New Video compression demo

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

From: ruben () europa ee uts edu au (Ruben Gonzalez)
Newsgroups: alt.binaries.multimedia,alt.binaries.pictures.misc
Subject: New Video compression demo






A demonstration of SDDV, a real-time, full colour, software only video player
is now available. Originally the first version of this codec was called RISC 
video, SDDV however is a new generation algorithm which is better in all ways.


Existing software only video players are either low definition,
or they only support very low frame rates or they have terrible compression.
Other schemes have a fixed colour maps and dither which mean that the image 
quality is somewhat suspect. This all comes down to low quality video which
requires a lot of storage space for only a short video segment.


We aim to solve these problems with our new technique. We get high quality 
images with up to 80:1 compression (and rising, average 40:1) and frame rates 
of up to 200+ frames per second (average 70fps) on a standard 486 IBM PC with a 
standard VGA card, ISA bus. No fancy anything is required.


This technique is still in the process of development and so this demo
does not really demonstrate the ultimate performance we will attain.


Seeing as we are a University, we are not geared for the commercialisation
of this research. So we are on the look out for commercial partners 
interested in developing this further. If you are interested in 
this project and/or helping us out we are interested in hearing from you.


Please note that this demonstation software is supplied as is and 
remains the property of the MultiMedia Systems Group, Unversity of 
Technology, Sydney. This software is Copyright 1993, MultiMedia Systems
Group, University of Technology Sydney, all rights reserved.
This software may be freely distributed and copied in unmodified form
as long as this notice remains intact and is included in any distribution
of this software.


For any further information contact me :


Ruben Gonzalez
The School of Electrical Engineering,
University of Technology, Sydney.
PO Box 123 Broadway, 2007
Australia.


email : ruben () ee uts edu au
fax   : +612-3302435


However if you plan to contact me you had better do it soon because,
my contract is about to expire and I'll be looking for somewhere to go.
(I'm open to any suggestions)




How to get it ?
---------------


This demo can be obtained via anonymous ftp from : rcc.ee.uts.edu.au 


Under the directory /pub/PC/sddv


ie type


%ftp rcc.ee.uts.edu.au
ftp> bin
ftp> prompt
ftp> cd pub/PC/sddv
ftp> mget *




Running The Demo 
----------------


This demo comes in a few files; two versions of the SDDV video 
player and some short video clips  as well as this README file.
This demo will only work on 386/486 based PCs with VGA cards


to play the demo movies under dos just type : "sddv movie_file" 


The video clips are mainly 150 frames long each of 176x144 pixels in size.


The SDDV video demonstration will run on a standard VGA card.
It runs in the 256 colour 320x200 mode. However the most appropriate
mode to view the demo is at 640x400 mode in 256 colours and this would improve
the quality substatially. Unfortunately I have not as yet written a VESA 
compliant decoder for SVGA boards since I don't have a copy of the standard.


The windows version of the player "WinSDDV" will run under windows version 3.X.
It is only a very early pre-alpha version and will only play the video files.
Most of the features have not been implemented yet, and is only being released
for you to experiment with. Sorry, but we haven't had the resources yet to 
finish the MS Windows port yet because I have been simultaneously working
on a Machintosh QuickTime port as well, which is not completed yet.




Regards
Ruben.                                                  5/9/93