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That page ends on a cliffhanger - does the hoax.avi look as good as the ray_480p.mp4 or not? How does the framerate compare?
I checked the demo videos: "Original Version" - 1080p, AVC uncompressed "Standard Compression" - 480p, AVC uncompressed "Raystream Version" - 480p H.264 AAC, ~1200kb data rate Nothing that fishy here. They seem to be advertising to broadcasters. It's possible they have some nice custom algorithms for their videos. That isn't uncommon - take a look at Apple movie trailers and iTunes videos: they have their own magic j…
"Custom magic algorithms" in this case being "off-the-shelf free software, using completely default parameters, that we've stolen and claimed is our magic algorithm".
Of course, this company may be a pump-and-dump, but it is also true that some kind of super-clever encoding algorithm may exist that would be much better than existing encoders and still run fine on existing phone codecs. That is, the fact that they claim an algorithm produces correctly-formatted mpeg is not a disqualifying factor.
I checked the demo videos: "Original Version" - 1080p, AVC uncompressed "Standard Compression" - 480p, AVC uncompressed "Raystream Version" - 480p H.264 AAC, ~1200kb data rate Nothing that fishy here. They seem to be advertising to broadcasters. It's possible they have some nice custom algorithms for their videos. That isn't uncommon - take a look at Apple movie trailers and iTunes videos: they have their own magic j…
"Custom magic algorithms" in this case being "off-the-shelf free software, using completely default parameters, that we've stolen and claimed is our magic algorithm".
There is a large market for proprietary optimised implementations of various codecs for use in industry. The same goes for mp3 and so on.
Unless people have found x264 headers left in the files, in which case, fail.
Looking at the uncompressed vs Raystream videos, it's difficult to tell if it's doing anything more than h264, x264, or neither. The conclusion being made by the OP may be true, it may not; likely they're exaggerating their marketing to look better than they truly are.
One of the marketing tricks they're using to make their technology look better than it is, is by not showing the videos side by side. Viewing them side by side, it's easy to see that Raystream's video lose quality in their color complexity, image sharpness, and some artifacting shows up if you know what to look for (I can do up some comparison images if anyone is interested.)
When we were testing our compression technology we would run our video through acid tests (difficult video to test the limits of the encoders.) We had a variety of acid tests, and depending upon encoder settings we could tweak each video to look good - however the problem was getting all of the acid test videos to look good at the same settings.
So while Raystream may be able to encode a promotional video that has very low complexity scenes, that doesn't mean this tech is any good at high complexity scenes. In fact, most of the scenes in the promo video our encoders would have had no trouble doing. Things like sports, live concerts, trees, or complex water (the surfer wasn't nearly complex enough, and the original quality of the humming bird wasn't good enough to produce a noticeable difference) were what we used to test our encoders.
I also notice they've got a "Live Streaming" section on their site. On demand content is easy to do, relative to live streaming. For on demand content you have no bounds like cpu, or ram, the biggest barrier is disk io and time to encode. Whereas live streaming is extremely complex. They claim they can do 1.7 Mbs live streaming; we were able to do 1.5 Mbs and less, but at that point the quality suffers significantly, and the video would infrequently go blocky for a frame or two. The only use case is for TVs that no one is going to get close to.
There comes a certain point with this type of technology where you can't stuff a 100 pieces of data, into a container that only holds 10 pieces of data. It doesn't matter how good your compression algorithm is.
I worked for a couple of years investigating frauds and I was blown away at the lack of law enforcement activity. There's a whole community of people who work together to steal huge amounts of money from anyone who will give it up. These people are amongst the biggest spenders on lawyers, as they try to keep their names off websites through the use of libel laws. For example, these guys: http://www.petraenergy.net/ I…
> The police simply aren't interested. Probably because it isn't their area. Stock frauds and pump-and-dumps should be reported to the sec: http://www.sec.gov/complaint/select.shtml They are getting better at investigating them :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Custom magic algorithms" in this case being "off-the-shelf free software, using completely default parameters, that we've stolen and claimed is our magic algorithm".
H.264 is not "free software." You're thinking of x264, the free software implementation of H.264 that everyone uses. There is a large market for proprietary optimised implementations of various codecs for use in industry. The same goes for mp3 and so on. Unless people have found x264 headers left in the files, in which case, fail.
Here's more details: http://www.timothysykes.com/2011/11/how-a-penny-stock-promot... The RAYS campaign was run by the same guys who did LEXG, the latter being one of the best pump and dumps last year-- ran from $1 to $10 in a short amount of time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Custom magic algorithms" in this case being "off-the-shelf free software, using completely default parameters, that we've stolen and claimed is our magic algorithm".
H.264 is not "free software." You're thinking of x264, the free software implementation of H.264 that everyone uses. There is a large market for proprietary optimised implementations of various codecs for use in industry. The same goes for mp3 and so on. Unless people have found x264 headers left in the files, in which case, fail.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Custom magic algorithms" in this case being "off-the-shelf free software, using completely default parameters, that we've stolen and claimed is our magic algorithm".
I hate to burst your bubble, but "custom magic algorithms" actually exist. I was involved with a contract that accomplished the same end as mentioned in the article - compressed video data, playable within standard video players. The company wasn't achieving the same level of compression that this article is claiming, but they did manage to reduce video size while maintaining quality.
But x264 isn't an awful one; it's the best, by a factor of ~30% over the nearest competition according to the most recent independent comparison (http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/h264_2011/). Every company loves to claim that their "custom magic algorithms" are amazing and magic, but when push comes to shove, nothing compares to what free software can put out, and this shows no signs of changing, at least before the release of HEVC.
If you have a "magic algorithm" that does better than the current state of the art, send it in to be benchmarked! I mean, if you can do better than the encoder used by Google, Youtube, Netflix, Facebook, and thousands of other companies around the world, surely you'll be able to get some customers if you publicize this super-amazing-magic algorithm, right?
Or maybe, like the thousands of other companies claiming the same, your "magic algorithm" is bullshit -- or a good idea, just already implemented in dozens of other encoders out there too, and you're demonstrating its efficacy by comparing it to a junk heap like Quicktime.