Fractal pioneers, Iterated Systems Inc, have won their first clear distribution victory for video compression in the form of Mitsubishi Co Ltd – with a possible addendum from the Japanese giant’s consumer arm. The video compression codec launched last month after several months of beta testing and was immediately greeted with oohs and aahs – but that’s a press demonstration for you. What the industry had grown accustomed to in Fractal compressed video – beautiful pictures with a strange resolving effect at the start of each scene change – is now cured with a automatic key-frame picker that detects the start of scenes and puts a new key-frame in. The codec also allows for variable compression in static and moving areas of video – the size of the file in a moving area will be thicker, but that should be unnoticeable to the viewer, said Jim Cavedo, from the company’s Atlanta, Georgia headquarters. We designed Clearvideo specifically for the store- and-forward market rather than moving something designed for videoconferencing into the Web arena. Mitsubishi has agreed to distribute the compression system in Japan and one Iterated source confirmed talks were in progress with the company’s consumer arm, Mitsubishi Electric Co Ltd, which is already known to be working with High Definition Television, PCs, artificial retinas, and interactive TV set-tops. This is the first stage of Iterated’s strategy: to get a cheap entry-level product that operates over low bandwidths on the PC and Macintosh. Netscape Communications Corp and Microsoft Corp are said to be very interested in what the company is doing (Microsoft used the compression in its Encarta Encyclpaedia), and if Iterated gets an Internet standard off the ground – and there is some steep competition despite the plaudits – it will move on to high-capacity databases and extend its ability to perform real-time compression – currently the most arduous of tasks. Phil Burgess, at the company’s UK branch, said he also hoped to exploit the compression system’s ‘zoom’ facility – something of a bonus side-effect of Fractal compression, which can zoom into a picture four or five times without a noticeable degradation of image quality. Michael [Barnsely, founder and patent holder of Fractal compression] is as excited today as the day he discovered the Fractal form.
