Can you put a one-hour HD movie in 8 kilobytes of memory? Impossible.
But some people believe that was the case in what appeared to be a revolutionary compression technology with a compression factor of one million.
In the early 1990s, a Dutch TV engineer named Jan Sloot invented and patented a new source-coding method. He was so secretive about the inner working of his invention that he alone--nobody else--really knew how it worked. Sloot was able to maintain this high level of secrecy by carrying around what appeared to be a memory device--apparently less that a megabyte--that was never out of his control or sight.
High-level investors regarded Sloot's technology as the miracle breakthrough that would fundamentally change the landscape for media storage and distribution. They scrambled to make an investment even though Sloot refused to give them an in-depth look at the technology. The most avid of these suitors were convinced of the power of the technology, although others said it was a smokescreen.
But it did seem to work. Witnesses saw the inventor plug the hardware device into another unit, after which video playback was possible--despite the limited memory involved.
In 1999, Sloot died. With him to the grave went his implementation secrets, although his patent did leave behind a few clues. In an article in the Dutch magazine "De Ingenieur" (The Engineer) of August 15, 2008, a well-written analysis describes how his method might have worked. The author explains that the method works with a reference table and a memory of image elements, each consisting of a small set of pixels. Each entry in the reference table refers to a specific image element from the memory.
A TV image is then encoded by its corresponding reference table with a set of numbers referring to a set of basic image elements in that memory. The original image can be reconstructed from the combination of reference table and the corresponding image elements.
The reference table can be kept very small in kilobytes. It's been speculated that some people confused that table as a measure for the compression ratio. If that were true, then you end up with a compression factor of a million. The article argues that in reality the compression method is comparable to an approach such as MPEG2, although there are differences in the way the compression works.
But how much compression is really possible and how much memory is really necessary?
To answer that question, we revert to an information theory that poses questions such as "under what conditions can error-free communication take place?", and "what happens in less than ideal conditions such as noise on a communication channel?" A well-known information theory law is the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem which says if you have an analog signal (for example a TV signal) with a highest frequency of "f," then you have to sample that signal with at least two times this highest frequency (i.e. "2f") to guarantee faithful reproduction of the original signal.
Take, for example, a PAL video signal with a resolution of 576 x720 pixels, or a total of 414,720 pixels per image. An image is refreshed twenty-four times a second, giving a rate of almost ten million pixels per second. With how many bits do we need to encode a pixel? The eye can distinguish between a billion levels of light and can discern approximately 120 levels of color. Encoding these levels translates into 23 and 7 bits respectively, a total of 30 bits per pixel. I have ignored the fact that the color sensitivity of the eye is dependent on the quantity of light. In our PAL example, the bottom line is some 300 million bits per second. In practice, however, we use much less.
Suppose we limit color and light sensitivity to 15 bits, scaling back to about 150 million bits per second. Hence, for a one-hour movie, the total bill is a whopping 135 Gigabytes of memory. Obviously, we still want a smaller number.
Any image contains redundancies. Therefore, we can manage with less information by encoding these redundancies in a special manner.
So what would a compression factor of a million mean? For comparison, at a compression factor of 50 (H264), the resolution would be equivalent to some 45,000 HD pixels. Applying a compression ratio of a million to a 1920 x 1180 pixel HD image yields a resolution corresponding to only one or two HD pixels. In other words: no picture at all but only compression noise.
At that compression ratio a movie makes no sense anymore. Unless you believe it still should work. But maybe that kind of impressive compassion about compression is just as entertaining as a movie; that is, if you can still see it.
Cees Jan Koomen, a former Philips executive, is a Netherlands-based entrepreneur.