Increasing use of internet distribution and continual pressure on storage and bandwidth provide motivation to transition to an even more efficient form of compression, trading off computational time for better efficiency. Increased computing power allows more sophisticated algorithms to be implemented. Luckily, the decode rates were often “sufficiently fast” to be able to render the output in real-time.ĭevelopments in compression don’t stop. I had to endure encode rates of about an hour for each minute of video when I first started with MPEG-1, then with MPEG-2, MPEG-4 ASP, and then MPEG-4 AVC. In the “early” days of each of these standards, it was a painful but almost necessary procedure to optimize the encoding workflow and achieve the required quality. Throughout the whole journey, I have been doing my own video comparisons, but mostly empirically by testing out several settings and seeing how I liked them. Another bump was achieved with MPEG-4/H.264 (Part 10 – AVC) which improved efficiency to the point where standard definition “near-DVD-quality” could be fit into the same sort of space as CD-quality audio. Before long, MPEG-4/H.263 (ASP) was upon us, with another doubling, enabling a lot of “internet” video (e.g. Then MPEG-2 heralded the era of the DVD, SVCD and most of the DVB-T/DVB-S transmissions, with a claimed doubling of compression efficiency.
The quality wasn’t as good as TV, but it was constrained by the computing power available then.īecause of the continual increase in computing power, I watched as MPEG-1 bought VCDs and VHS quality to the same amount of storage as normally taken by uncompressed CD-quality audio.
I watched as early “simple” compression efforts such as Cinepak and Indeo bought multimedia to CD-ROMs running at 1x to 2x, good enough for interactive encyclopedias and music video clips.
Having played around with video since I had a few multimedia CD-ROMs and a BT878-based TV tuner card, video compression is one area that has amazed me.
0 kommentar(er)
