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Assuming H.264 compatibility, what techniques could be applied to compressing videos?
The folks behind Beamr H.264 also have a 'patent pending', proprietary JPEG image "recompression technology": http://www.jpegmini.com/ I'm curious what an analysis of one of their JPEG's would show?
The folks behind Beamr H.264 also have a 'patent pending', proprietary JPEG image "recompression technology": http://www.jpegmini.com/ I'm curious what an analysis of one of their JPEG's would show?
They explicitly state "The technology works in the domain of standard H.264 video, resulting in video streams that are fully compatible with any media player or consumer device." Assuming H.264 compatibility, what techniques could be applied to compressing videos?
As an example of "techniques" that can be applied to compressing videos, one of the reasons why x264 is considered the best H.264 encoder out there is due to its advanced psychovisual optimizations - these are basically methods that will increase the perceived visual quality for human viewers, but decreases the quality in the eyes of metrics like PSNR and SSIM.
However, I know of one program that does in fact meet its claims: DLI Image Compression (https://sites.google.com/site/dlimagecomp/)
It only compresses images, and it is extremely slow at it too. But apparently it's better than anything out there. Dark Shikari (x264 developer) says [1]:
> I’ve seen that one before; iirc, last I tested it, it was competitive with x264 and even beat it significantly at times. Given that it was adapted for insanely high compression times, of course, this is not very surprising. Still rather impressive.
I'm not a native speaker and thus not good at phrases. Can anybody explain the "snake oil" please?
Snake oil is an expression that originally referred to fraudulent health products or unproven medicine but has come to refer to any product with questionable or unverifiable quality or benefit. By extension, a snake oil salesman is someone who knowingly sells fraudulent goods or who is himself or herself a fraud, quack, charlatan, and the like.
"Snake oil" as used today in tech is the opposite -- accurately labeled, but ineffective.
I'm not a native speaker and thus not good at phrases. Can anybody explain the "snake oil" please?
They explicitly state "The technology works in the domain of standard H.264 video, resulting in video streams that are fully compatible with any media player or consumer device." Assuming H.264 compatibility, what techniques could be applied to compressing videos?
Our technologies for image and video compression have received excellent reviews in the media, and have been tested and proven by industry experts. You can find the reviews online, and I would be happy to send you the quotes we got from the industry experts as well. Thousands of users are using our free online photo optimization service at JPEGmini.com daily, and thousands more have purchased JPEGmini for Mac to optimize images locally, and they are all very happy with these tools.
The important thing regarding our technologies, and the main point you have missed in your analysis, is that they are used for automatic image optimization to the lowest bitrate or file size possible, and not for encoding an image or video to a specific bitrate or file size. Based on analysis of the image or video using a perceptual quality measure we have developed, we adaptively set the encoding parameters for each image or video. So the amount of compression for each image or video clip is different, and depends on the content and original quality of that image.
Comparing the quality of a clip encoded in Beamr Video with the quality of the same clip encoded at the same bitrate using another encoder is meaningless, since part of the uniqueness of Beamr Video is "knowing" what is the right bitrate (actually the lowest bitrate possible) for encoding each video such that it stays perceptually identical to the original clip. Beamr Video is the only technology that can adaptively reduce the bitrate of any clip to the minimum amount possible, while ensuring that quality of the output clip is perceptually identical to the quality of the input clip.
The same is true for our image technology: We reduce each JPEG file to the minimum file size possible without affecting its original quality. Of course, you can take a specific file and tune a regular JPEG encoder to reach the same size on that specific file. And you can also manually tune the quality for each image using a regular JPEG encoder by viewing the photo before and after compression. But there is no other technology that can take millions of photos and automatically adapt the size of each one to the minimum possible size while preserving quality.
The clips on our website are an initial demo of Beamr Video we are offering today, based on Blu-Ray sources. In a few weeks we will launch a cloud-based Beamr Video encoding service, where everyone will be able to process their own clips and reach their own conclusions. There are free trial versions of JPEGmini available for anyone to download and try. So again, I don't understand the basis of your "Snake Oil" claim. I would be happy to continue this discussion with you privately if you like, you can email me at dror@beamr.com.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Snake oil is an expression that originally referred to fraudulent health products or unproven medicine but has come to refer to any product with questionable or unverifiable quality or benefit. By extension, a snake oil salesman is someone who knowingly sells fraudulent goods or who is himself or herself a fraud, quack, charlatan, and the like.
The irony is that the original "snake oils" actually were effective, just mislabeled (contained no actual snakes). "Snake oil" as used today in tech is the opposite -- accurately labeled, but ineffective.