Fractal pioneer Iterated Systems Inc of Atlanta, Georgia has won its first clear distribution victory for video compression in the form of Mitsubishi Electric Corp – with a possible addendum from the Japanese major’s consumer arm. The video compression codec was launched last month after several months of beta testing. What the industry had grown accustomed to in fractal compressed video – 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 headquarters. We designed Clearvideo specifically for the store-and-forward market rather than moving something designed for videoconferencing into the Web arena. Mitsubishi Electric has agreed to distribute the compression system in Japan and one Iterated source confirmed talks were in progress with the company’s consumer arm, which is already working with High Definition Television, personal computers, artificial retinas, and interactive television set-top boxes. This is the first stage of Iterated’s strategy: to get a cheap entry-level product that operates over low bandwidths on the Windows and Macintosh personal computer. 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 Encyclopaedia – and if Iterated gets an I nternet 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 qual ity. Michael [Barnsley, founder and patent holder of Fractal compression] is as excited today as the day he discovered the Fractal form.
