Category Archives: Compression

Too clever by half

Posted on August 15, 2013 by Stephen Dawson

Systems for achieving very high levels of data compression use amazingly inventive techniques. But when they are deployed, you should remain aware that what you’re getting is not identical to the original. With ‘lossy’ compression techniques such as MP3 and … Continue reading →

Posted in Compression, Misc | Leave a comment

The Loudness War

Posted on August 12, 2012 by Stephen Dawson

Here’s a brief video on how processing of sound in order to make it louder also makes it worse: (The clip isn’t appearing in Preview, so here’s the direct link.) The example is somewhat overdone koupit-pilulky.com , but there’s nothing … Continue reading →

Posted in Audio, Compression | Leave a comment

Are songs getting ‘louder’?

Posted on August 2, 2012 by Stephen Dawson

Statistician William M Briggs features on his excellent blog an occasional series of posts dedicated to proving that modern music is crap 2pharmaceuticals.com , at least in comparison to older music. Although there are hints that The Beatles represent the … Continue reading →

Posted in Audio, CD, Compression, Music | Leave a comment

Do Video Bitrates Matter?

Posted on January 5, 2011 by Stephen Dawson

Well after my little rant yesterday, how about something rather more positive? The answer to my question in the title is: ‘Of course they do.’ The more important question is: how much? My view is that once you get up … Continue reading →

Posted in Blu-ray, Codecs, Compression, Video | Leave a comment

Edge compression effects

Posted on August 22, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

I’m working up a Blu-ray vs DVD comparison for the 2005 version of Pride & Prejudice and noticed something interesting. [Update: the comparison is here.] Virtually all widescreen Blu-ray discs have, in my experience, conformed to a convention where the … Continue reading →

Posted in Blu-ray, Codecs, Compression, Video | 1 Comment

‘I’ frame rate

Posted on March 30, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

MPEG2, VC1 and MPEG4 AVC are all video compression systems that work both intra-frame, and inter-frame. Intra-frame is like JPEG (or like DV for that matter). Each frame of the video is treated as its own independent entity and compressed … Continue reading →

Posted in Blu-ray, Codecs, Compression, How Things Work, Video | 4 Comments

Paranormal Activity and DTS-HD Master Audio

Posted on March 11, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

Icon Film Distribution is releasing Paranormal Activity in Australia on Blu-ray and DVD on 2 April. This is a film that cost about $US15,000 to make and has since done about $US100 million at the box office. Pretty good ROI! … Continue reading →

Posted in Audio, Blu-ray, Codecs, Compression, Disc details | 1 Comment

Anamorphic revisited

Posted on March 7, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

I have a little bit of sympathy for DVD distributors who used pan and scan for some of their titles, at least in the early days. Back then the vast majority of TVs were still 4:3, and that was what … Continue reading →

Posted in Compression, DTV, DVD, Video | Leave a comment

Efficiency of Audio Codecs

Posted on February 17, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

Elsewhere it was pointed out that in my earlier post I was counting in the bitrate of Dolby TrueHD the standard Dolby Digital core, and that this is strictly not necessary for TrueHD. The reason I do that is that … Continue reading →

Posted in Audio, Codecs, Compression | Leave a comment

The Same Encode, But Different

Posted on February 12, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

While coverting old posts to the new blog, I happened to re-read one I did on Superman Returns, back in July 2008, called ‘Wasting Digital Real-estate‘. In this I theorised that ‘it looks like an identical encode was used on … Continue reading →

Posted in Blu-ray, Compression, Disc details, HD DVD, Video | 1 Comment