Pixels better than real life?

According to this survey by Motorola, Americans would rather watch the Superbowl on an HDTV than in person. “The survey results really speak to the popularity of high-definition programming,” said Doug Means from Motorola.

That's a lame study and a lame statement. The results of the survey don't say anything about the quality of HD video and how close it gets to being there. Yes, quite a few people would rather sit in their homes than take a plane and sit on a plastic seat for hours watching the game. Yes, a big screen TV presents a much better picture than an old Philco Predicta. But no, nothing compares to being there. And I can say that without having ever been to a superbowl game.

Pixel etymology

Did you know the word pixel is derived from "picture element"? Here's a long video that details a search for the history of the pixel, by Richard Lyon. Lots of well known names in the field of video and graphics are mentioned. To skip over the introduction go to 2:20.

Perfect pixel patent

As early as 1929, Ray Davis Kell described a form of video compression and was granted a patent for it. He wrote, "It has been customary in the past to transmit successive complete images of the transmitted picture. [...] In accordance with this invention, this difficulty is avoided by transmitting only the difference between successive images of the object." Although it would be many years before this technique would actually be used in practice, it is still a cornerstone of many video compression standards today. It's the reason why video using MPEG can be compressed roughly a factor of 10 better than JPEG-compressed still images.

What technique can provide another magnitude of improvement in video compression?

My prediction is that we need to change focus from optimizing for best peak signal to noise performance to optimizing for psycho-visual perception. I.e. "how good do the compressed images look" instead of looking at minimizing the mathematical difference between the original and compressed imagery.

Pixel resolution

The other day I ran across this very useful resolution chart at Wikipedia:

While not all resolutions I come across are listed (where are QCIF, 176x144, and CIF, 352x288, for instance) and the PAL resolution seems incorrect (they quote 768x576) this is still quite a nice diagram.

User-generated pixels

Ever heard of a show called Fun TV with Kato-chan and Ken-chan? Me neither. It was quite successful in Japan in the mid 1980s though and featured some of the first user-generated content. Later, ABC's America's Funniest Home Videos would follow the same recipe of showing slapstick movies that people captured at home with their camcorders. Fast forward to 2005, the year that YouTube was born based on the same principle, but on the internet. In 2007, less than two years later, YouTube was sold for $1.6 billion dollars to Google. Nowadays, over 9 billion videos are watched online per month in the US alone, and YouTube has about 30% of that market. That's quite a lot of user-generated pixels, and for sure a number that will keep on growing for quite some time to come.

One year ago: analog pixels switched off

It's been a year since they turned off all over-the-air analog broadcast of TV signals in the Netherlands. I haven't heard a complaint since. Only about 74,000 households picked up the analog signals before, so that was to be expected. The extra bandwidth that became available unfortunately are now used to transmit encoded signals, which you have to pay KPN a monthly fee for to view. In return for the free over the air bandwidth, KPN built and maintains the digital broadcasting masts and systems. Sounds like a pretty good trade for the KPN to me, and a lousy trade for the government and us tax payers. My guess is that it is this monthly fee that is severely reducing the market introduction of digital portable TV receivers for in the car, mobile phones, etc. Even in the home it'd be handy -- when was the last time you pulled a cable through your house?

Do any of you understand why we still have to pay for TV channels transmitted over the air while they contain more than 10 minutes of paid advertising per hour?

Discontinued pixels

In March of 1993 Jim Blinn, perhaps the ultimate pixel guru, wrote an article called "NTSC: Nice Technology, Super Color". It's a play on what people often say NTSC means: Never The Same Color. The last few sentences of the article read this: "Current plans call for the FCC to adopt a new high-definition television standard some time this year. The FCC will then strongly encourage all broadcasters to switch over to the new standard as soon as possible. By the year 2007, the FCC wants this conversion to HDTV to be complete. Broadcasters will no longer be allowed to use NTSC. Boo hoo.". Well, HD is happening, but NTSC is still alive and will be for quite some time to come.

What's your guess: when will Standard Definition truly die?

Open source pixels

The other day I noticed a menu option on the iPod Touch called "Legal". Normally, I avoid reading such legal notes, but this time I was curious to see what was mentioned here. Well, a lot was mentioned. It took me 76 "scroll-the-page-down" strokes to reach the bottom of the long list of legal speak. Most interesting fact; more than 3/4 of the notes were open source related! I saw the GPL come by several times for instance.

Anyone dare to estimate how much total effort it took to develop all the software shipped with the iPod Touch, including the effort put into the open source software? Are your SOCs and video subsystems ready to support open source software?

Shiny pixels at Qualcomm

CRT, LCD, TFT, OLED, EPD and DLP are just some of the many acronyms used for the techniques behind displays. There's an article in the November 2007 issue of Scientific American that presents a new acronym: IMOD. The IMOD displays are based on many small interferometric modulators, which bounce back light at different intensities. They don't need a backlight, which means power consumption is much lower, ever so important for portable applications. The viewing experience is also greatly enhanced I am sure. The electronic paper displays that I've seen don't use a back-light either and they're great. They read like paper. The e-ink pixels change intensities too slowly to show video though, while the IMOD technology is very fast. The whole technology reminds me of the, also MEMS-based, DLP from Texas Instruments. Within a few years, that technology quickly became prevalent in projectors, beating out LCD.

With better displays, video coding artefacts will only become more apparent. Is your video subsystem ready to capture and play the highest quality video?

Sluggy pixels

My brother is an artist. One of his friends made this low-resolution and very-low-frame-rate imaging device. It's called the PingPongPixel and displays one image every 2.5 hours. That's about 0.0001 frame per second. Hardly practical, but still pretty nifty. Each pixel is represented by a ping-pong ball, which come in 6 shades of gray.

Anybody know of a display device with an even lower refresh rate?