compress

James LeVoy Sorenson, the billionaire entrepreneur and founder of the Sorenson Companies, died of cancer on Sunday. He was 86.

Sorenson Companies developed such technologies as the Sorenson Squeeze, a digital video compression and encoding technology.

And more recently, the company launched a social-networking genealogy Web site in October that incorporates the use of DNA testing called GeneTree.

Sorenson, however, is best known for the medical devices he invented, such as the first disposable surgical masks, blood recycling systems, and computer systems that provide real-time heart monitoring.

Sorenson is survived by his wife, eight children, 47 grandchildren, and 28 great-grandchildren.… Read more

I've always preferred prognostication to nostalgia, so rather than replay the best of 2007, I'll use these late December doldrums to make 10 predictions for the coming year. Some editors will warn you that this kind of list is suicide--it's too easy for everybody to look back a year later and see where you were wrong--but it hasn't hurt Cringely, so here goes. In no particular order.

DRM will die. The trendline is clear--Apple's been selling DRM-free tunes on iTunes since May, Amazon's DRM-free MP3 store has three of the four majors signed up, … Read more

Every computer user needs a solid file compression program. Not only are they mandatory for opening downloaded software, they offer several other useful features for tasks like creating e-mail attachments, performing backups, and saving space on your hard drive. Most people use WinZip because it comes pre-installed on a lot of Windows PCs, but WinZip isn't the only program available for file compression.

There's certainly nothing wrong with WinZip, but some programs offer better file compression or features that may be more in tune with what you need. For instance, some apps make efficient compression their focus, while … Read more

FixMyMovie is a new service that takes your pixelated digital video clips and does its best to fix them. The technology stems from MotionDSP's processing technology, which is similar to what's used in government intelligence operations to improve those dark and grainy security films--like you see in movies.

The entire process is fairly straightforward: Just upload and tag a supported movie file, and the service will crunch it on its servers. You get a note by e-mail when it's done. Once it's finished you can preview the first 10 seconds of the enhanced version, as well as compare before and after results live, by pressing the "compare" button. What's even cooler is a stills mode that lets you compare the before and after with an easy-to-use slider that follows your mouse. Whatever's on the left of the slider is the old, with the new on the right.

To grab the improved film, there are download options for multiple formats, including iPod-formatted H.264, Adobe Flash, and Windows Media. You can also grab quick embed code to stick it in any blog, which I've done after the break.

I tried out the service on several video clips this morning and got improved results on every single one of them. The most dramatic improvement of all was with text, which managed to turn almost unreadable pixelated words into legible sentences. Just be wary, though: The service can only handle clips up to 352x288 in resolution, which means the VGA videos from your digital camera aren't going to cut it. Older cameras, on the other hand, are fine.

FixMyMovie is launching in beta at this morning's DEMOfall conference in San Diego with $25 worth of free processing for everyone while still in its beta period. Eventually, FixMyMovie plans to charge users for the option to enhance video and still images, which can also be captured manually by users within the Flash player. I can see this service being hugely popular, as everyone wants better looking video clips, and ways to improve older, lower resolution clips.

Update: It's worth noting you need the latest beta of Adobe Flash 9 to view videos on the service (which makes the neat, live before and after feature possible). You can pick it up here, or just get a feel for what it can do with the screenshot below.… Read more

San Francisco Chronicle music critic Joel Selvin mourns the loss of audio quality in our iPod-obsessed culture.

He's right: MP3 files and other forms of data-compressed audio, such as AAC (used by Apple's iTunes) and Windows Media Audio, don't contain as much audio data as an uncompressed song on a CD. For long-time music listeners such as Selvin, the difference is striking. (Note that he's talking about data compression, not the audio compression that's misused to "punch up" many modern recordings.)

The first time I heard a CD full of burned MP3 files … Read more

Downloads cheat you out of most of the music. Blame it on the way MP3s and the other lossy codecs work--they "throw away" as much as 90% of the original recording's information to squeeze the data into smaller files. The fuzzy logic behind this musical abomination is the missing information isn't audible, and if you never plan to listen to the music you love over anything better than a set of $29 plastic computer speakers or the freebie ear buds that come with your iPod, I'll concede the point. So sure, if you don't … Read more

After a tip came through the wire that Phillipe the Phisher was vacationing in Paris, Power Downloader asked his friend Francois Foto if he might be able to snap some undercover pictures of the information pilfering villain. A week later, Power received an e-mail from Foto saying that he got the shots Power requested, but that he wondered how he could safely send the images without them being stolen in transit. Also, the image files take up a lot of space, so regular e-mail attachments would be too big for some e-mail clients to handle.

Understanding the need for both … Read more

How come modern rock recordings seem to be so relentlessly loud? Essentially, the answer comes down to the misuse of compression, a technique by which the peaks and valleys of volume in a recording are electronically leveled out.

There's a popular YouTube video circulating that gives a pretty simple explanation. After a recording is finished but before it's mastered to CD, engineers use electronic tools to increase the volume of the entire recording, then squash out any peaks over a certain level. The result is a really loud CD that is supposed to stand out to radio programmers … Read more

This is why we love technology. Sure, a lot of gadgets are made just for fashion, fetish or one-upsmanship, but every once in awhile something of socially redeeming value comes along. In this case, it's sign language on mobile phones.

Taking a generational leap beyond text messaging, the University of Washington's "MobileASL" project is working on video-compression technology that would improve transmission quality so that American Sign Language gestures would be recognizable on cell phones. "It uses skin-detection algorithms to zoom in on those specific areas in the video that contain essential movements used to … Read more