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.