Don't Buy the Snake Oil of Beamr Video

>Beamr isn't claiming a superior encoder.

Their sure make it sound like it in their marketing material. Hell, they've even gotten articles written about them that start like this[0]:

New technology from video encoding experts Beamr claims to be able to out-perform the new H.265 format by merely encoding H.264 better. Their video optimisation apparently reduces the bitrate of video streams by up to four times, while retaining their resolution, quality, and - most importantly - their industry-standard H.264 format. It works on all frame-sizes up to and including 4K

All the writing out there pretty much implies that thanks to Beamr Video's new technology, H.264 suddenly compresses up to four times better. Which is obviously not the case. No site is talking about "how most videos have 'too much' bitrate and how Beamr Video can select a much lower bitrate that is enough for the video to still look good", because that would be much more along the lines of what they're actually trying to do.

Anyway, there's something else that came to my mind from the discussion in this thread. Check out this section from a PR piece of theirs[1]:

>Online streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon and iTunes typically encode full HD (1080p) streams at 5-6 Megabits per second (Mbps). Utilizing Beamr Video optimization can reduce the required bitrate for full HD streaming to around 3-4 Mbps, enabling smoother playback, support for customers with lower broadband connectivity, and significant delivery cost savings to the streaming service providers.

Let's stop and think about this for a moment. As we have learned today:

* Beamr Video is not going to offer any kind of quality / filesize control in their service. Not even any kind of upper or lower bounds.

* Beamr Video is intended for re-encoding existing lossy video.

* Re-encoding from lossy to lossy is always going to introduce generation loss to some degree.

Combine these two facts, and you'll realize that for content providers like Netflix, Amazon and iTunes, this service is completely and utterly useless. When you're doing online streaming, bitrate matters. These services should all be encoding their video streams from very high quality sources (higher than what can be found on Blu-rays). If they ran these sources through Beamr, they'd only get a single video out of it, most likely at a bitrate far larger than what they're willing to stream (as demonstrated on Beamr's page, Blu-ray sources are enough to make for 9-30 Mbps streams on average, while, as the quoted section mentions, streaming services usually offer 1080p video around 5-6 Mbps). Thus, it rules Beamr out for this kind of straight encoding from high quality sources for online streaming use cases.

Now, they could encode all their streams like usuals, in different resolutions and bitrates, and then run these streams through Beamr, but does that make any damn sense? No, it does not. As I've proven, at the same bitrate, Beamr offers nothing over x264, so if any legitimate service wanted to offer their videos at smaller bitrates, they could just encode their videos straight to those bitrates from the high quality sources. Or, in case of something like Netflix that already encodes videos to several different bitrates, they could simply drop the higher-end streams. Not to mention that re-encoding with Beamr could potentially make the streaming experience worse due to the fact that Beamr does not seem to set any VBV options[2] for their encodes.

It's also the same situation with any digital video download services: If they wanted to offer lower-bitrate content, they could just encode the content directly to said lower bitrates. And since any legit digital video downloads are DRM'd up the bum (man, why must the legitimate digital video download market suck so much?), you, as an user, would not be able to make the video smaller through Beamr either.

So I guess the big question is: What actual use cases does this service have? Re-encoding Blu-ray sources isn't really that feasible for end users either, since what kind of user would have the patience to upload several dozens of gigabytes to Beamr with a regular consumer internet connection (unless they have Google Fiber or something)?

I guess ultimately this leaves us with regular users wanting to compress their videos taken with mobile phones or something, but if they for example want to put these videos up on YouTube, then there's really no reason for them to upload the full-sized original video to Beamr, wait for them to re-encode it, download it, and then upload that to YouTube, which is going to re-encode it again, when they could simply upload the original full-sized video straight to YouTube and have it be re-encoded only once.

[0] http://www.redsharknews.com/distribution/item/455-beamr-clai...

[1] http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/beamr-unveils-breakt...

[2] http://mewiki.project357.com/wiki/X264_Encoding_Suggestions#...

Even if imgur did use a lossy format (which it didn't), you can see a difference between the top and bottom halves of that single image.

Fireworks, pngquant, and png-nq have quantization algorithms that will dither a 32-bit PNG with alpha down to 8-bit palletized PNGs with alpha. The palette selection algorithms the free tools use (I haven't used Fireworks) sometimes drop important colors used in only a small section of an image, resulting in a blue power LED losing its blue color.

bjornsing, I think you might not understand what Diaz is doing. He is not manually tuning the parameters for each video file. He is actually letting x264 automatically choose the bitrate and encoding parameters, to achieve a desired level of quality.

If that is so, show examples of video files which prove it! Show us some uncompressed video files which compress both smaller and with better quality using Beamr (as compared to x264's CRF mode).