Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A web video company that is most likely a hoax

ihatelawyers3.github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 104 posts

Re: A web video company that is most likely a hoax

#81

Post by the_philcoder »

MichaelGG wrote: post #77
JonnieCache wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Try clicking on DarkShikari's username.

Nice. :) This made me register an account here at HN so that i can post comment. Thanks for the heads up!

Re: A web video company that is most likely a hoax

#82

Post by sfdfadds »

mikeryan wrote: post #45
radley wrote: post #34

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…

they seem to be pretty active for being supposedly fake. Check their twitter feed. They tweet as much if not more than most video companies and it's not fluff. A good pump and dump scam requires a believable company presence. You just fell for the smoke screen.

You underestimate the power of BS. I worked for a company that raised capital hand over fist and sucked in companies like nobody's business. We could have been doing nothing or been awesome as hell, but it didn't matter- it was all about the slick CEO selling his wares. And in the end, the company still exists even after seemingly burning up in a significant blaze of glory. Money is more important than technology. Unfortunately, many here don't realize that yet.

Re: A web video company that is most likely a hoax

#83

Post by gavingmiller »

DarkShikari wrote: post #80
gavingmiller wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, you can "improve compression" -- just compare yourself to an awful encoder! This is the strategy used by thousands of marketing whitepapers. 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 algorithm…

I can assure you that we did our testing against x264, and that we produced encodings that were better than x264. You're also assuming that compression optimization can only occur in the encoder - which I assure you is false (damn you NDA!! You'll have to take my word on these statements.)

As to the business of selling said encoders, I couldn't agree with you more, if you've got something that improves the most widely used encoder then surely customers should be clamoring to get a hold of this algorithm. That is if you're selling it properly.

However, I was merely a contractor, and not making the business decisions. I worked with multiple contractors that thought similar things to yourself (myself included.) And when you're taking investor money, telling them that you're going to open source a technology that took 2+ years to develop, and hope that you'll make money from it is a great way to lose your investor money.

Re: A web video company that is most likely a hoax

#84

Post by DarkShikari »

gavingmiller wrote: post #83
DarkShikari wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, you can "improve compression" -- just compare yourself to an awful encoder! This is the strategy used by thousands of marketing whitepapers. 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 algorithm…

I can assure you that we did our testing against x264, and that we produced encodings that were better than x264. You're also assuming that compression optimization can only occur in the encoder - which I assure you is false (damn you NDA!! You'll have to take my word on these statements.) As to the business of selling said encoders, I couldn't agree with you more, if you've got something that improves the most widel…

I can assure you that we did our testing against x264, and that we produced encodings that were better than x264

By what measurement, PSNR? x264 doesn't optimize for PSNR by default.

And when was this? x264 has improved dramatically in the past 4 years. In 2007, Mainconcept could beat x264 in many cases and Ateme's 2004 encoder was still sometimes better! There are cases where x264 has improved by a factor of 2 in this time period, or more.

You're also assuming that compression optimization can only occur in the encoder

Do you mean prefiltering? Such a thing is a dishonest comparison, as you can prefilter before using any particular encoder, and there are whole frameworks built for exactly that purpose which are widely used with x264 -- and other encoders too.

And when you're taking investor money, telling them that you're going to open source a technology that took 2+ years to develop, and hope that you'll make money from it is a great way to lose your investor money.

If your technology takes 2+ years to develop, your programmers are incompetent or your management is broken. Probably no single algorithm in x264's history has taken more than a few days to develop. Coming up with good ideas is a matter of thinking, combined with trial and error: once you have a idea that actually works, implementing it is dead trivial. The time-consuming part is the other 99 ideas you tried that didn't work so well -- and you can't plan for that.

Re: A web video company that is most likely a hoax

#86

Post by hyperbovine »

DarkShikari wrote: post #39
radley wrote: post #34

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".

You've just described the business model of a surprisingly large number of consultancies. One man's obvious is the next man's "magic". AFAICT businesses are happy to pay for this sort of thing, so I'm not sure who deserves blame here.

Re: A web video company that is most likely a hoax

#88

Post by hackermom »

I don't think there's any hoax being played here, and I don't think they're fraudsters. I suspect someone simply discovered the various advanced settings of x264 and found out that they can maintain good video quality at "lower-than-common" bitrates, mistaking it all for a flash of brilliance on their own part. Everyone knows that f.e. YouTube aren't really doing everything they can with whatever h.264 encoder they've been using.

Re: A web video company that is most likely a hoax

#89

Post by dreww »

brandonhall wrote: post #68
steveplace wrote: post #33

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.

Glad you mentioned Tim here. He's one of about five truth-tellers in that world of scams. Great resource

starting to think all of this is to drive traffic from hackernews to timothy sykes.
Post reply on HN