Apple Acquires Startup That Uses AI To Compress Videos - Slashdot

Posted by msmash

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  From my simple understanding, this allows AI to show you "important elements" (text and faces), over "non essential" elements like scenery without requiring new hardware or codecs. Am I right? So, they are finding a way to show you lower quality video when there is a poor connection without sacrificing "important elements".

  That's neat, but can I turn it off?

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  • Re:

    Feed in a low quality copy of the video. AI generates a high resolution version. Take the difference between the AI version and the real version, and compress it.

    The low res version and the compressed difference data will be smaller than compressing the full quality data. Could even be lossless if you want.

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      But then you’d have to transmit the low quality version and the difference. That’s like the whole thing.

      You could however run the same AI prediction on both ends and then transmit only the difference between the prediction and the next actual frame. That’s what I thought they’d do but it doesn’t seem to be the case.

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    You've spun it into anti-corporate outrage which is on point for/. but when it comes to compression, "cost savings" and "high quality" are two sides of the same coin.

    Codecs devote a lot of time to deciding where to spend bits. Have you ever looked at a scene and noticed compression artifacts floating around some important element? Maybe text on a document, or a figure cloaked in dark backdrop bokeh in a horror. That Game of Thrones episode in the final season that happened entirely at night and was almost

  • Re:

    To be honest, given I doubt real time use of this can be effective without an equal amount of data fed to the AI, I suspect the tool will be easier exploited by copyright infringers so you can have, say, a high quality 4K two hour movie transferred in less than a gigabyte, which you can uncompress at home.

    It doesn't sound that useful for real time streaming.

• AI that can focus more bits in places we pay more attention and use fewer bits in paces that we don't pay attention is the future of video compression, especially for streaming and doubly so for videoconferencing. I don't care about the details on the leaves of the trees behind the person I'm talking to, I care about their facial expressions and their gestures.

  There are several AI video compression efforts out there, from DeepMind's MuZero [bbc.com] to NVIDIA's Maxine [nvidia.com] to smaller players like Deep Render [techcrunch.com] and Orange A [github.com]

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  • Attention-based compression is Marketing Bullshit

    Are you using a 28.8k dial-up modem or something? The few pixels you save are meaningless. Attention-based compression is Marketing Bullshit

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      Russ Hanneman would disagree.

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    The newest codecs... AV1? have some areas that are open to decisions being decided by AI. Even in h.264 has optimized presets for situations like slide shows or cartoons or black and white film or lower color spaces. Detectors not using AI could change optimization modes but maybe do a smarter job of it. Quality ranking is decided by amount of motion/change already and this can be perfect for AI -- I do not know if anybody has been using existing face detection algorithms (on cameras) in codecs to help ma

  • And the training data is from...

    AI that can focus more bits in places we pay more attention and use fewer bits in paces that we don't pay attention is the future of video compression

    So, where would it get training data to learn where peoples focus would be in a video I wonder?

    Interesting that pretty soon they are releasing a headset with integrated eye tracking where one promoted use is watching video...

  • Re:

    It would be interesting if it used AI to fill in irrelevant details that humans are unlikely to care about while giving us detailed faces and other focal elements. I’m not totally sure they’re doing that though.

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    Actually, it isn't. If the AI makes the creative decisions then the video is not copyrightable, just like a video made by a monkey. However, if a human uses the AI as a tool, making the final creative decisions himself, then he can copyright his work.

    As long as the AI is a tool, it is no different from a typewriter. Even though you used a typewriter to write your novel, rather than writing the words by hand, it is still your novel.

    Another way to think about it is to imagine that the AI is like a random n

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