[theora-dev] Response to your questions about my suggestions i sent in yesterday

[Teran McKinney]

> i also said this:
> Theora should have a feature where when a user plays a video using
> the Theora player, the video will be compressed so the file size is smaller
> and  it will be faster to load. The quality of the video should remain the
> same.  For example, some 2 hour 16:9 Widescreen High definition 1080p videos
> are  4Gigabytes in size, so Theora should compress this 4GB video into
> 100MB  without losing any quality.

I like that idea. I think seeing as Theora utilitizes compresion
itself already, the fact that it doesn't already shrink a video
normally 4GB down to 100MB just shows that the developers are paid by
M$ and other companies. I like how you say it should do that, when it
sounds like you have no understanding of how compression works. I'll
make a statement: Open Office should never let any document get above
1MB without sacrificing the storage capacity, and should load any
document in less time than it takes for my harddrive to seek to the
spot on the disc. Do you see a problem here?

Now, Theora possibly might be able to give you a 2 hour 1080P video in
100MB if it was just blackness.

> Now for those that found this funny because you think it's impossible, well
> all i can say is new technologies are coming out all the time. 100 years ago
> they didn't even
> have cellphones, and now we do. Just this year, researchers have found a way
> to store 100 DVD's of information onto a single DVD that can be found here:
> http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10246057-1.html

> So maybe there is a way to compress a 4GB movie into 100MB without losing
> any quality.

It's all about perception. Compress the same movie to 100MB and 4GB
from the original. If 100MB is a tight squeeze, give it to the person
who has never seen a movie before, and they may think it's amazing (if
they can make out the different between a person and a dog in the
movie), while the 4GB might even look cheap to someone else. So I am
proposing to put a 32bit signed integer in the Theora header format,
for perceived quality suitable. Video fidelists might have something
like 0x7EADBEEF and the blind might have 0xDEADBEEF.

FYI: Increasing storage capacity != increasing compression. It's a lot
easier to increase storage capacity than increase compression,
especially without sacrificing quality.

Cheers!
Teran

PS: It's okay to not understand this, but I do think you are a little
narrow on this topic for how much you seemed to push this.