alternative.

Deriving from this, i don't think the competitors will still be the same - but sure the names will remain known, only this forum will be discussing codecs we don't know the names of by now.

People will look at Mpeg-4 (incl. AVC) as we do now at mpeg-2, a solid, boring industry standard. CDs will be about to vanish as its much cheaper to fill a DVD by only 15%. People argue wether blue-ray can defeat the cheap double layer recordable DVDs - hey, hardware evolves not THAT fast :). DVD-Video often use Mpeg-4 container, all codecs can encode HighDefinition resolutions without problems and 50/60 fps is often used for end products. My bet on next industry standard goes to AVC/AAC (uh, cheap bet :) in Mpeg-4 with many players recognising matroska with identical content as well.
Fast networks will make the average user swap movies like mp3s today - playing a 2 or 4 mbit/s movie from a remote drive is the same as from a local drive - making the drive bus the limiting factor in p2p if several people want to watch off your drive

(People here are coding a replacement for the outdated matroska container which is the only reamaining non-DRMed container :P and i'll be tired of trying out new video tricks and never rip a DVD again - i hope not)

[Joe Fenton]

9/4/2003: You can get the Sony BW-F101 Blu-ray writer from Japan (will be in the US soon) if you got the money - about $3000. Stores 23G on a single disc - at about $45 a pop.

Philips also makes blu-ray drives. Given the rapid evolution of CDs and DVDs, why are people so skeptical of blu-rays? What makes them any different? They are available NOW, so in five years, they will be the dominant format. CDs will be dead and buried, and DVDs will be like CDs are right now - on the cusp of being obsolete and phased out.

It's the one negative of the computer market: the technology advances so fast, equipment becomes obsolete almost overnight. That doesn't mean unusable, it just means it won't be mainstream and it will be increasingly difficult to find supplies and parts. Just TRY to get 5.25" Mini-Floppies these days. It's hard enough to get 3.25" Micro-Floppies.

In five years, CDRs will be hard to find and expensive. DVDRs will be dirt cheap and everywhere, and Blu-rays will be moderate priced and increasingly dominant. The talk will all be on UV-rays... will they hit a TB per disc? We'll all wait with baited breath...

[geoffwa]

CDs have been around since the 1980s.

It's not technological superiority it's market penetration. Given how people seem to be buying into DVDs, it's unlikey that Blu-ray discs will take off quickly unless they are significanly better. And having Blu-ray discs availble in Japan at $45 a pop does not make them available *now*

If anything will kill CDs, it's that their primary storage ability - audio - seems to be shifting to online distribution.

I *do* predict that by 2020, Donald Graft will have produced a plugin that can make a Hollywood blockbuster out of random white noise, using field matching.

[trbarry]

It's not technological superiority it's market penetration. Given how people seem to be buying into DVDs, it's unlikey that Blu-ray discs will take off quickly unless they are significanly better. And having Blu-ray discs availble in Japan at $45 a pop does not make them available *now*

In five years time there may or not be HD/DVD's plentifully for sale. Hollywood really can't make up its mind about this. But many more of us will be doing HD capture off the airwaves and other places, encoding HD movies at 720 lines or better. And the debate will probably shift towards whether a 1 DVD HD rip is a quality worth watching.

Blank DVD-R's will probably cost about 25 cents or less.

- Tom

[Soulhunter]

And the debate will probably shift towards whether a 1 DVD HD rip is a quality worth watching.
:D :D :D

And dont forget to consider if you downmix your 12.1 soundtrack to 5.1... :D

Bye

[unmei]

And dont forget to consider if you downmix your 12.1 soundtrack to 5.1...

hmm i wonder if i'm still using headphones by then.. i have never encoded 5.1 so far cos i always watch my movies with headphones - that way i can watch them at 4am in full volume in my lil flat
..given i will own my own villa till then i might start to use "surround", but so far.. :D

[General Lee D. Mented]

Originally posted by unmei
hmm i wonder if i'm still using headphones by then.. i have never encoded 5.1 so far cos i always watch my movies with headphones - that way i can watch them at 4am in full volume in my lil flat
..given i will own my own villa till then i might start to use "surround", but so far.. :D

Why not just get the same thing I plan on getting?

http://shop.store.yahoo.com/guybuys/mdr-ds8000.html

Surround headphones! :P

[Joe Fenton]

Originally posted by General Lee D. Mented
Why not just get the same thing I plan on getting?

http://shop.store.yahoo.com/guybuys/mdr-ds8000.html

Surround headphones! :P

Hot damn! Pardon my french. :)
I been lookin' for sumthin' like this recently!

[Tuning]

Note: The document provided here is purely SCI-FI and the names provided may be purely coincidental . The author has no intention to cause humiliation to purely coincidental names used here.

Finally time will come when Bill * releases Microsoft Linux 2010Ex Advanced Professional Edition (quiet early in first quarter 2008).In which u have MS Linux Media Player 10-U can directly watch movies by simply typing the movie name and LMP 10 will fetch it for u from MS servers in seconds.(Not free - single $ maybe).By this release M$ tries to bring monopoly in all of the Computer Literate people out there(includes me!).The new codec coming with this OS will be called OVC (open video codec)and OAC(Audio).The hardware encoders may have been built in with Mother Board supplied by M$. With a single click on the existing file u are asked to confirm the transcoding. The codecs may be developed by the open source world and finally M$ has bought it for Millions of$.The codec will be loseless ones and u can wait for the open source to build another lossy one. Every individual will be having this lossless codec in their mobile phones, PDAs etc……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………and story continues…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………blah………….blah………………

The End

[Mug Funky]

ooh! i love threads like this... we can archive them and check how wrong we were in 5 years time.

- quantum computing logic components will have been developed, but no hardware will exist because computer scientists just can't find enough alcohol to allow them to think with an extra dimension.

- EMI will face a backlash from angry fans for making their CDs sound no better than the mp3s they tried to stop (hope this happens sooner - i've found that burning a copy of a CopyControlled disc actually sounds much better than the original, if you do it right:)
)

- the internet will be pay-per-click, even on p2p networks (it's going this way...)

- George W Bush will be justifying his last war on New Zealand, saying that the weapons must've been moved out during their 48 hour deadline before attacking. The US army will find a chemical weapons plant cleverly hidden in an otherwise ordinary looking sheep. the US will also have an active nuclear weapons program (this at least is true - check google).

- we'll have USB keys (or similar) with 40 gigs of space, at about $100 a pop (AUD).

- by the time i finally get enough money together to buy a DV camera, we'll all be over it and onto HDTV.

- portishead will finally release their new album (hmm... is 5 years enough?)


doom and gloom! hooray! the portishead album will make it all worth it though.

[unmei]

@GLDM these are sure the most hitekky headphones i ever saw:) there is only two things wrong with: i havent seen them in a store and i dont plan to get a credit card to start online shopping, and second they are eight times the price of my current ones which im fully satisfied with and i cant see tech specs like signal/noise or linearity distortion ..mine are cheap but among the best cheap ones :P

[General Lee D. Mented]

Originally posted by unmei
@GLDM these are sure the most hitekky headphones i ever saw:) there is only two things wrong with: i havent seen them in a store and i dont plan to get a credit card to start online shopping, and second they are eight times the price of my current ones which im fully satisfied with and i cant see tech specs like signal/noise or linearity distortion ..mine are cheap but among the best cheap ones :P

I've seen them at the Metreon in SF, but that's like Sony's own store, so obviously they'd have there.

I don't think signal/noise or distortion are the main selling points, though I'd assume they're comparable to something near the highend sonys. It's probably listed on their website. Most people buying this want it for the 6.1 channel HRTF rendered sound, or direct digital DTS stream input etc. :P

I'm currently very happy with my $85 sennheiser 280 pros.

[Sirber]

Are you talking about this?

http://www.futureshop.ca/multimedia/products/large/05612433.jpg

[General Lee D. Mented]

Originally posted by Sirber
Are you talking about this?

http://www.futureshop.ca/multimedia/products/large/05612433.jpg

I'm talking about http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/eCS/Store/-/-/-/SY_DisplayProductInformation-Start?ProductSKU=MDRDS8000&CategoryName=hav_HAVDepartmentAccessories_Headphones

and http://www.sennheiser.com/sennheiser/icm_eng.nsf/root/products_headphones_dj_04974

[Soulhunter]

Hmm... 5 years !?!

Maybe CPU power is about 15-20 GHz then... ???

Maybe HD have more capacity than 1TB then... ???

Maybe most Hollywood movie are 90% CG then... ???

Maybe all movies in cinemas are direct streamed over net then... ???

Maybe we have some sort of 3D TV's then... ???

Maybe the count of speakers for surround sound getting more then...(<8.1) ???

Maybe the count is getting lower, because of better psy decode methods then...(>5.1) ???

Maybe Mobile Phones and PDA's are the same then... ???

Maybe TV's and PC's are the same then... ???

Maybe standalones and PC's are the same then... ???

Maybe we have multiple soundtracks for each movie on one disc then... ??? (rock, pop, dance, classic, rap... etc.)

Maybe we have net-connection to download 1GB in 1min. then... ???

Maybe M$ begins to build a new secret KI-based OS codename "MATRIX" then... ???

Maybe DukeNukem4Ever is released then... ???

Maybe Ive won in the lottery till then... ???

[PS: I think winning in the lottery is more realistic than DN4Ever gets released... ;)]

Bye

[General Lee D. Mented]

>Maybe CPU power is about 15-20 GHz then... ???

Probably closer to 10-12Ghz. 5years is not that long and we haven't hit 5 yet. The rate is slowing.

>Maybe HD have more capacity than 1TB then... ???

Dunno about single HDs. RAIDs definately.

>Maybe most Hollywood movie are 90% CG then... ???

Doubt it, screen actors guild and unions would throw a fit.

>Maybe all movies in cinemas are direct streamed over net then... ???

Doubt it, too many problems with connections dying. Maybe a dedicated backbone network.

>Maybe we have some sort of 3D TV's then... ???

Can have it now, problem is multiple viewers.

>Maybe the count of speakers for surround sound getting more then...
>(<8.1) ???

Not enough improvement to justify the cost. The only real revolution I can see is hypersonic systems using phase intersecting ultrasound.

>Maybe the count is getting lower, because of better psy decode
>methods then...(>5.1) ???

Possibly, but doubt it. That kinda thing doesn't work well on anything except headphones because the environment messes up the phase cues.

>Maybe Mobile Phones and PDA's are the same then... ???

Probably.

>Maybe TV's and PC's are the same then... ???

Unlikely, people don't wanna have to deal with a PC to watch TV.

>Maybe standalones and PC's are the same then... ???

Standalones?

>Maybe we have multiple soundtracks for each movie on one disc
>then... ??? (rock, pop, dance, classic, rap... etc.)

Doubt it, to expensive to produce.

>Maybe we have net-connection to download 1GB in 1min. then... ???

Yes, but you can only upload at ISDN speeds still, and all ports are firewalled and everyone is behind a nat and it scans your processes for P2P apps every day.

>Maybe M$ begins to build a new secret KI-based OS codename "MATRIX"
>then... ???

KI-based? No idea what that is.

>Maybe DukeNukem4Ever is released then... ???

Maybe hell will have a decent ski season and daikatana 2 will be the top seller.

>Maybe Ive won in the lottery till then... ???

I hope I win it tonight, $126 million. :P

[Soulhunter]

Maybe CPU power is about 15-20 GHz then... ???

Probably closer to 10-12Ghz. 5years is not that long and we haven't hit 5 yet. The rate is slowing.

Hmm... Think there could be a "jump" in the rate... Because of new ways to build processors... (3D working processors)


Maybe most Hollywood movie are 90% CG then... ???

Doubt it, screen actors guild and unions would throw a fit.

OK, actors real, but the rest of the movie could be CG... :D


Maybe TV's and PC's are the same then... ???

Unlikely, people don't wanna have to deal with a PC to watch TV.

Mean that TV'S are able to do lot of stuff that PC's can do (Internet etc.)


Maybe standalones and PC's are the same then... ???

Standalones?

:D Yeah ! Mean DVD players etc. That they are able to play all kinds of data, not only MPEG1/2 and maybe MPEG4... [PS: Same for GamingConsoles etc.]


Maybe M$ begins to build a new secret KI-based OS codename "MATRIX"
then... ???

KI-based? No idea what that is.

Ohw..:eek: (think this is a german shorting) Think its "AI" in english...
Was just a yoke... ! :D M$ beginns to build "THE MATRIX" OS... ! :D


Maybe DukeNukem4Ever is released then... ???

Maybe hell will have a decent ski season and daikatana 2 will be the top seller.

LOL :D :D :D
Minnimum system requirements P7 10GHz, GF8-ULTRA-9999³, DirectX v.11c :D :D :D


Bye

[mikeytown2]

Well 5 years has passed, lets see how close some of the predictions were. It would be fun to do something like this to present the results
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketches_from_Late_Night_with_Conan_O%27Brien#In_the_Year_2000

Prediction: DVDs will be so cheap to own rentals will be a thing of the past.
Outcome: Nope, in fact rentals have gotten cheaper, while new DVD's are still costly.

Prediction: Most people will not be buying their music in a physical format by then.
Outcome: iTunes has taken over for the most part.

Prediction: Movies will be available cheaply online.
Outcome: Netflix's Watch Instantly feature has done this.

Prediction: MPEG-4 (DivX,xvid) will still be going strong.
Outcome: H.264 has rocked the world with flash support and in the near future MS Silverlight.

Prediction: Chipsets and videocards supporting H.264 will becoming standard.
Outcome: DirectX Video Acceleration or DXVA has made this a standard.

Prediction: Encoding H.264 at home will be slower and not much better quality than xvid API9.
Outcome: X.264 has surpassed xvid in terms of efficiency.

Prediction: open-source project hdot264 will have reached version 1.0.
Outcome: X.264 will release 1.0 once Core i7 (Nehalem) goes to market.

Prediction: One or two huge lawsuits, probably involving Microsoft, that kill a standard or two.
Outcome: Nope, all video standards still exist.

Prediction: no more confusion around the DVD format.
Outcome: eh, who knows?

Prediction: DVD players will support Matroska
Outcome: Don't think so...?

Prediction: We'll have access to legally downloadable movies for couple $$.. with best quality available.
Outcome: as a stream yes, as a file no.

Prediction: Windows Media Video 11/12 (partially based on h264) will rule the world.
Outcome: WMV 9 uses VC-1, and in the states here it did rule the Olympics... close but no world domination.

Prediction: DRM will be cracked
Outcome: Yes and no, Blu-Ray was the most recent DRM "crack" that made major news on the Internet. New forms of DRM are always being dreamed up so any grand eureka regarding DRM is probably an unreachable goal, for both parties I might add (implementations & crackers).

Prediction: No one will care about software piracy
Outcome: Far from the truth, it is still a huge issue.

Prediction: A player that allows me to play movies faster by an arbitrary percentage.
Outcome: ReClock DirectShow Filter can do this

Prediction: DVD burners will finally be able to burn 9 gb discs.
Outcome: True... 8.5GB

Prediction: h.264 will not be adopted in hardware players yet.
Outcome: False, All Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players can playback h.264.

Prediction: Price of CD's rising as the price of DVD's have dropped drastically.
Outcome: CD's have dropped a little in price due to online music sales, DVD's are still costly.

Prediction: A standard favorite format for DVD R's will exist (+/-).
Outcome: Who uses media when HD's and flash are so freakin cheap!

Prediction: Microsoft will still be a big name in video compression.
Outcome: Because of Silverlight, MS could be leading in the near future.

Prediction: Divx will also be a household name as they are commercial and will be developing more and more hardware players.
Outcome: True, you can get Divx certified devices.

Prediction: Divx codec should be good but there will no longer be a 'free' version, hence Xvid and others will surpass them in this area.
Outcome: Divx still has a free version.

Prediction: Container similar to Mostroska but for commercial use that one would have to pay for initially and would self destruct after so many uses
Outcome: None as far as I know.

Prediction: There will still be developments in h.264, realmedia, Xvid, perhaps Divx, and probably a couple of new compression formats as well as containers.
Outcome: X.264 is moving ahead, xvid has come to a standstill, never used realmedia or Divx. There's always something new in terms of compression and containers (BBC Dirac).

Prediction: US will be renamed Disneyland and the US military turned into a copyright enforcement police force.
Outcome: US is still US. The copyright enforcement police force will be showing up in 2009...

Prediction: Devices capable of playing A/V will be illegal to operate without a network connect.
Outcome: Blu Ray???

Prediction: A/V Playback devices will all have mandatory blackboxes which will legally allow the incorporated government to observe anything you do on them at any given time to make sure you aren't infringing copyrights.
Outcome: Windows Vista? Otherwise false

Prediction: Production of media without Hollywood supplied encryption and watermarking will be illegal
Outcome: False

Prediction: we will watch low quality mpeg-1 movies and like it.
Outcome: Youtube!

Prediction: DVDs and CDs will be sold only on eBay as curios as Blu-ray drives take over the market.
Outcome: Far from the truth.

Prediction: The MPAA and RIAA finally go bankrupt and people throw a week-long party.
Outcome: Party hat still in my desk, awaiting this day.

Prediction: Encoding at hi def resolutions in 5 years time.
Outcome: Yes we are.

Prediction: DVDs will be cheap and auto-destructing.
Outcome: Nope

Prediction: Blockbuster will be hurting due to lost revenue from overdue movies, as they now don't need to be returned, ever.
Outcome: Netflix has done its damage.

Prediction: H.264 set top boxes will be being discussed by industry magazines, with maybe one or two expensive ones actually available on the market.
Outcome: HD-DVD & Blu Ray both use H.264

Prediction: content base will be nonexistant because 99.99% of the public believes "DVD is good enough."
Outcome: For the most part yes

Prediction: There will be discussion of upcoming blu-ray disc HD players that use H.264 as their native format due in 2 years (7 years from now).
Outcome: They already support H.264

Prediction: MPEG and derivatives will have been crushed by advanced supertemporal wavelet codecs and adaptive codecs.
Outcome: Wait another 5 years.

Prediction: $1 256MB solid state MRAM cards will be the portability medium of choice for video, which people like to watch on PDAs and laptops on the go.
Outcome: True for the most part, flash is dirt cheap, but disks still rule video.

Prediction: DVD burners software will have heavy copy-protection circumvention features, much like CDR software does now.
Outcome: burners never really had the circumvention features, it was always the rippers.

Prediction: The "We have too much free time" scene will be hacking ways to get movies to play on portable game systems, popularized by sony's playstation portable.
Outcome: Right on the money.

Prediction: Software app development will have moved on to editors, and new apps that not only encode but peform functions equivalent to Premiere and in some cases beyond will be in various stages of completion.
Outcome: Blender & Cinelerra.

Prediction: Filesharing apps will be smarter and still rampant.
Outcome: Torrents are huge

Prediction: Various security measures will be integrated to provide anonymous downloading.
Outcome: Not really unless your a nut and using Tor for torrents.

Prediction: Cable modem providers will be losing customers to DSL as they block more ports and throttle more bandwidth, aggrivating users.
Outcome: True, but here in the states, it's still a monopoly when it comes to high speed Internet. Most people can only choose one provider.

Prediction: DSL providers that are hurting now will be gaining customer base by advertising openness of access and "Guaranteed bandwidth that's never capped."
Outcome: With Comcasts recent 250GB limit, this might come true.

Prediction: mf will have a girlfriend, who may or may not be an actual biological girl.
Outcome: Earlier this month a Turing test fooled 25 percent of human judges. One step closer to AI.

Prediction: People will look at Mpeg-4 (incl. AVC) as we do now at mpeg-2, a solid, boring industry standard.
Outcome: Wrong. AVC is on the cutting edge.



Stopped at post #11 if someone wants to continue...

[Sagekilla]

Prediction: CDs will be dead, DVDs will be on cusp of obsolete and Blu-ray dominant
Reality: CDs only good for music now, DVDs still the dominant format

Prediction: CDs will be hard and expensive to find, DVDs will be dirt cheap, Blu-rays will be moderately priced and more and more dominant
Reality: CDs are still cheap and plentiful, DVds are a bit more expensive and Blu-rays are a bit pricey still. Not $45/disc though

Prediction: Blu-ray will be plentiful for sale
Reality: Yep, not dominant but it's easy to find.

Prediction: Most of us will be doing HD cpature off airwaves and encoding HD movies at 720p or higher
Reality: Most are still on DVD, but most people can and are doing HD airwave capcture and encoding @ 720p.

Prediction: We'll debate whether 1 DVD HD-rips are worth quality
Reality: We're actually debating over 720p vs 1080p on a DVD-5

Prediction: Blank DVD-Rs are $0.25 or less.
Reality: Bingo.

Prediction: quantum computing logic will be developed
Reality: Actually it has.. Some researchers made a 4-quibit computer I think

Prediction: EMI will face a backlash for having CDs sound no better than the mp3s
Reality: Uh? I don't think this has happened.

Prediction: Internet will be pay-per-click
Reality: If you're talking about ads, yes.

Prediction: George Bush will be justifying his war on New Zealand
Reality: No.

Prediction: USB keys with 40 GB for $100. ($2.5/GB)
Reality: I can get a 32 GB flash drive for $60 on newegg ($1.87/GB)

Prediction: By the time I'll have money to buy DV camera, we'll be onto HDTV
Reality: Yep.

Prediction: Portishead will finally release their new album
Reality: too lazy to check wikipedia.

Prediction: CPU power is 15-20 GHz
Reality: If you consider 4 cores @ 4 GHz... It's been done then.

Prediction: HD will have 1 TB capacity:
Reality: We're up to 1.5 TB actually

Prediction: Most hollywood movies are CG
Reality: Actually not that far off.

Prediction: All movies in cinema are direct streamed
Reality: Not quite but we do have a lot of digital theaters

Prediction: 3D Tvs
Reality: No, but there are 2 3D LCD monitors..

Prediction: More speakers for surround sound
Reality: We went up to 7.1 now, but that's about it

Prediction: Count is lower because of better codecs
Reality: Uh, count is low because it's impractical to have a dozen speakers

Prediction: Mobile Phones and PDAs are the same
Reality: Mobile Phones are converging with PDAs, but not there yet

Prediction: TVs and PCs are same
Reality: You can go on your PC with your TV monitor to watch TV on the internet!

Prediction: Standalone (consoles?) and PCs are the same
Reality: On PS3 you can install linux!

Prediction: Multiple soundtracks for each movie on a disc
Reality: If you count multiple tracks like PCM, DTS, etc then yes

Prediction: We'll have a connection to download 1 GB/min
Reality: I can download 1/3 of a GB/min on a high end FiOS connection

Prediction: MS begins new secret KI (AI?) based OS
Reality: I have no idea what you were trying to say. Please speak into the microphone louder.

Prediction: Dukenukem4 will be released
Reality: "When it's ready."

Prediction: I win the lottery?
Reality: Nope. You're still poor.

[Soulhunter]

Prediction: Dukenukem4 will be released
Reality: "When it's ready."
When its done...

But at least there was a new trailer and some game-play video recently! :]



Prediction: I win the lottery?
Reality: Nope. You're still poor.
Unfortunately you are almost right...

I earn some more money now, but Ive never won more than 1k in the lottery! :[


Ps: Looking at my old posts, I'm kinda ashamed and shocked by my WTF!!!??? writing style XD

[cogman]

My predicitions? Flash memory will be as cheap/cheaper then a DVD disk per memory, so people will prefer to rip their DVDs to a flash drive rather then burning it onto a DVD.

DVD Players will finally get a usb port so flash drives can be plugged into them.

Big media companies will consider using flash media with a special super secrete handshake, DNA sampling, Iris reading, nose picking security measure. It will be broken 1 week before it is released (Actually if they did something like this, it might not be broken :()

[tph]

Prediction: We'll have a connection to download 1 GB/min
Reality: Some people in Sweden have (uncapped) Gbit connections which gives a maximal download speed of around 7.5 GB/min.

[LoRd_MuldeR]

Reality: Some people in Sweden have (uncapped) Gbit connections which gives a maximal download speed of around 7.5 GB/min.

I guess this works only, because there are not that much people (per square kilometre) in Sweden :p

[zeeman_88]

I anticipate a better compression algorithm will come out. Something that doesn’t use Motion Predication/Estimation… The speed of multi-core CPU will make such an algorithm applicable in real….

[akupenguin]

So how do you plan to improve compression by not exploiting temporal redundancy with spatial locality, any formulation of which is equivalent to motion?

[Sagekilla]

@zeeman_88, unless you plan on creating extremely complex and powerful AI that can recreate real life imagery based on a description given to it, I doubt it. Even that is decades, if not centuries, away, if it weren't for the impossibilities that such a situation presents.

[teddg]

Prediction: A player that allows me to play movies faster by an arbitrary percentage.
Outcome: ReClock DirectShow Filter can do this

PSP has this built in

[zeeman_88]

Sagekilla, akupenguin…

In my humble opinion, the current motion estimation algorithm of using trial and error till findings the “best” motion vectors is not that efficient!

There should be a better mathematical way to find those, or at least there should be a better way to de-correlate the redundant information across successive frames.

One way to do that is the 3D de-correlation transform… And may be there will be better way to do that.

Right know the “image” and “audio” compression algorithms are more sophisticated than video algorithm. Basically video compression algorithms are still the same since the days of mpeg1.

For example, JPEG2000 and JPEG use total different algorithm and we need something like JPEG2000 for video…

[LoRd_MuldeR]

For example, JPEG2000 and JPEG use total different algorithm and we need something like JPEG2000 for video…

JPEG2000 uses Wavelet compression. There are video formats that use Wavelets, such as Dirac and Snow, but they did not prove to be superior to H.264 yet. Maybe they never will...


Also you must ask: Do we really need more efficient video compression than what we've got today?

Discs are becoming bigger and bigger, bandwidth is becoming cheaper and cheaper. Also I'm not sure if we will ever need much higher resolutions than "Full HD", simply because you can't integrate even bigger screens into your living room. Not everybody can have a separate room for TV and Beamer. Also look what happens to audio compression: Now that the HDD's and Flash's in mobile audio players become bigger and bigger, people go away from MP3&Co and go back to uncompresses Wave or FLAC...

[zeeman_88]

When I mentioned JPEG2000 to JPEG, I meant JPEG2000 standard brought a total new algorithm to image compression that de-correlate the whole image and not just 16x16 blocks.
I would like to see some new algorithm for motion estimation (any new algorithm not wavelet), since the current method explores all the possible redundancy in a video sequence.

IMHO, although, we don’t need better compression algorithm storage wise, hard discs are very cheap now, I think we still need them bandwidth wise “Internet, mobile and military and other civilian applications”.

[LoRd_MuldeR]

I'm pretty sure we'll see new video compression algorithms, either further optimiztions of existing approaches or completely new approaches or a combination of both. But still the question: How long will it take until we see something that is really far superior to H.264? And now that H.264 has just been widely adopted in the industry and by customers (including "mobile" and Internet), it may take a long time to establish a completely new format. The SD to Full HD step was a huge one and it made H.264 necessary, because MPEG-2 wasn't really handy for Full HD footage. But are we going to see another big step, that makes the "next generation" video compression necessary, anytime soon? I'm not so sure about that, but we'll see, of course...

[Soulhunter]

My prediction for the next 5 years... I'm with LoRd_MuldeR for the thing with video compression -> Progress in video compression algorithms will be kinda slow, and x264 (or at least some other h.264 based encoder) will still be the winner of Doom9's codec comparisons... But regarding "higher resolutions than Full HD" -> UHDTV is already just "around the corner" in Japan! Probably there will be some test broadcasts in 5 years, and UHD capable (tho very very expensive) displays... Another 5 years and a lot of us will say "my new UHD movies look sooo much better than the old HD ones". HD might be "wowing" today, but remember, there was also a time where VHS or 16bit VGA res. was impressive! ;]

[prOnorama]

Prediction: Most people will not be buying their music in a physical format by then.
Outcome: iTunes has taken over for the most part.


That's nonsense CD's are still sold very much. It's true that the CD single was basically killed by online music sales (like iTunes and others), but that's for single tracks only.

[Blue_MiSfit]

My thoughts are that MPEG-4 will be around for a very long time. UHD will take awhile to get any sort of traction (I'm thinking 10-15 years). HDTV has been around in one form or another since the '80s, and is just within the last 3-4 years seeing widespread adoption. Heck, the Russians had a 1125 line analog system as early as 1958 for military applications!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hdtv

Anyway, compression technology is constantly improving (look at x264 over the last year!!), though I have a hard time imagining what the next "big thing" will be. Available bandwidth and storage capacity continue to increase at astonishing rates (well... storage at least), which lessens the need for super awesome compression.

I imagine by the time we need to transmit / store UHD on any sort of scale, something new will be developed to fit these needs. I wonder if something intermediate, a-la 4K (RED camera, anyone?) will fill the void.

I'd like to see a trend towards quality - i.e. higher bit depth / wider color gamut. This mostly means better displays. Unfortunately, most people either don't care, or can't tell a difference (realistically the same thing).

Who knows... I'm pretty damned happy with BluRay for now... especially my half-size backup MKVs! :D

~MiSfit

[Sagekilla]

I agree with Blue_MiSfit here: I'd like to see the trend towards higher bit depths in displays and for the actual content. Maybe soon we'll move towards YV12 with full chroma resolution? :) I remember reading an article once that said compressing an image at 4:2:0 sampling vs 4:4:4 sampling didn't make a huge difference in final file size, but the 4:4:4 file could give higher potential quality because of the larger resolution to start with, as well as some better prediction available from having all samples.

But, that was an article I read from God knows where. Is it true? I personally have no idea, but I'd be interested in seeing if it does in any lossy compression scheme.

[Blue_MiSfit]

YV12 can never have full chroma resolution ;) It's 4:2:0. 10 bit would be a much better improvement IMO - that way we wouldn't have to hide banding with dither/noise.

~MiSfit

[LoRd_MuldeR]

YV12 can never have full chroma resolution ;) It's 4:2:0. 10 bit would be a much better improvement IMO - that way we wouldn't have to hide banding with dither/noise.

~MiSfit

Okay, this may sound stupid, but what exactly do the numbers in x:y:z stand for and how does YV12/YUY2 fit in? :p

[STaRGaZeR]

Okay, this may sound stupid, but what exactly do the numbers in x:y:z stand for and how does YV12/YUY2 fit in? :p

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroma_subsampling

Hope that helps :)

[akupenguin]

In my humble opinion, the current motion estimation algorithm of using trial and error till findings the “best” motion vectors is not that efficient!
There are encoder-side alternatives to trial-and error, such as Skal's analytic subpel search (http://web.archive.org/web/20040803200325/skal.planet-d.net/coding/interpolation.html), or Tuukka's transform-based exhaustive search (http://www.ee.oulu.fi/mvg/files/pdf/pdf_332.pdf). But those are a question of implementation algorithm, not a change in the compression standard. And I have yet to find one that's unambiguously better or faster than trial-and-error with SIMD optimizations.

One way to do that is the 3D de-correlation transform… And may be there will be better way to do that.
Orthogonal 3D wavelet is much worse than mpeg1, it's approximately equivalent to hierarchical B-frames with every mv set to 0,0.
I know of exactly one attempt (http://web.archive.org/web/20050317032356/http://www.ece.ucdavis.edu/PCS2004/pdf/ID4_new_PCS_A4.pdf) to capture some of the motion redundancy without actual motion vectors. This algorithm is much better than orthogonal 3D wavelet, and still much worse than mpeg1. As a bonus it's hella slow.
Motion compensated 3D wavelet works (approximately equivalent to normal hierarchical B-frames), but then you're hardly revolutionizing motion prediction.

Right now the “image” and “audio” compression algorithms are more sophisticated than video algorithm. Basically video compression algorithms are still the same since the days of mpeg1.
That's why h264 intra-frames provide better quality-per-bitrate than any standard lossy still-image format, right?

[Caroliano]

Prediction: Various security measures will be integrated to provide anonymous downloading.
Outcome: Not really unless your a nut and using Tor for torrents.
You are forgoting japanese P2P programs. Winny, Share and Perfect Dark, in chronological order.

Also I'm not sure if we will ever need much higher resolutions than "Full HD", simply because you can't integrate even bigger screens into your living room. Not everybody can have a separate room for TV and Beamer.
People (japaneses..) are already discussing SHV, with 8000 by 4000 pixels, and standart designers are thinking how to make better codecs for that: http://diracvideo.org/node/13

Not in 5, but maybe in 10 years we can start to paint our walls with hi-resolution OLEDs or E-INK instead of having small 50" LCD tvs like now.

[LoRd_MuldeR]

Not in 5, but maybe in 10 years we can start to paint our walls with hi-resolution OLEDs or E-INK instead of having small 50" LCD tvs like now.

However the field of vision is limited by the human eye. So there is some natural limit for screen size, unless you have a cinema hall at home ;)

[Caroliano]

I noted that animes are changing since 2000 for ever smaller characters in the screen, as you can see things more clearly in bigger HDTV screens. Maybe movies will adapt to use most of those monstrous resolutions and sizes. 1080p is far from being more resolution than our eyes can distinguish.

[zeeman_88]

Akupenguin

Thanks for the through answer. I admire your knowledge regarding temporal redundancy research.

I know there are several attempts to use 3D wavelet for exploiting temporal redundancy and I know they haven’t produce better results nor they are practical.

However, I am anticipating one day “in the future” we will see a video compression algorithm that doesn’t use trial and error or macro-blocks coding. Instead it will analyze, process and encode the whole GOP as one data chunk. Even if there is such algorithm today, it would not be practical, at least at the decoder side. However as more cores will be added to the CPU, such algorithms will be more feasible. Until then h.264 and its extensions will still be the video compression champion.

Now regarding h264 intra compression as the best lossy still-image format. I am not aware of that and have not compared it to JPEG2000 myself. Have you run such a test? I would be interested too see these results.

My expectation for such a test is that they would give comparable quality for low to medium compression. But at high compression ratio (80 and above), I doubt h264 Intra will be able to keep up.

:)

[Dark Shikari]

My expectation for such a test is that they would give comparable quality for low to medium compression. But at high compression ratio (80 and above), I doubt h264 Intra will be able to keep up.No, it trashes JPEG-2000 at pretty much any bitrate. This isn't surprising, since JPEG-2000 is a terribly designed format that has singlehandedly tarnished peoples' expectations of wavelet formats for an entire decade.

Its also not surprising since spatial intra prediction is impossible in an overlapped-block format.

[Sagekilla]

YV12 can never have full chroma resolution ;) It's 4:2:0. 10 bit would be a much better improvement IMO - that way we wouldn't have to hide banding with dither/noise.

~MiSfit


Full 4:4:4 would be handy though :)


@Zeeman: We could make x264 encode on a per-GOP basis, with it outputting ridiculously large amalgam of all the frames from the start to end of the GOP, which would constitute one huge data block ;)

[akupenguin]

Now regarding h264 intra compression as the best lossy still-image format. I am not aware of that and have not compared it to JPEG2000 myself. Have you run such a test? I would be interested too see these results.
My expectation for such a test is that they would give comparable quality for low to medium compression. But at high compression ratio (80 and above), I doubt h264 Intra will be able to keep up.

At high resolutions but very low bitrates, jp2k fares better than h264 since jp2k can reasonably efficiently discard whole subbands (which is almost as good as downscaling, though it still wastes a few bits), while h264 block size maxes out at 16x16. Nevertheless, in such extreme cases both jp2k and h264 benefit from downscaling the image and compressing the lower resolution version to the same filesize. And once you do that, h264 wins again. (Granted I had to tweak the resolution manually, as x264 doesn't optimize it for you.)

IOW, yes h264 fails at sufficiently low bpp, but low bpp is always avoidable.

[Dark Shikari]

At high resolutions but very low bitrates, jp2k fares better than h264 since jp2k can reasonably efficiently discard whole subbands (which is almost as good as downscaling, though it still wastes a few bits), while h264 block size maxes out at 16x16. Nevertheless, in such extreme cases both jp2k and h264 benefit from downscaling the image and compressing the lower resolution version to the same filesize. And once you do that, h264 wins again. (Granted I had to tweak the resolution manually, as x264 doesn't optimize it for you.)

IOW, yes h264 fails at sufficiently low bpp, but low bpp is always avoidable.And this is a general problem with the concept of wavelets.

The primary benefit of wavelets is more efficient coding of large-scale detail.

But, in most cases, almost all your bits are spent on small-scale, not large-scale, detail.

But what if you're encoding at a bitrate low enough that you don't store small-scale detail?

... then you might as well downscale anyways, and you lose the wavelet advantage again.

[Blue_MiSfit]

What about a hybrid mode? Wavelets for large-scale detail, and blocks for low-scale detail?

Or have I had too much damned kool-aid?

~Misfit

[*.mp4 guy]

Imo it should be noted that bpp sensitivity is directly related to transform size, big transform = more possible data removal, small transform = limited data removal, and large transforms don't work well for a variety of reasons, this includes wavelets, curvelets, magiclets or any other buzzwordlet transform. Or, put another way, extremely low bpp (extremely low being defined as a case where the compression standard being used does not in anyway utilize a large percentage of the available resolution) is retarded, you should always use a realistic resolution for your bitrate budget, a qcif blurry mess is just as good as a wuxga blury mess, assuming very low and equivelent datarates (better if you account for superior performance of standalone interpolation to wavelet subband interpolation.

@ds
1 what is so horrible about jpeg2k
2 give me an example of a significantly better wavelet image coder from the same time frame.

I'm not saying j2k isn't pretty useless, but I happen to think this is largely because wavelets are over rated.



.
.
.
.
(hooray parenthesis)

[Dark Shikari]

@ds
1 what is so horrible about jpeg2k
2 give me an example of a significantly better wavelet image coder from the same time frame.

I'm not saying j2k isn't pretty useless, but I happen to think this is largely because wavelets are over rated.I'm not very well-versed in JPEG2K, but from those who know more than me about it, I've been told almost universally that it was a badly designed standard--not just that wavelets are problematic, but that the standard was just poor to begin with.

You'd have to talk to someone who's more familiar with the specifics to know exactly why.

[*.mp4 guy]

What about a hybrid mode? Wavelets for large-scale detail, and blocks for low-scale detail?

Or have I had too much damned kool-aid?

~Misfit

That would unavoidably end up being an overcomplete representation (you have redundancy). You would also get all of the problems stacked together, wavelet ringing, dct ringing, blocking. Imo you would be better off with a hybrid wavelet, that used all of the dct basis functions as subbands (dct's can be described as wavelets), but then extend them to lower frequency ranges instead of ending abruptly. This would probably be very slow.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Ah, but of course slow is a relative term.

Computer power always increases ;)

~MiSfit

[zeeman_88]

On my spare time, I will run some test to compare them both, and I let you guys know my findings …

I think h264 Intra is faster and easier to implement, but wavelet methods like J2K has couple more advantage besides the one you mentioned (automatic downscaling which is why
J2K uses 4:4:4 mostly which lead to a better color quality at all rates).

Some of these advantages like, produce more acceptable artifacts (blurry versus blocky), Scalable streams, and may be I can add rate control is really easy.

[Dark Shikari]

That would unavoidably end up being an overcomplete representation (you have redundancy). You would also get all of the problems stacked together, wavelet ringing, dct ringing, blocking. Imo you would be better off with a hybrid wavelet, that used all of the dct basis functions as subbands (dct's can be described as wavelets), but then extend them to lower frequency ranges instead of ending abruptly. This would probably be very slow.Or you can just use a hierarchical lapped DCT, which allows you to in a sense get the best of both worlds.

[akupenguin]

automatic downscaling which is why J2K uses 4:4:4 mostly which lead to a better color quality at all rates
What does chroma subsampling have to do with bitstream peeling? If 4:2:0 is good for 720p, and 4:2:0 is good for 360p, then 4:2:0 is good for 720p with the HF subband removed. Alternately, you could peel luma and leave all the chroma, giving 360p 4:4:4. Or you could take a 4:4:4 input and peel it to 4:2:0. They're completely orthogonal choices.

[Shinigami-Sama]

and to continue the tradition
5 years from now we'll still be using 32bit and wondering why
we'll still be using mechanical harddrives and wondering why
x264 will become self aware and take over the world after dark tries to make some sort of predictive adaptive ME
HDTV will account for about 25% of basic TV packages
game consoles will still cost half a month's pay
the music industry wil finally start to realize they can't win after getting sodomized in court with a meathook
hollywood will still be wondering why no-one wants to buy a remake of a remake of a remake for the 3rd time this year...
the abortive x264vfw will still be around
dark will still be addicted to touhou
ATI will still have horrible drivers and support
another DNS hole will be exposed
wavelts will still just be toys to play with
youtube videos will still look like crap
we'll have GPGPU down to something somewhat useable
there will be 1tb laptop drives for under 150$
4gb ram will be standard
people will still complain x264 is to slow at 100fps on 1080p samples using sharktooth's insane profiles on a laptop...
I will still have this avatar
nettops(EEEPCs - similar) will have replaced PCs in coffee shops because they cost less than 100$/each and no-one cares if they loose it

[Quark.Fusion]

JPEG2000 uses Wavelet compression. There are video formats that use Wavelets, such as Dirac and Snow, but they did not prove to be superior to H.264 yet. Maybe they never will...


Also you must ask: Do we really need more efficient video compression than what we've got today?

Discs are becoming bigger and bigger, bandwidth is becoming cheaper and cheaper. Also I'm not sure if we will ever need much higher resolutions than "Full HD", simply because you can't integrate even bigger screens into your living room. Not everybody can have a separate room for TV and Beamer. Also look what happens to audio compression: Now that the HDD's and Flash's in mobile audio players become bigger and bigger, people go away from MP3&Co and go back to uncompresses Wave or FLAC...
I'm still waiting for high DPI displays and maybe movies will be at 4k resolutions.

[Sagekilla]

I want 300 DPI displays personally ;) Our current ones have maybe... 72 DPI at best?

[nm]

I want 300 DPI displays personally ;) Our current ones have maybe... 72 DPI at best?
Many current PC displays have 100 pixels per inch or more. Some laptops have 150 PPI displays, and with money to spend, you could have bought a 200 PPI LCD panel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors) over five years ago.

[vmrsss]

this is not directly relevant to x264, hope I can be forgiven for an incidental remark: i'm not quite sure why people as at the beginning of this thread insist that disc space is so cheap to kill dvds and other removable support. At the moment, I can buy a terabyte of reasonably reliable dvds for less that $30. I need twenty times as much for a terabyte of hard disc. Also, I can always buy another dvd and extend the space available to me, while there is a limit to how many discs a desktop will support. Finally, if a dvd breaks, you've lost 4GB, if your hard disc goes, then you've lost it all, which implies you really can't get away without systematic backups.

[Dark Shikari]

this is not directly relevant to x264, hope I can be forgiven for an incidental remark: i'm not quite sure why people as at the beginning of this thread insist that disc space is so cheap to kill dvds and other removable support. At the moment, I can buy a terabyte of reasonably reliable dvds for less that $30.13 cents per DVD-RW? Can you link me to where those are being sold, so I can buy a few thousand and resell them for four times the price? :pI need twenty times as much for a terabyte of hard disc.Uh... $600 for a terabyte hard disk?

[Sagekilla]

vmrsss: Where are you buying from that a 1 TB hard drive costs $600? I can buy one online for close to $100.

Downside to DVDs: After a few years (4-5 of use), will those DVDs still work well? ;) Or will you be able to find them all 200+ of them, especially if you have kids? Also, searching from 200+ discs for your movie is a pain IMO. I like being able to pull up an alphabetical list on my computer that shows 200+ all within the screen space.

Each method has it's ups and downs. DVDs are great if you take good care of them but most people don't.

[Blue_MiSfit]

My sentiments exactly. I did lots of DVD-> MKV burned on DVD backups several years ago, and most of those DVD-Rs now have CRC errors, even though they've been sitting in a binder and very rarely used! It's not a big deal since I can just re-rip from my original discs now (with x264 instead of Xvid - w00t), but it's a hassle!

Windows Home Server presents a compelling solution to those of us who have large, ever-growing media libraries and like to keep everything "always available". Specifically, its abstracted storage model, which allows you to add hard drives, and redistribute free space as necessary - and specify levels of redundancy. It's very cool! In fact, a 4tb WHS box is in my immediate future. That way, my big hungry overclocked Q6600 doesn't have to stay on all night so I can watch my stuff on the laptop while in bed ;)

Oh, and as icing on the cake it serves as a Terminal Services gateway (so you can remote desktop into your machines from anywhere on the intarwebs), and provides shadow copy / backup services as well.

~MiSfit

[Sagekilla]

Indeed, if you're looking to keep long lasting backups of your movies, the best way to go is aim for ~4 GB rips (Very easy for me, mine are regularly 3.5 - 4 GB @ crf 18) on a RAID 0'd data server. If you maintain it well (basically make sure it doesn't get dusty inside) then that data will always be there. If a drive dies on you, you pop in a new one. Or, if you have WHS like Blue_MiSfit said, you just pop in drives as you like and it reconfigures on the fly.

For individual hundreds of DVDs, if a disc fails, yes you just lose one disc but you have to re-rip every time that happens. Over time that can really accumulate, and nothing beats having all your media a click away ;) I rip my movies because I don't want to deal with discs.

[vmrsss]

13 cents per DVD-RW? Can you link me to where those are being sold, so I can buy a few thousand and resell them for four times the price?

Sorry, I meant DVD-R, which I guess we can all buy for about 15 cents?

:pUh... $600 for a terabyte hard disk?

Admittedly I am talking of over one year ago, yet I paid for a lacie firewire 1T disk about £265, which was roughly $530. From what I read from you, probably not the best of choices, or perhaps prices went down quite considerably since...

Certainly if 1TB hard disc can be gotten for about $100, I'll have to reconsider my DVD-R burning strategy... Indeed, as people have suggested, to keep track of hundreds of discs and index their contents in some reasonable and reliable way it is a serious burden a would gladly do without...

About DVDs going wrong after a while, luckily it's never happened to me. It surprises (and worries) me to hear of DVD-R with CRC errors even if never used... In fact, my "hollywood" DVDs are on average older than 6yr, and still going strong. Are they technical different from self-burn discs?

[Dark Shikari]

Sorry, I meant DVD-R, which I guess we can all buy for about 15 cents?Newegg says 35 cents, not counting shipping. And don't suggest a local store to avoid shipping: they're twice the price.
Admittedly I am talking of over one year ago, yet I paid for a lacie firewire 1T disk about £265, which was roughly $530. From what I read from you, probably not the best of choices, or perhaps prices went down quite considerably since...Mine was $220... over half a year ago. And it was an external.

[Blue_MiSfit]

About DVDs going wrong after a while, luckily it's never happened to me. It surprises (and worries) me to hear of DVD-R with CRC errors even if never used... In fact, my "hollywood" DVDs are on average older than 6yr, and still going strong. Are they technical different from self-burn discs?


Yep :) Very much so! Pressed discs are hugely more reliable than burned discs, especially cheap burned discs!!

Here's a Samsung F1, 1TB, for $115 with free shipping..
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152102

~MiSfit

[Sagekilla]

For $115, you can get:
1) 1 TB drive
2) 1.5 TB on ~328 discs if you're not paying shipping @ 0.35/disc.

Now tell me, what's quicker (assuming all the movies are perfectly 4.5 GB): Copying all your data over to a new drive, or backing up 328 DVDs? ;) We might have fast DVD-burners but 328 discs still takes a loooong time.

[*.mp4 guy]

If you consider dud discs, and disc death whith equivelent usage patterns of discs and HD's, I don't see how the dvd's can come out ahead, even assuming everything else is optimal.

[Sagekilla]

On an interesting note, I happen to have one of the infamous IBM "death star" drives running in my system still (Yup, a Deskstar 75GXP don't ask, I don't even know why I do) and it still hasn't died on me some how. I have quite a few DVDs and even with good care they've died over the years. Of course, my Deskstar that still runs is rather anomalous and I don't think that's normal in the bit for a drive with it's reputation ;)

Still, I'd sooner trust my movies on a single drive rather than DVDs. And if people are really concerned with losing data, that's where RAID comes in.

[Soulhunter]

Regarding DVD-Rs vs HDDs: Around 1/4 of my (supposed to be high quality) Verbatim/TJ discs got CRC errors over the years, even the ones I never used! >_< But my HDDs still run fine, and they run 24/7...

http://img507.imageshack.us/img507/1449/pc03sw7.png

[Industrial_One]

Heh! Sept 2003 was the time I first signed up. Oh the memories... [...], wishing videos wouldn't take up so much space... To be honest, I didn't give a **** about digital video to wonder how it'll develop in 5 years time. Them video standards never impressed me up until I discovered H.264, but even that is only an extension and practically nothing new.

I dunno about 5 years, but we may finally step out of the matrix in 10 years time -- ditch the retarded 2D+3Dtime macroblock-based concept and move onto 3D+4Dtime compression where you'll save 20x the space.

The problem is, there is no reliable mathematical definition for depth yet. Even though you look at a 2D image, you can tell how far an object is in the pic, but can't really explain. What is a pixel with more or less depth? Darker? Brighter?

Currently, high-dynamic range videos can be manipulated in intriguing ways using such technology (http://gizmodo.com/5038183/photographs-enhance-video-in-absolutely-unbelievable-ways), as well as restoring quality. But it only works with static scenes, which *****.

But as I said, 10 years from now, they'll fix that problem, and you'll be able to convert all your **** low-quality DivX encodes to high quality and bring 700-4700 megs down to 50. So feel free to encode to low bitrates; you can compensate for it later.

As far as the movie industry goes, CGI films will be distributed in closed-source .EXE with its procedurally-generated textures and graphics. Perfect lossless quality and resizable to any resolution. Maybe this way they could utilize a practical lockout chip to prevent piracy like some games do, and we will just use a screen recorder and continue to distribute 'em in crappy, lossy multimedia formats.

And 50 years from now, we'll all have video/audio cards with exabyte-sized libraries and Kolmogorov codecs that'll losslessly compress UHD-quality 3DTV movies down to a couple megs. The final limit. Mark my words.

[Raptus]

I dunno about 5 years, but we may finally step out of the matrix in 10 years time -- ditch the retarded 2D+3Dtime macroblock-based concept and move onto 3D+4Dtime compression where you'll save 20x the space.
Not if we're still encoding 2D material.

But as I said, 10 years from now, they'll fix that problem, and you'll be able to convert all your **** low-quality DivX encodes to high quality and bring 700-4700 megs down to 50. So feel free to encode to low bitrates; you can compensate for it later.
No you can't. You might try to extrapolate some of the lost information to fake some detail, but you'll never be able to restore the original data.
As for huge improvements in compression efficiency, we are actually getting diminishing returns for increasing complexity, so the efficiency curve is asymptotic. But that is nothing to worry about as storage capacities are still growing fast.
Probably the largest gains that still can be made is from a better exploitation of psychovisual effects.

[*.mp4 guy]

There is a lot of redundancy that we juct can't get at the way we are doing things now (in video coding). If we will ever get close to using all of this redundancy is debatable, but it is there, unlike with image compression, where we could thoretically get close to an optimal solution in 5 or 10 years.

[pcordes]

Heh! Sept 2003 was the time I first signed up. Oh the memories... [...], wishing videos wouldn't take up so much space... To be honest, I didn't give a **** about digital video to wonder how it'll develop in 5 years time. Them video standards never impressed me up until I discovered H.264, but even that is only an extension and practically nothing new.

I dunno about 5 years, but we may finally step out of the matrix in 10 years time -- ditch the retarded 2D+3Dtime macroblock-based concept and move onto 3D+4Dtime compression where you'll save 20x the space.

The problem is, there is no reliable mathematical definition for depth yet. Even though you look at a 2D image, you can tell how far an object is in the pic, but can't really explain. What is a pixel with more or less depth? Darker? Brighter?

Currently, high-dynamic range videos can be manipulated in intriguing ways using such technology (http://gizmodo.com/5038183/photographs-enhance-video-in-absolutely-unbelievable-ways), as well as restoring quality. But it only works with static scenes, which ****.

But as I said, 10 years from now, they'll fix that problem, and you'll be able to convert all your **** low-quality DivX encodes to high quality and bring 700-4700 megs down to 50. So feel free to encode to low bitrates; you can compensate for it later.


I wrote a big long reply on the assumption you weren't joking/exaggerating for fun. 'cause it didn't sound that way...

Not without magic. Once you destroy information, it's gone. You might be able to reconstruct 3D from even a blocky or blurry video, but all the textures of everything would still be blurry and artifacted. That link you posted is about adding new information about the original source (the high quality still photo) to each frame of the video. You _need_ the HQ still of the source. The equivalent for a full-length movie would be HQ still pictures of every scene. So if you have that, then you can make a low-qual encode and fix it later. But if you can get a frame of every scene from e.g. a BluRay, why not just rip the BluRay and forget about your divx encode? Even with HQ stills of each scene, it wouldn't work as well for dynamic scenes, because it would have to figure out what was going on and what detail to put where. New stuff that came on screen (e.g. an explosion) wouldn't have any information that could be applied to it.

The need for the HQ still photo is not something that will go away, ever. Information theory says you can't get more information out of something than is there in the first place. Of course, you're arguing that future magic will be able to figure out how all the sharp detailed textures are supposed to look from the less-detailed information left in your video. Not impossible, in theory, if the magic algorithm can assume that it's a video of a real-life 3D scene containing the sorts of things humans usual have around. So if it thinks something is a face, it could make it look like a highly detailed face. But that's just making up details, not recovering the information you threw away in low qual encode.

Anyway, I'm going stand by my claim that there's no way you'll ever get a crappy old 1CD divx to look as good as a 2CD x264 rip, even with whatever post-processing you want on the divx and none on the x264. (I'm talking about a typical feature film here. And I suppose this depends on your definition of good... And of course the postprocessor isn't allowed to have any information from the original source to add detail back in to the video.)


As far as the movie industry goes, CGI films will be distributed in closed-source .EXE with its procedurally-generated textures and graphics. Perfect lossless quality and resizable to any resolution. Maybe this way they could utilize a practical lockout chip to prevent piracy like some games do, and we will just use a screen recorder and continue to distribute 'em in crappy, lossy multimedia formats.

Yeah, video on the Internet (esp. p2p) is going to keep sucking as long as most people don't know they could be making better encodes than the default settings on whatever they use. And various other things like that. [...], and it will continue to be mostly horrible, both low vid qual (mpeg1 and 2 will never die...), and not very erotic: unrealistic with bored-looking actors.

About the only thing with any decent quality is HD movie rips (which is quite a pleasant surprise, considering how crappy quality everyone seems to be willing to accept in everything else). [...], but for anything but the most popular/cult movies, mostly made when the movie came out on DVD. That's ok for current stuff, since x264 is starting to mature, but not many people encode older movies. Although a lot of people make encodes with non-optimal x264 settings. I wish the x264 defaults included maybe 3 b-frames and 2 reference frames. e.g. [...] There is a ton of strobing going on, but the x264 string in the bitstream looks like mostly default settings: ref=1. Which is really bad for videos with e.g. flash photography or stuff like that going on. Not to mention the stage light-show. It did use 2 bframes, which is maybe why it was watchable at all.

(Is this kosher with the forum rules regarding discussion of illegal filesharing? I'm trying to be oblique, and definitely not mention any specific movies. Everything I've said applies equally to Creative-Commons licensed DVD releases, etc.)


And 50 years from now, we'll all have video/audio cards with exabyte-sized libraries and Kolmogorov codecs that'll losslessly compress UHD-quality 3DTV movies down to a couple megs. The final limit. Mark my words.

lossless? Not that small. Noise prevents lossless from being that small. With storage and bandwidth as cheap as they probably will be in 50 years, what's the incentive to make some kind of AI codec that 3D-models the things in the video... (Figuring out what's going on and storing just geometry and textures is probably the most efficient way, but it would require absurd amounts of CPU time, and like I said, probably some AI.)

Technology isn't magic, and it's possible to put some hard limits on what's theoretically possible. I know video is pretty highly redundant, but it's just not _that_ redundant. Even the script (i.e. written by the screenwriter) would be a few percent of a couple MB when compressed with e.g. LZMA or PPM (which I think I read gets close to the entropy limit on most text, i.e. almost 8 bits of information per byte of compressed output).

I could believe a couple GB for UHD, but still not for lossless. There's always going to be too much entropy in the noise. Hopefully by then we'll be using more than 8 bits per channel, so there's more "information" in the noise for the same amount of noise. (noise being random, you can't gain anything from losslessly compressing it.)

[Industrial_One]

Not if we're still encoding 2D material.

I am talking about 2D material. A 2D image has a visual (3D) depth, and by exploiting the redundancies with a codec that can model the objects, you can do way better, save a shitload of space.

As for huge improvements in compression efficiency, we are actually getting diminishing returns for increasing complexity, so the efficiency curve is asymptotic. But that is nothing to worry about as storage capacities are still growing fast.
Probably the largest gains that still can be made is from a better exploitation of psychovisual effects.

That's cuz you are thinking in only one direction, fixated on one concept.

Not without magic. Once you destroy information, it's gone. You might be able to reconstruct 3D from even a blocky or blurry video, but all the textures of everything would still be blurry and artifacted. That link you posted is about adding new information about the original source (the high quality still photo) to each frame of the video. You _need_ the HQ still of the source. The equivalent for a full-length movie would be HQ still pictures of every scene. So if you have that, then you can make a low-qual encode and fix it later. But if you can get a frame of every scene from e.g. a BluRay, why not just rip the BluRay and forget about your divx encode? Even with HQ stills of each scene, it wouldn't work as well for dynamic scenes, because it would have to figure out what was going on and what detail to put where. New stuff that came on screen (e.g. an explosion) wouldn't have any information that could be applied to it.

That's the problem. It needs some smart temporal interpolation modelling scheme in addition to the spacetime-fusion technique or whatever to compensate for the artifacts that would arise in dynamic scenes. However, this will improve in the future. Just think how your own mind works. Can you visualize an HQ version of an LQ video just by looking at it? Would an HQ photo help? Do you now have a general idea of what's infesting the quality? Cool, you should now be able to imagine what the next kickass scene with the nukes would look like.

The need for the HQ still photo is not something that will go away, ever. Information theory says you can't get more information out of something than is there in the first place. Of course, you're arguing that future magic will be able to figure out how all the sharp detailed textures are supposed to look from the less-detailed information left in your video. Not impossible, in theory, if the magic algorithm can assume that it's a video of a real-life 3D scene containing the sorts of things humans usual have around. So if it thinks something is a face, it could make it look like a highly detailed face. But that's just making up details, not recovering the information you threw away in low qual encode.

True. Feeding the app HQ source photos will be mandatory. So you would have to touch the photo up yourself, or hire a photoshop professional. I doubt that having a photo for every scene will be necessary, as there should be some interval of the amount of parameters the program needs to get an idea how to fix the whole video, e.g. you got a sitcom that takes place in only one location throughout the whole series -- you just take photos of a couple scenes that encompass what the general show looks like.

[...]

lossless? Not that small. Noise prevents lossless from being that small. With storage and bandwidth as cheap as they probably will be in 50 years, what's the incentive to make some kind of AI codec that 3D-models the things in the video... (Figuring out what's going on and storing just geometry and textures is probably the most efficient way, but it would require absurd amounts of CPU time, and like I said, probably some AI.)

We won't be shooting film by that time. Everything will be procedurally constructed CGI, hence no noise. And if we wanted some noise into the film for extra texture, that can be stored as a tiny 8-byte pseudorandom seed. Also, it is in everyone's interest for multimedia to be high quality and as small as possible. Stuff that takes days/hours to distribute is not what I call "distributable." The real future of P2P is instant sharing.

I could believe a couple GB for UHD, but still not for lossless. There's always going to be too much entropy in the noise. Hopefully by then we'll be using more than 8 bits per channel, so there's more "information" in the noise for the same amount of noise. (noise being random, you can't gain anything from losslessly compressing it.)

Try 32 bits.

P.S. Notice how I have the class to completely hijack this thread and **** about 10-50 years predictions like some LSD-binging nerd. So I'll get back on topic and give my 10 cents on what I predict in 5 years time:

H.265 will be available, somewhat less dominant than H.264 is today, but popular. People [...] as the 50% efficiency increase will make sub-HD possible at bitrates below the megabit range.

Retards will be releasing encodes with 8-channel 192 KHz audio at like 10 Mbps and brag about their "ultrahigh quality encodes."

Avery Lee will find some time to upgrade Avidemux, turn it into a professional, reliable application like VirtualDub that can actually EDIT content contained in MP4/MKV without crashing/producing corrupt video/errors or otherwise **** up in any way. Then all the [...].

Joost will replace BitTorrent (yo, BT sucks) for video content, and 3rd generation P2P apps will dominate current 2nd gen apps, but will still be popular in 3rd world countries where people can't afford the multiplied bandwidth of their traffic being routed thru proxy peers. Stealthnet and Tesla will be big, Freenet will develop a user-friendly GUI and maybe become more popular.

Ultrareal CGI films will be more common and less expensive to produce. There will be more credible movies than Flatland completely created by one person. Indies in general will be more common, especially with oldschool 8/16-bit games.

Tapestry media and HVDs will quickly replace Blu-rays, and Blu-rays will become the standard casual media format as DVDs are today. Ultrahigh-definition will be prominent, but won't replace HD. HD will be more common as machines get more powerful and make processing high resolutions a casual activity. SD will still be popular as 720x576 for all intents and purposes is enough, but any lower-res rips will be rare.

These faulty [...] LCDs will start to be replaced by LEP displays (that you can fold like paper) which take way less power, have a way higher contrast ratio and don't distort from other angles. Virtual retinal displays will be developed and finalized, but not yet affordable or widely available.

[...]

And I'll be in Japan makin' phat cash.

[/10cents]

[squid_80]

Avery Lee will find some time to upgrade Avidemux, turn it into a professional, reliable application like VirtualDub that can actually EDIT content contained in MP4/MKV without crashing/producing corrupt video/errors or otherwise **** up in any way.Not a chance in hell of this happening.

[LoRd_MuldeR]

Avery Lee will find some time to upgrade Avidemux, turn it into a professional, reliable application like VirtualDub that can actually EDIT content contained in MP4/MKV without crashing/producing corrupt video/errors or otherwise **** up in any way.

VirtualDub is still stuck in the VFW era of the early 1990's and you call it a "professional" application? :D

If Avery Lee had some free time to spend, I think he'd better kick all the VfW code out of VirtualDub and add support for encoder plugins. Allowing decoder plugins already was a first step into the right direction ;)

And before you further bash on Avidemux, please name us one fully-fledged OpenSource video editor with fully working H.264 + MP4/MKV support or what you have contributed to create one :rolleyes:

[Industrial_One]

VirtualDub is still stuck in the VFW era of the early 1990's and you call it a "professional" application? :D

If Avery Lee had some free time to spend, I think he'd better kick all the VfW code out of VirtualDub and add support for encoder plugins. Allowing decoder plugins already was a first step into the right direction ;)

I should've said: There will be a professional, user-friendly app that will let us edit MP4/MKV streams as easy as AVI today.

And before you further bash on Avidemux, please name us one fully-fledged OpenSource video editor with fully working H.264 + MP4/MKV support

There is none, that's the whole problem. But I'm not gonna turn this into a VfW lecture [...] and I grow weary of wasting my time educating them of the benefits of x264vfw.

what you have contributed to create one :rolleyes:

[...]

Now give me one good reason why I should ever spend a second programming an MKV editor for free.

[squid_80]

I don't even know why I still post here after that.I don't know why you do either, this forum doesn't support any of the things you've supposedly "contributed." Since it seems to have brought you so much grief maybe you should consider a new (legal) hobby.

[LoRd_MuldeR]

Now give me one good reason why I should ever spend a second programming an MKV editor for free.

Because you obviously don't hesitate to use existing OpenSource tools for free as long as they serve you well.

Maybe you feel like giving something back to the community one day? :confused:

(If we exclude all the software that was developed and contributed by people for FREE, the video world would be a really sad place - no Avisynth, no ffmpeg/libavcodec, no x264, no LAME, no Xvid, no ffdshow, no VirtualDub, no Avidemux, no MPlayer, no Media Player Classic, no VLC Player, no DG(AVC)Index - just to name a few)

[Sharktooth]

deleted by mod
so, your contribution to the "community" was spreading illegal material all over the world along with your stupidity. what can you expect from an illegal activity?
get a life and since you're so unrespectful of other ppl (legal) work, please REFRAIN to use ANY opensource software. if you want one, make your own... and ensure it will NOT be opensource.
your second option is to pay for softwares that do what you want... if they will ever exist (good luck!!!).
remember: NO ONE OWE YOU ANYTHING. that's a lesson i hope you will learn...

[Industrial_One]

Since this is originally a thread where we smoke chronicles/guess the future and is going off-topic, don't reply to this post, just read.

Because you obviously don't hesitate to use existing OpenSource tools for free as long as they serve you well.

Maybe you feel like giving something back to the community one day? :confused:

[...]

so, your contribution to the "community" was spreading illegal material all over the world along with your stupidity. what can you expect from an illegal activity?
get a life and since you're so unrespectful of other ppl (legal) work

[...]

please REFRAIN to use ANY opensource software.

Ok, can I still use closed-source freeware? ¯_¯

[foxyshadis]

Way off any kind of topic, devolving into a flamewar laced with profanity, and discussion way out of line for this forum. This is supposed to be a professional forum, act with a professional decorum. Closed.