DVD-R/RW and the future of Alt. Curve actually, believe, testing, backing

andy

About Alt. Curve amp; all variants of Curve Compression.

Please don't think I take all this testing and developing lightly but don't you think that as soon as DVD-R/RW/+R becomes just a little cheaper, all of these and every other people will begin just ripping at Q2 and backing up 2 to 3 DVDs in one DVD-R, forgetting all about CC?
And how far will that be? 6 months? 8 months?

I strongly believe motion estimation will be the way to go for this codec. That and *-Frames (you can't actually say the B word here, can you?) if they do go for a IBBPBBPBBPBBP setup.

Just my thoughts...

Motion estimation performance is always a useful goal, as is (in my opinion) 2-pass optimization.  There will always be uses for it, as there will always be people who want a clip to meet a desired size.

I do think that the focus on B-frames is a bit misguided - MPEG-4 tools like INTER4V motion estimation and other improvements over MPEG-2 have made P-frame sizes much closer to B-frames, enough to make B-frames mostly useless (apart from speeding up seeking and for dropping frames).  Sure it'd be nice to have, but it's not a cure-all.

-h

I don't think DVD-R/RW will be popular mainstream for at least another year. The drives are just too costly at the moment, and I don't think there's gonna be a huge price reduction soon. And let's not forget that many people probably still have a couple hundred of spare CD-Rs still lying around waiting to be burned.

but don't you think that as soon as DVD-R/RW/+R becomes just a little cheaper, all of these and every other people will begin just ripping at Q2 and backing up 2 to 3 DVDs in one DVD-R, forgetting all about CC?

Look at something which will point at the state of movie compression in a couple of years - audio compression. Despite the fact that, with lossless compression, you can easily rip 2 average sized audio CDs, compress, and burn to a CDR, lossy compression is still very popular. I don't see people moving on from the current state of compression movie size for quite a long time. Even if they do just use Q2 for their personal DVD rips, streaming and portables will keep the pressure up for many years to come.

But remember HDTV movies are becoming more available. And trying to fit a full max resolution HD movie onto a single DVD-R at best possible quality ends up looking remarkably similar to trying to make a 1 CD rip.

So I don't think the quest for max quality/bit is quite over yet.

- Tom

IMHO, since currently most people are doing their compression with a fixed number of CDRs (1 or 2, even 3) in mind, that make no difference when they switch to DVDR.  Because DVDR is only treated as a larger CDR for them, now they might think how to fit a fixed number of (hours of) movies into a DVDR.  With that said, I think that those 2-pass compression tricks will always be as important as motion estimation is.

lossy compression is still very popular
Well, Q2 is still lossy. And smaller than MPEG2.
I think that those 2-pass compression tricks will always be as important as motion estimation is.
They will be usefull but AFAIK I wouldn't develope it further. For ME they are already powerfull enough.
But remember HDTV movies are becoming more available. And trying to fit a full max resolution HD movie onto a single DVD-R at best possible quality ends up looking remarkably similar to trying to make a 1 CD rip.

Well, here the accusation rests.

DVD-R + MPEG2 will be fine until people want to put high-res (like HD TV) movies onto them. Then MPEG-4 will again be king :-D. When people want to backup their DVHS tapes or Blu-Ray (or whatever) then DVD-R + XviD will probably be the medium of choice.

Or alternatively, you could just enjoy the luxuary of having 3 movies on a single disc.

Oh yeah, and streaming MPEG-4 is likely to become more popular in the near future, which will make the development done by XviD all the more important.

Plus I don't intend on getting a DVD-R/+RW/whatever any time soon.

-s

If I would have a DVD-R Writer I think I would just go for settings like these:

single pass
quants: min: 2, max: 6
bitrate: 900
AC3 sound (or perhaps: lame --alt-preset standard)

(this is divX 5)

These are the settings I used for encoding videoclips from Moby's album Play. And it looks very nice.
May I ask a question.. Is it possible to do something similar with xvid. I didn't find single pass options like these written above.
(Please reply)

Francis

I give you an answer.. you can do very similar with xvid, but are enabled to set quantizers for I- and P-frames independendly, can choose the quantization type to your likings, and such nifty little things