11 ms·

Don't Buy the Snake Oil of Beamr Video

245 points by Daiz 14y ago

bconway 14y ago
For similar benchmark fallacies (and straight up scams) discussed previously, see "A web video company that is most likely a hoax" - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3211630 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3211630 http://seekingalpha.com/article/316946-raystream-remains-under-scrutiny-even-fails-to-disclose-loss-of-one-alleged-customer http://seekingalpha.com/article/316946-raystream-remains-und...
messel 14y ago
No doubt. Still looking forward to wider acceptance of h265 which has real gains in quality/bit
metajack 14y ago
At least it is not as bad as Pixelon: http://web.archive.org/web/20000711031951/http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,16368,00.html http://web.archive.org/web/20000711031951/http://www.thestan...
- Bustard 14y ago
  It could be. We don't know that yet...
wmf 14y ago
ICVT actually developed some interesting algorithms, but it's a shame they're letting marketing hyperbole overshadow it. Another case where technical innovation doesn't sell, I guess.
- Daiz 14y ago
  Even if they had actually developed some "interesting algorithms", they sure don't seem to be using them, at least not in the actual video encoding process. There's really no other explanation for the fact that you can end up with practically identical video to Beamr's examples when using largely identical settings and bitrate with vanilla x264.
  - LocalPCGuy 14y ago
    There actually is an argument that if they can do as good a job as a manual encoding but automate the process, that is valuable, even if the encoding process is the same as the manual process. If you had thousands of videos to encode, they all probably wouldn't be optimally encoded at the exact same settings, and automating that task could save a significant amount of time.
    - bjornsing 14y ago
      Yea, but what Daiz proves in the OP is that he personally can do a better job than this so-called "algorithm". I hear his next project will be proving the worthlessness of spell checkers by simply beating them, at spelling. That paper clip thing in Word is such Snake Oil! ;) For the record I have nothing to do with this Beamr, but I do feel sorry for the those guys. The marketing speak on their website may be a little hyperbole, but there's nothing fraudulent there that I can see. I don't think they deserve this treatment. UPDATE: LocalPCGuy, sorry for posting this as a reply to your comment. You obviously get it.
      - DrJosiah 14y ago
        Actually, no. What Diaz showed is that Beamr is offering nothing that actually improves either visual quality or bitrate; every setting that their method uses actually reduces quality compared to default x264 settings.
        bjornsing 14y ago
        > What Diaz showed is that Beamr is offering nothing that actually improves either visual quality or bitrate Well too bad Beamr never made that claim (AFAIK). What Beamr does claim is that their software can automatically find settings (per frame) that will compress a certain video file to it's smallest size without affecting quality (too much - in some subjective measure). I'm not saying that Beamr is great. I have no idea, I've never used it. But what I can say for sure is that Daiz has not made a fair evaluation of the technology in the OP.
haven 14y ago
The folks behind Beamr H.264 also have a 'patent pending', proprietary JPEG image "recompression technology": http://www.jpegmini.com/ http://www.jpegmini.com/ I'm curious what an analysis of one of their JPEG's would show?
- dangrossman 14y ago
  The files in the before/after preview slider are exactly the same file size when they're supposed to be showing how their compressed image looks as good as the original. They're also not the same files you get when you click the download button.
  - drorgill 14y ago
    Those are just preview files used for fast page load, but they are based on resized versions of the original and the JPEGmini version. You are welcome to download the original and JPEGmini full resolution files, and compare them at "Actual Size" (100% zoom).
    - nwh 14y ago
      If you get two large images and resize them down to a small preview, they'll look the same. It's really complete bullshit showing those as "examples".
    - lwat 14y ago
      I downloaded the pic of the dog, opened the 'Original' in Paint.net, re-saved it at the same filesize as the JPEGmini version and it's indistinguishable from the other two versions. JPEGmini doesn't seem to do anything that I can't already do in any image editor. Looks like snake oil to me.
      - drorgill 14y ago
        Note my previous reply on this issue: JPEGmini adaptively encodes each JPEG file to the minimum file size possible without affecting its original quality (the output size is of course different for each input file). You can take a specific file and tune a regular JPEG encoder to reach the same size as JPEGmini did on that specific file. And you can also manually tune the quality for each image using a regular JPEG encoder by viewing the photo before and after compression. But there is no other technology that can do this automatically (and adaptively) for millions of photos.
alpb 14y ago
I'm not a native speaker and thus not good at phrases. Can anybody explain the "snake oil" please?
- ars 14y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil Basically a fake remedy that actually does nothing.
- WillyF 14y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil
- lem72 14y ago
  Snake oil is an expression that originally referred to fraudulent health products or unproven medicine but has come to refer to any product with questionable or unverifiable quality or benefit. By extension, a snake oil salesman is someone who knowingly sells fraudulent goods or who is himself or herself a fraud, quack, charlatan, and the like.
  - rdl 14y ago
    The irony is that the original "snake oils" actually were effective, just mislabeled (contained no actual snakes). "Snake oil" as used today in tech is the opposite -- accurately labeled, but ineffective.
    - SwellJoe 14y ago
      "were effective" for what purpose? And do you have a source for that?
      - rdl 14y ago
        http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=snake-oil-salesmen-knew-something http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=snake-oil-s... real Chinese snake oil was essentially some kind of omega-3 rich thing for topical application. And, from the wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil "snake oil" as sold in the US was essentially capsaicin, which is used today, both as a topical treatment and others, for a variety of muscle/bone/tissue ailments. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsaicin#Medical http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsaicin#Medical Whereas snake oil in cryptography tends to be worse. In practice even snake oil algorithms are probably enough protection for short-term, limited use (no one is going to devote real cryptanalysis resources to high school notes), but it can encourage people to have a false sense of security and do things they wouldn't otherwise, or it ends up getting used for purposes not originally intended.
niggler 14y ago
They explicitly state "The technology works in the domain of standard H.264 video, resulting in video streams that are fully compatible with any media player or consumer device." Assuming H.264 compatibility, what techniques could be applied to compressing videos?
- Daiz 14y ago
  A video standard essentially defines a set of methods for compressing video - it's up to the encoding applications to decide how to apply those methods and where. Basically, the smarter decisions the encoder can make, the higher quality results it will produce. This is why all H.264 encoders are not created equal. As an example of "techniques" that can be applied to compressing videos, one of the reasons why x264 is considered the best H.264 encoder out there is due to its advanced psychovisual optimizations - these are basically methods that will increase the perceived visual quality for human viewers, but decreases the quality in the eyes of metrics like PSNR and SSIM.
- calinet6 14y ago
  The techniques that could be applied in the domain of standard H.264 video are called "H.264."
- Hello71 14y ago
  > Assuming JavaScript compatibility, what techniques could be applied to minifying code?
  - niggler 14y ago
    You can minify code ensuring absolute correctness or make substitutions that are almost always correct. For example, there are some cases where you could replace tests like `x===y` with `x==y` but this may not work in all cases. If you accept imperfect translation, then this is a valid technique, but it should be clear that the translation isn't perfect. The reason why my question is different is because I'm asking about the constraints on the format. For example, is run-length encoding (RLE) acceptable? That wouldn't be acceptable for a .BMP bitmap
Xcelerate 14y ago
I've found that most claims of extreme video or image compression don't hold up under scrutiny. There's just too much research that has to go into it and so many tradeoffs to consider. However, I know of one program that does in fact meet its claims: DLI Image Compression (https://sites.google.com/site/dlimagecomp/ https://sites.google.com/site/dlimagecomp/) It only compresses images, and it is extremely slow at it too. But apparently it's better than anything out there. Dark Shikari (x264 developer) says [1]: > I’ve seen that one before; iirc, last I tested it, it was competitive with x264 and even beat it significantly at times. Given that it was adapted for insanely high compression times, of course, this is not very surprising. Still rather impressive. [1] http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/541 http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/541
drorgill 14y ago
Daiz hello, this is Dror from Beamr. The technologies we have developed, JPEGmini and Beamr Video, are definitely not "Snake Oil", and I don't think it would be good practice to make such claims regarding any company's technology without checking the facts first and asking for the company's response before posting. Our technologies for image and video compression have received excellent reviews in the media, and have been tested and proven by industry experts. You can find the reviews online, and I would be happy to send you the quotes we got from the industry experts as well. Thousands of users are using our free online photo optimization service at JPEGmini.com daily, and thousands more have purchased JPEGmini for Mac to optimize images locally, and they are all very happy with these tools. The important thing regarding our technologies, and the main point you have missed in your analysis, is that they are used for automatic image optimization to the lowest bitrate or file size possible, and not for encoding an image or video to a specific bitrate or file size. Based on analysis of the image or video using a perceptual quality measure we have developed, we adaptively set the encoding parameters for each image or video. So the amount of compression for each image or video clip is different, and depends on the content and original quality of that image. Comparing the quality of a clip encoded in Beamr Video with the quality of the same clip encoded at the same bitrate using another encoder is meaningless, since part of the uniqueness of Beamr Video is "knowing" what is the right bitrate (actually the lowest bitrate possible) for encoding each video such that it stays perceptually identical to the original clip. Beamr Video is the only technology that can adaptively reduce the bitrate of any clip to the minimum amount possible, while ensuring that quality of the output clip is perceptually identical to the quality of the input clip. The same is true for our image technology: We reduce each JPEG file to the minimum file size possible without affecting its original quality. Of course, you can take a specific file and tune a regular JPEG encoder to reach the same size on that specific file. And you can also manually tune the quality for each image using a regular JPEG encoder by viewing the photo before and after compression. But there is no other technology that can take millions of photos and automatically adapt the size of each one to the minimum possible size while preserving quality. The clips on our website are an initial demo of Beamr Video we are offering today, based on Blu-Ray sources. In a few weeks we will launch a cloud-based Beamr Video encoding service, where everyone will be able to process their own clips and reach their own conclusions. There are free trial versions of JPEGmini available for anyone to download and try. So again, I don't understand the basis of your "Snake Oil" claim. I would be happy to continue this discussion with you privately if you like, you can email me at dror@beamr.com.
jcromartie 14y ago
A company called RayStream tried to pull something like this a while back. Maybe Beamr actually has a proprietary video compression algorithm... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3211630 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3211630
antonb2011 14y ago
A lot of these companies, like Beamr, with extraordinarily technological claims tend to be preparations for stock pump and dump schemes. Usually their parent company will eventually be listed on: http://stockpromoters.com/ http://stockpromoters.com/ Tim Sykes talks a lot about this stuff on his website.
chebert 14y ago
At first I was all, "oh man -- another small company trying to rip me off." Then I was all, "oh man -- this actually seems like a pretty cool product" I actually hate choosing compression settings, so for a piece of software to choose compression settings for me seems really nice. Up to 4x -- so what if it is "over the top"? That's advertising. You present your best results. You pick the stuff that sounds the best. Why? Because people are usually too ignorant (not necessarily a bad thing) to know what is good for them. Anyway. Props to you guys (drorgil) for making a good product and standing by it.
- alexdowad 14y ago
  "I hate choosing compression settings" -- but you don't have to. Diaz has shown in this thread, that a free, open-source encoder can automatically choose settings for you which work better than Beamr's.
hakaaaaak 14y ago
It's too bad that more SaaS apps aren't held to the same level of scrutiny. Most stuff on HN is snakeoil.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  Are there any particular examples that come to mind?
  - hakaaaaak 14y ago
    Whenever you go to a site and it promises something, you have to give it your email address to possibly get access to a beta later, and then it either never appears, doesn't live up to the hype, or pivots and becomes something you're not interested in. Or, how about something that promises it will be around forever, and doesn't. I won't name names.
photorized 14y ago
May I just say I love threads like this. VCs should read these discussions.
pudquick 14y ago
TL;D(id)R version: Beamr isn't claiming a superior encoder. They're claiming to provide a service for video compression that is similar to what the tools like optipng and jpegoptim do for images: recompression without (noticeable) loss. Their big claim to fame, however, is that they determine the "minimum" bitrate for your video to still look good. So, in theory, if I feed back in the compressed video they give me - Beamr should refuse to optimize it further because it should be as perfectly compressed as possible. Someone please do this test. Then, more importantly, redo the test but modify those option strings embedded in the video (as mentioned in OP) so that it can't cheat and detect a "perfect" video by noticing its own proprietary app name or a previously seen checksum of the file. I'd love to see the results. If it can't detect perfection, letting the user recompress video over and over again until it slides into digital blocks of moving mush, then there really is no difference between this service and using a CRF of 18.5 as mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
- glomph 14y ago
  In this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5290308 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5290308 he seems to claim both that beamr it can compress any file and that it is a downfall of x264 that it would continue to compress a file when reapplied. Weird.
  - pudquick 14y ago
    Yeah, this response is partly why I suggested that testing protocol.
- Daiz 14y ago
  >Beamr isn't claiming a superior encoder. Their sure make it sound like it in their marketing material. Hell, they've even gotten articles written about them that start like this[0]: New technology from video encoding experts Beamr claims to be able to out-perform the new H.265 format by merely encoding H.264 better. Their video optimisation apparently reduces the bitrate of video streams by up to four times, while retaining their resolution, quality, and - most importantly - their industry-standard H.264 format. It works on all frame-sizes up to and including 4K All the writing out there pretty much implies that thanks to Beamr Video's new technology, H.264 suddenly compresses up to four times better. Which is obviously not the case. No site is talking about "how most videos have 'too much' bitrate and how Beamr Video can select a much lower bitrate that is enough for the video to still look good", because that would be much more along the lines of what they're actually trying to do. Anyway, there's something else that came to my mind from the discussion in this thread. Check out this section from a PR piece of theirs[1]: >Online streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon and iTunes typically encode full HD (1080p) streams at 5-6 Megabits per second (Mbps). Utilizing Beamr Video optimization can reduce the required bitrate for full HD streaming to around 3-4 Mbps, enabling smoother playback, support for customers with lower broadband connectivity, and significant delivery cost savings to the streaming service providers. Let's stop and think about this for a moment. As we have learned today: * Beamr Video is not going to offer any kind of quality / filesize control in their service. Not even any kind of upper or lower bounds. * Beamr Video is intended for re-encoding existing lossy video. * Re-encoding from lossy to lossy is always going to introduce generation loss to some degree. Combine these two facts, and you'll realize that for content providers like Netflix, Amazon and iTunes, this service is completely and utterly useless. When you're doing online streaming, bitrate matters. These services should all be encoding their video streams from very high quality sources (higher than what can be found on Blu-rays). If they ran these sources through Beamr, they'd only get a single video out of it, most likely at a bitrate far larger than what they're willing to stream (as demonstrated on Beamr's page, Blu-ray sources are enough to make for 9-30 Mbps streams on average, while, as the quoted section mentions, streaming services usually offer 1080p video around 5-6 Mbps). Thus, it rules Beamr out for this kind of straight encoding from high quality sources for online streaming use cases. Now, they could encode all their streams like usuals, in different resolutions and bitrates, and then run these streams through Beamr, but does that make any damn sense? No, it does not. As I've proven, at the same bitrate, Beamr offers nothing over x264, so if any legitimate service wanted to offer their videos at smaller bitrates, they could just encode their videos straight to those bitrates from the high quality sources. Or, in case of something like Netflix that already encodes videos to several different bitrates, they could simply drop the higher-end streams. Not to mention that re-encoding with Beamr could potentially make the streaming experience worse due to the fact that Beamr does not seem to set any VBV options[2] for their encodes. It's also the same situation with any digital video download services: If they wanted to offer lower-bitrate content, they could just encode the content directly to said lower bitrates. And since any legit digital video downloads are DRM'd up the bum (man, why must the legitimate digital video download market suck so much?), you, as an user, would not be able to make the video smaller through Beamr either. So I guess the big question is: What actual use cases does this service have? Re-encoding Blu-ray sources isn't really that feasible for end users either, since what kind of user would have the patience to upload several dozens of gigabytes to Beamr with a regular consumer internet connection (unless they have Google Fiber or something)? I guess ultimately this leaves us with regular users wanting to compress their videos taken with mobile phones or something, but if they for example want to put these videos up on YouTube, then there's really no reason for them to upload the full-sized original video to Beamr, wait for them to re-encode it, download it, and then upload that to YouTube, which is going to re-encode it again, when they could simply upload the original full-sized video straight to YouTube and have it be re-encoded only once. [0] http://www.redsharknews.com/distribution/item/455-beamr-claims-up-to-75-reduction-in-h-264-bitrates-and-works-with-4k http://www.redsharknews.com/distribution/item/455-beamr-clai... [1] http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/beamr-unveils-breakthrough-video-delivery-technology-with-unprecedented-75-percent-bitrate-reduction-190832551.html http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/beamr-unveils-breakt... [2] http://mewiki.project357.com/wiki/X264_Encoding_Suggestions#VBV_Encoding http://mewiki.project357.com/wiki/X264_Encoding_Suggestions#...
midvar 14y ago
It's good to see a response from Beamr staff. Perhaps rhetorical but.... How do you feel licensing an amazing open source tool, adding a few patches you feel needed for perceptual quality in crf encodes, and then calling it your own product? Even a "patent pending" product? You've done one small bit of coding, building upon the _years_ of work that open source devs have done. You present this minorly tweaked x264 as a revolution in online video and allude that it's all your work. No reference to x264 at all on your site, which I guess is your right having paid the license fee. Still not impressive for anyone looking at your product, how it works, or wondering about the toolchain involved. How about submitting some patches and pull requests to the tool that makes your product possible? Oh wait, that's right, you'll take that product that's 99% not your work and make as much money as you can. Are you gonna approach all the big sites using x264 and try to convince them to change to beamr? No, I didn't think so. Snake Oil semantics for the uninformed. As a wonderful T-Shirt I saw once states " My free software runs your company ". UPDATE Actually I've thought long and hard about this. They might not be so blameworthy or snake oily, they might just be using FAR too broad of explanations for what they've done. We've all jumped on them because it was almost like they've said they created a new encoder. The possibility I didn't really think of is that they have coded their own proprietary solution that, as the media put it loosely in the original piece posted here : "According to the company, the compression method mimics the human eye and removes elements that would not have been processed by the human eye in the first place." [1] Now I don't know if their solution; #1 Directly changes/effects the x264 source code, or #2 is something that runs before encoding and simply determines x264 settings to be used. Or even a mixture of both. #1 If the changes are to x264 itself, I shake my head and my fist at them and again point to the years of open free development done in x264. (Most notable in this case it's amazing psy optimizations which do exactly what this company is claiming to have advanced ... it adjusts quality internally for the human eyes perception instead of metrics like PSNR and SSIM.) Submit a patch! #2 If their software is completely separate and determines x264 settings via their proprietary methods, then what they've done is not so ridiculous. They've done a confusing job explaining things, but I can imagine at least one scenario: ----- A user uploads a home video to their servers. Their software scans it and takes careful note of scenes with high levels of movement, scenes with human shapes moving, scenes with human faces, scene's that match algorithms for water, grass, natural environs etc etc They then parse those notes and either set x264's many advanced settings globally, or perhaps even change each scene's x264 settings accordingly. --- Who knows.... It's been interesting following this nonetheless, [1] http://nocamels.com/2013/02/beamr-can-cut-video-file-size-by-half-without-losing-quality/ http://nocamels.com/2013/02/beamr-can-cut-video-file-size-by...
yarou 14y ago
It's highly ironic that Daiz is commenting on other encoders, when his encodes tend to be bloated. :)
wyck 14y ago
This reminds me of the hey days or porn, remember when it was powering innovation? Anyway there were Snake Oil video's salesmen all over the place, wrapping windows media and real play encoders into 6 figure custom super amazing but actually nothing special systems. And people did buy them.
beagle3 14y ago
The important underlying issue that some people take for granted, and some are completely unaware of: Most h264 encoders suck. If you take an h264 recording from your camcorder / phone / ip camera / blu ray rip, and push it through x264 (and no special configuration), you usually get 30% bit rate reduction with no loss of quality. With tweaking, you very often get 50%-75% bit rate reduction with no loss of quality, but you have to actually tweak. (e.g., I'm getting ~65% bit rate reduction on h264 streams coming out of Axis IP cameras by running through x264 with -tune slow ant no other change). Beamr's claim to fame appears to be that they automate this tweaking. Diaz' claim seems to be that "--crf 18.5" is a tweak that can consistently deliver better bitrate reduction than Beamr. My opinion: If you can use the x264 commandline, Beamer is probably overpriced for you. But if you're a professional photographer with no serious computer skills, Beamr might be useful for you. (Assuming they actually deliver something better than --crf 18.5 ; a claim of which I have no knowledge, but I will assume for the sake of argument)
rb2k_ 14y ago
If anybody is interested to read up on the rate control algorithms that x264 provides (and what this seems to be mostly about): http://git.videolan.org/?p=x264.git;a=blob_plain;f=doc/ratecontrol.txt;hb=HEAD http://git.videolan.org/?p=x264.git;a=blob_plain;f=doc/ratec... There is a also an interesting thread related to CRF on the doom9 forums: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=116773 http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=116773

245 points by Daiz 14y ago

For similar benchmark fallacies (and straight up scams) discussed previously, see "A web video company that is most likely a hoax" - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3211630 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3211630 http://seekingalpha.com/article/316946-raystream-remains-under-scrutiny-even-fails-to-disclose-loss-of-one-alleged-customer http://seekingalpha.com/article/316946-raystream-remains-und...

messel 14y ago

No doubt. Still looking forward to wider acceptance of h265 which has real gains in quality/bit

metajack 14y ago

At least it is not as bad as Pixelon: http://web.archive.org/web/20000711031951/http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,16368,00.html http://web.archive.org/web/20000711031951/http://www.thestan...

Bustard 14y ago
It could be. We don't know that yet...

wmf 14y ago

ICVT actually developed some interesting algorithms, but it's a shame they're letting marketing hyperbole overshadow it. Another case where technical innovation doesn't sell, I guess.

Daiz 14y ago
Even if they had actually developed some "interesting algorithms", they sure don't seem to be using them, at least not in the actual video encoding process. There's really no other explanation for the fact that you can end up with practically identical video to Beamr's examples when using largely identical settings and bitrate with vanilla x264.
- LocalPCGuy 14y ago
  There actually is an argument that if they can do as good a job as a manual encoding but automate the process, that is valuable, even if the encoding process is the same as the manual process. If you had thousands of videos to encode, they all probably wouldn't be optimally encoded at the exact same settings, and automating that task could save a significant amount of time.
  - bjornsing 14y ago
    Yea, but what Daiz proves in the OP is that he personally can do a better job than this so-called "algorithm". I hear his next project will be proving the worthlessness of spell checkers by simply beating them, at spelling. That paper clip thing in Word is such Snake Oil! ;) For the record I have nothing to do with this Beamr, but I do feel sorry for the those guys. The marketing speak on their website may be a little hyperbole, but there's nothing fraudulent there that I can see. I don't think they deserve this treatment. UPDATE: LocalPCGuy, sorry for posting this as a reply to your comment. You obviously get it.
    - DrJosiah 14y ago
      Actually, no. What Diaz showed is that Beamr is offering nothing that actually improves either visual quality or bitrate; every setting that their method uses actually reduces quality compared to default x264 settings.
      - bjornsing 14y ago
        > What Diaz showed is that Beamr is offering nothing that actually improves either visual quality or bitrate Well too bad Beamr never made that claim (AFAIK). What Beamr does claim is that their software can automatically find settings (per frame) that will compress a certain video file to it's smallest size without affecting quality (too much - in some subjective measure). I'm not saying that Beamr is great. I have no idea, I've never used it. But what I can say for sure is that Daiz has not made a fair evaluation of the technology in the OP.

haven 14y ago

The folks behind Beamr H.264 also have a 'patent pending', proprietary JPEG image "recompression technology": http://www.jpegmini.com/ http://www.jpegmini.com/ I'm curious what an analysis of one of their JPEG's would show?

dangrossman 14y ago
The files in the before/after preview slider are exactly the same file size when they're supposed to be showing how their compressed image looks as good as the original. They're also not the same files you get when you click the download button.
- drorgill 14y ago
  Those are just preview files used for fast page load, but they are based on resized versions of the original and the JPEGmini version. You are welcome to download the original and JPEGmini full resolution files, and compare them at "Actual Size" (100% zoom).
  - nwh 14y ago
    If you get two large images and resize them down to a small preview, they'll look the same. It's really complete bullshit showing those as "examples".
  - lwat 14y ago
    I downloaded the pic of the dog, opened the 'Original' in Paint.net, re-saved it at the same filesize as the JPEGmini version and it's indistinguishable from the other two versions. JPEGmini doesn't seem to do anything that I can't already do in any image editor. Looks like snake oil to me.
    - drorgill 14y ago
      Note my previous reply on this issue: JPEGmini adaptively encodes each JPEG file to the minimum file size possible without affecting its original quality (the output size is of course different for each input file). You can take a specific file and tune a regular JPEG encoder to reach the same size as JPEGmini did on that specific file. And you can also manually tune the quality for each image using a regular JPEG encoder by viewing the photo before and after compression. But there is no other technology that can do this automatically (and adaptively) for millions of photos.

alpb 14y ago

I'm not a native speaker and thus not good at phrases. Can anybody explain the "snake oil" please?

ars 14y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil Basically a fake remedy that actually does nothing.
WillyF 14y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil
lem72 14y ago
Snake oil is an expression that originally referred to fraudulent health products or unproven medicine but has come to refer to any product with questionable or unverifiable quality or benefit. By extension, a snake oil salesman is someone who knowingly sells fraudulent goods or who is himself or herself a fraud, quack, charlatan, and the like.
- rdl 14y ago
  The irony is that the original "snake oils" actually were effective, just mislabeled (contained no actual snakes). "Snake oil" as used today in tech is the opposite -- accurately labeled, but ineffective.
  - SwellJoe 14y ago
    "were effective" for what purpose? And do you have a source for that?
    - rdl 14y ago
      http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=snake-oil-salesmen-knew-something http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=snake-oil-s... real Chinese snake oil was essentially some kind of omega-3 rich thing for topical application. And, from the wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil "snake oil" as sold in the US was essentially capsaicin, which is used today, both as a topical treatment and others, for a variety of muscle/bone/tissue ailments. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsaicin#Medical http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsaicin#Medical Whereas snake oil in cryptography tends to be worse. In practice even snake oil algorithms are probably enough protection for short-term, limited use (no one is going to devote real cryptanalysis resources to high school notes), but it can encourage people to have a false sense of security and do things they wouldn't otherwise, or it ends up getting used for purposes not originally intended.

niggler 14y ago

They explicitly state "The technology works in the domain of standard H.264 video, resulting in video streams that are fully compatible with any media player or consumer device." Assuming H.264 compatibility, what techniques could be applied to compressing videos?

Daiz 14y ago
A video standard essentially defines a set of methods for compressing video - it's up to the encoding applications to decide how to apply those methods and where. Basically, the smarter decisions the encoder can make, the higher quality results it will produce. This is why all H.264 encoders are not created equal. As an example of "techniques" that can be applied to compressing videos, one of the reasons why x264 is considered the best H.264 encoder out there is due to its advanced psychovisual optimizations - these are basically methods that will increase the perceived visual quality for human viewers, but decreases the quality in the eyes of metrics like PSNR and SSIM.
calinet6 14y ago
The techniques that could be applied in the domain of standard H.264 video are called "H.264."
Hello71 14y ago
> Assuming JavaScript compatibility, what techniques could be applied to minifying code?
- niggler 14y ago
  You can minify code ensuring absolute correctness or make substitutions that are almost always correct. For example, there are some cases where you could replace tests like `x===y` with `x==y` but this may not work in all cases. If you accept imperfect translation, then this is a valid technique, but it should be clear that the translation isn't perfect. The reason why my question is different is because I'm asking about the constraints on the format. For example, is run-length encoding (RLE) acceptable? That wouldn't be acceptable for a .BMP bitmap

Xcelerate 14y ago

I've found that most claims of extreme video or image compression don't hold up under scrutiny. There's just too much research that has to go into it and so many tradeoffs to consider. However, I know of one program that does in fact meet its claims: DLI Image Compression (https://sites.google.com/site/dlimagecomp/ https://sites.google.com/site/dlimagecomp/) It only compresses images, and it is extremely slow at it too. But apparently it's better than anything out there. Dark Shikari (x264 developer) says [1]: > I’ve seen that one before; iirc, last I tested it, it was competitive with x264 and even beat it significantly at times. Given that it was adapted for insanely high compression times, of course, this is not very surprising. Still rather impressive. [1] http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/541 http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/541

drorgill 14y ago

Daiz hello, this is Dror from Beamr. The technologies we have developed, JPEGmini and Beamr Video, are definitely not "Snake Oil", and I don't think it would be good practice to make such claims regarding any company's technology without checking the facts first and asking for the company's response before posting. Our technologies for image and video compression have received excellent reviews in the media, and have been tested and proven by industry experts. You can find the reviews online, and I would be happy to send you the quotes we got from the industry experts as well. Thousands of users are using our free online photo optimization service at JPEGmini.com daily, and thousands more have purchased JPEGmini for Mac to optimize images locally, and they are all very happy with these tools. The important thing regarding our technologies, and the main point you have missed in your analysis, is that they are used for automatic image optimization to the lowest bitrate or file size possible, and not for encoding an image or video to a specific bitrate or file size. Based on analysis of the image or video using a perceptual quality measure we have developed, we adaptively set the encoding parameters for each image or video. So the amount of compression for each image or video clip is different, and depends on the content and original quality of that image. Comparing the quality of a clip encoded in Beamr Video with the quality of the same clip encoded at the same bitrate using another encoder is meaningless, since part of the uniqueness of Beamr Video is "knowing" what is the right bitrate (actually the lowest bitrate possible) for encoding each video such that it stays perceptually identical to the original clip. Beamr Video is the only technology that can adaptively reduce the bitrate of any clip to the minimum amount possible, while ensuring that quality of the output clip is perceptually identical to the quality of the input clip. The same is true for our image technology: We reduce each JPEG file to the minimum file size possible without affecting its original quality. Of course, you can take a specific file and tune a regular JPEG encoder to reach the same size on that specific file. And you can also manually tune the quality for each image using a regular JPEG encoder by viewing the photo before and after compression. But there is no other technology that can take millions of photos and automatically adapt the size of each one to the minimum possible size while preserving quality. The clips on our website are an initial demo of Beamr Video we are offering today, based on Blu-Ray sources. In a few weeks we will launch a cloud-based Beamr Video encoding service, where everyone will be able to process their own clips and reach their own conclusions. There are free trial versions of JPEGmini available for anyone to download and try. So again, I don't understand the basis of your "Snake Oil" claim. I would be happy to continue this discussion with you privately if you like, you can email me at dror@beamr.com.

jcromartie 14y ago

A company called RayStream tried to pull something like this a while back. Maybe Beamr actually has a proprietary video compression algorithm... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3211630 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3211630

antonb2011 14y ago

A lot of these companies, like Beamr, with extraordinarily technological claims tend to be preparations for stock pump and dump schemes. Usually their parent company will eventually be listed on: http://stockpromoters.com/ http://stockpromoters.com/ Tim Sykes talks a lot about this stuff on his website.

chebert 14y ago

At first I was all, "oh man -- another small company trying to rip me off." Then I was all, "oh man -- this actually seems like a pretty cool product" I actually hate choosing compression settings, so for a piece of software to choose compression settings for me seems really nice. Up to 4x -- so what if it is "over the top"? That's advertising. You present your best results. You pick the stuff that sounds the best. Why? Because people are usually too ignorant (not necessarily a bad thing) to know what is good for them. Anyway. Props to you guys (drorgil) for making a good product and standing by it.

alexdowad 14y ago
"I hate choosing compression settings" -- but you don't have to. Diaz has shown in this thread, that a free, open-source encoder can automatically choose settings for you which work better than Beamr's.

hakaaaaak 14y ago

It's too bad that more SaaS apps aren't held to the same level of scrutiny. Most stuff on HN is snakeoil.

jlgreco 14y ago
Are there any particular examples that come to mind?
- hakaaaaak 14y ago
  Whenever you go to a site and it promises something, you have to give it your email address to possibly get access to a beta later, and then it either never appears, doesn't live up to the hype, or pivots and becomes something you're not interested in. Or, how about something that promises it will be around forever, and doesn't. I won't name names.

photorized 14y ago

May I just say I love threads like this. VCs should read these discussions.

pudquick 14y ago

TL;D(id)R version: Beamr isn't claiming a superior encoder. They're claiming to provide a service for video compression that is similar to what the tools like optipng and jpegoptim do for images: recompression without (noticeable) loss. Their big claim to fame, however, is that they determine the "minimum" bitrate for your video to still look good. So, in theory, if I feed back in the compressed video they give me - Beamr should refuse to optimize it further because it should be as perfectly compressed as possible. Someone please do this test. Then, more importantly, redo the test but modify those option strings embedded in the video (as mentioned in OP) so that it can't cheat and detect a "perfect" video by noticing its own proprietary app name or a previously seen checksum of the file. I'd love to see the results. If it can't detect perfection, letting the user recompress video over and over again until it slides into digital blocks of moving mush, then there really is no difference between this service and using a CRF of 18.5 as mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

glomph 14y ago
In this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5290308 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5290308 he seems to claim both that beamr it can compress any file and that it is a downfall of x264 that it would continue to compress a file when reapplied. Weird.
- pudquick 14y ago
  Yeah, this response is partly why I suggested that testing protocol.
Daiz 14y ago
>Beamr isn't claiming a superior encoder. Their sure make it sound like it in their marketing material. Hell, they've even gotten articles written about them that start like this[0]: New technology from video encoding experts Beamr claims to be able to out-perform the new H.265 format by merely encoding H.264 better. Their video optimisation apparently reduces the bitrate of video streams by up to four times, while retaining their resolution, quality, and - most importantly - their industry-standard H.264 format. It works on all frame-sizes up to and including 4K All the writing out there pretty much implies that thanks to Beamr Video's new technology, H.264 suddenly compresses up to four times better. Which is obviously not the case. No site is talking about "how most videos have 'too much' bitrate and how Beamr Video can select a much lower bitrate that is enough for the video to still look good", because that would be much more along the lines of what they're actually trying to do. Anyway, there's something else that came to my mind from the discussion in this thread. Check out this section from a PR piece of theirs[1]: >Online streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon and iTunes typically encode full HD (1080p) streams at 5-6 Megabits per second (Mbps). Utilizing Beamr Video optimization can reduce the required bitrate for full HD streaming to around 3-4 Mbps, enabling smoother playback, support for customers with lower broadband connectivity, and significant delivery cost savings to the streaming service providers. Let's stop and think about this for a moment. As we have learned today: * Beamr Video is not going to offer any kind of quality / filesize control in their service. Not even any kind of upper or lower bounds. * Beamr Video is intended for re-encoding existing lossy video. * Re-encoding from lossy to lossy is always going to introduce generation loss to some degree. Combine these two facts, and you'll realize that for content providers like Netflix, Amazon and iTunes, this service is completely and utterly useless. When you're doing online streaming, bitrate matters. These services should all be encoding their video streams from very high quality sources (higher than what can be found on Blu-rays). If they ran these sources through Beamr, they'd only get a single video out of it, most likely at a bitrate far larger than what they're willing to stream (as demonstrated on Beamr's page, Blu-ray sources are enough to make for 9-30 Mbps streams on average, while, as the quoted section mentions, streaming services usually offer 1080p video around 5-6 Mbps). Thus, it rules Beamr out for this kind of straight encoding from high quality sources for online streaming use cases. Now, they could encode all their streams like usuals, in different resolutions and bitrates, and then run these streams through Beamr, but does that make any damn sense? No, it does not. As I've proven, at the same bitrate, Beamr offers nothing over x264, so if any legitimate service wanted to offer their videos at smaller bitrates, they could just encode their videos straight to those bitrates from the high quality sources. Or, in case of something like Netflix that already encodes videos to several different bitrates, they could simply drop the higher-end streams. Not to mention that re-encoding with Beamr could potentially make the streaming experience worse due to the fact that Beamr does not seem to set any VBV options[2] for their encodes. It's also the same situation with any digital video download services: If they wanted to offer lower-bitrate content, they could just encode the content directly to said lower bitrates. And since any legit digital video downloads are DRM'd up the bum (man, why must the legitimate digital video download market suck so much?), you, as an user, would not be able to make the video smaller through Beamr either. So I guess the big question is: What actual use cases does this service have? Re-encoding Blu-ray sources isn't really that feasible for end users either, since what kind of user would have the patience to upload several dozens of gigabytes to Beamr with a regular consumer internet connection (unless they have Google Fiber or something)? I guess ultimately this leaves us with regular users wanting to compress their videos taken with mobile phones or something, but if they for example want to put these videos up on YouTube, then there's really no reason for them to upload the full-sized original video to Beamr, wait for them to re-encode it, download it, and then upload that to YouTube, which is going to re-encode it again, when they could simply upload the original full-sized video straight to YouTube and have it be re-encoded only once. [0] http://www.redsharknews.com/distribution/item/455-beamr-claims-up-to-75-reduction-in-h-264-bitrates-and-works-with-4k http://www.redsharknews.com/distribution/item/455-beamr-clai... [1] http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/beamr-unveils-breakthrough-video-delivery-technology-with-unprecedented-75-percent-bitrate-reduction-190832551.html http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/beamr-unveils-breakt... [2] http://mewiki.project357.com/wiki/X264_Encoding_Suggestions#VBV_Encoding http://mewiki.project357.com/wiki/X264_Encoding_Suggestions#...

midvar 14y ago

It's good to see a response from Beamr staff. Perhaps rhetorical but.... How do you feel licensing an amazing open source tool, adding a few patches you feel needed for perceptual quality in crf encodes, and then calling it your own product? Even a "patent pending" product? You've done one small bit of coding, building upon the _years_ of work that open source devs have done. You present this minorly tweaked x264 as a revolution in online video and allude that it's all your work. No reference to x264 at all on your site, which I guess is your right having paid the license fee. Still not impressive for anyone looking at your product, how it works, or wondering about the toolchain involved. How about submitting some patches and pull requests to the tool that makes your product possible? Oh wait, that's right, you'll take that product that's 99% not your work and make as much money as you can. Are you gonna approach all the big sites using x264 and try to convince them to change to beamr? No, I didn't think so. Snake Oil semantics for the uninformed. As a wonderful T-Shirt I saw once states " My free software runs your company ". UPDATE Actually I've thought long and hard about this. They might not be so blameworthy or snake oily, they might just be using FAR too broad of explanations for what they've done. We've all jumped on them because it was almost like they've said they created a new encoder. The possibility I didn't really think of is that they have coded their own proprietary solution that, as the media put it loosely in the original piece posted here : "According to the company, the compression method mimics the human eye and removes elements that would not have been processed by the human eye in the first place." [1] Now I don't know if their solution; #1 Directly changes/effects the x264 source code, or #2 is something that runs before encoding and simply determines x264 settings to be used. Or even a mixture of both. #1 If the changes are to x264 itself, I shake my head and my fist at them and again point to the years of open free development done in x264. (Most notable in this case it's amazing psy optimizations which do exactly what this company is claiming to have advanced ... it adjusts quality internally for the human eyes perception instead of metrics like PSNR and SSIM.) Submit a patch! #2 If their software is completely separate and determines x264 settings via their proprietary methods, then what they've done is not so ridiculous. They've done a confusing job explaining things, but I can imagine at least one scenario: ----- A user uploads a home video to their servers. Their software scans it and takes careful note of scenes with high levels of movement, scenes with human shapes moving, scenes with human faces, scene's that match algorithms for water, grass, natural environs etc etc They then parse those notes and either set x264's many advanced settings globally, or perhaps even change each scene's x264 settings accordingly. --- Who knows.... It's been interesting following this nonetheless, [1] http://nocamels.com/2013/02/beamr-can-cut-video-file-size-by-half-without-losing-quality/ http://nocamels.com/2013/02/beamr-can-cut-video-file-size-by...

yarou 14y ago

It's highly ironic that Daiz is commenting on other encoders, when his encodes tend to be bloated. :)

wyck 14y ago

This reminds me of the hey days or porn, remember when it was powering innovation? Anyway there were Snake Oil video's salesmen all over the place, wrapping windows media and real play encoders into 6 figure custom super amazing but actually nothing special systems. And people did buy them.

beagle3 14y ago

The important underlying issue that some people take for granted, and some are completely unaware of: Most h264 encoders suck. If you take an h264 recording from your camcorder / phone / ip camera / blu ray rip, and push it through x264 (and no special configuration), you usually get 30% bit rate reduction with no loss of quality. With tweaking, you very often get 50%-75% bit rate reduction with no loss of quality, but you have to actually tweak. (e.g., I'm getting ~65% bit rate reduction on h264 streams coming out of Axis IP cameras by running through x264 with -tune slow ant no other change). Beamr's claim to fame appears to be that they automate this tweaking. Diaz' claim seems to be that "--crf 18.5" is a tweak that can consistently deliver better bitrate reduction than Beamr. My opinion: If you can use the x264 commandline, Beamer is probably overpriced for you. But if you're a professional photographer with no serious computer skills, Beamr might be useful for you. (Assuming they actually deliver something better than --crf 18.5 ; a claim of which I have no knowledge, but I will assume for the sake of argument)

rb2k_ 14y ago

If anybody is interested to read up on the rate control algorithms that x264 provides (and what this seems to be mostly about): http://git.videolan.org/?p=x264.git;a=blob_plain;f=doc/ratecontrol.txt;hb=HEAD http://git.videolan.org/?p=x264.git;a=blob_plain;f=doc/ratec... There is a also an interesting thread related to CRF on the doom9 forums: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=116773 http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=116773