Quoting "Paul G. Allen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
I used to work on the very first industry MPEG-2 video compressors ever made. Our company was five years ahead of the competition (the competition being Scientific Atlanta, which from what I know subsequently stole our designs, hardware, and software). My job was
they sound like Microsoft. :)
testing, troubleshooting, and repairing the $60K video compressor hardware that went into the racks that were used to uplink digital video to the satellites. I also built the production test stations, wrote the test documents, and wrote the test software for these units. We had a maximum compression ratios of 270:1. Part of my job when testing was to view the video (sometimes for hours on end - how many hundreds of times have I seen Jurassic Park!?) and make sure there were no "macro-blocks". This is commonly known as pixelation. Obvious pixelation occurs right around 2MB/sec. streaming video rate.
Was probably after you, but a good 10 years ago when I was still just starting out at Qualcomm, I did some work in the video lab now and then. They had really early HD stuff too. The movie they had in massively high quality (for the time at least) was Air Force One. Saw bits of that tons of times. This was some of the really early work that went into the eventual digital cinema stuff we came out with.
After two plus years of this, I have a keen eye for pixelation. I can
I've got a really good eye for it too. I tend to see things like this when noone else does.
This is because all the video feeds come from the same uplinks. They
It usually seems like the best source feed is for Discovery HD Theater.
use the same encoders. In an attempt to maximize bandwidth and cram more channels into the same space, they began raising the compression ratio. It didn't take long before they reached the fine line between obvious pixelation and barely discernible pixelation. Most people can't see it, but I see it as glaringly obvious.
It can become very noticeable to most people on movie channels and such opposite big sporting events. They clearly give more bandwidth to the really popular stuff at the expense of the rest of the channels.
-- Mike Marion-Unix/Linux Admin-http://www.miguelito.org "One of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence." -- Charles Austin Beard (1874-1948) -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
