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STV: A full-motion video codec for the Atari ST

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Re: STV: A full-motion video codec for the Atari ST

#11

Post by jaen »

Choosing 8×8 blocks is very likely highly suboptimal when it comes to the quality of the codec.

The point of the 4×2 tiles is exactly to avoid the blockiness artifacts of vector quantization (visible in the article).

Larger tiles increase the average error and entropy because of the way VQ works - it tries to find blocks that look like each other and then encode all similar blocks by referencing a single tile (usually choosing the "average" or "mode" the blocks).

As tiles grow larger, the chance to find highly similar blocks obviously decreases (and deviation from the representative tile increases).

Reducing one of the dimensions is probably better positioned on the quality-speed frontier.

Re: STV: A full-motion video codec for the Atari ST

#12

Post by TD-Linux »

esafak wrote: post #2

> Each 8×8 block is turned into a short DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) feature vector; distance is measured there instead of raw pixels. Was this your idea or the agent's? Because it feels peculiar to essentially describe JPEG, modulo the entropy coding, without mentioning its name. It was released in 1992 -- before C+C. Which makes me wonder why Westwood didn't just use JPEG too... Fun fact, DCT's inventor: https:/…

It's not JPEG like at all, unlike JPEG it is using the DCT only for the loss function, so it can have frequency weights, having the same approximate effect as JPEG's quantization matrices (at least, according to the slopped-out description). Whether that actually improves things for this type of content is unclear.

Re: STV: A full-motion video codec for the Atari ST

#13

Post by TD-Linux »

amiga386 wrote: post #9

I'm sure the effort is good, but the article is not. It reads like breathless corporate crap. It also doesn't have any video of this FMV, though what I see in the HTML source is an attempt to use a third-party site to embed youtube videos, which does nothing on Firefox. Doesn't work: Let's go to the Youtube video it's meant to show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhOa3KCE_nM Now let's put Youtube's direct embed code…

>I'm sure the effort is good, but the article is not. It reads like breathless corporate crap.

That is because it is AI-written.

Re: STV: A full-motion video codec for the Atari ST

#14

Post by [deleted] »

TD-Linux wrote: post #12
esafak wrote: post #2

> Each 8×8 block is turned into a short DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) feature vector; distance is measured there instead of raw pixels. Was this your idea or the agent's? Because it feels peculiar to essentially describe JPEG, modulo the entropy coding, without mentioning its name. It was released in 1992 -- before C+C. Which makes me wonder why Westwood didn't just use JPEG too... Fun fact, DCT's inventor: https:/…

It's not JPEG like at all, unlike JPEG it is using the DCT only for the loss function, so it can have frequency weights, having the same approximate effect as JPEG's quantization matrices (at least, according to the slopped-out description). Whether that actually improves things for this type of content is unclear.

[deleted]

Re: STV: A full-motion video codec for the Atari ST

#15

Post by dannyw »

This is a really cool project. That said, as genuine constructive feedback, I think it would be better if a bit more time was spent on improving the writing and prose of it.

I use LLMs to write too, and give it examples of my writing for style which gives a better starting base. Then I do at least a full copyedit pass, and usually rewrite (or shorten) at least 20-30% of the word count; until I’m happy to publish.

An increasing amount of writing following the same style, quirks, and relative lack of humanity makes reading and learning less engaging.

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