A man claims to store multiple movies on 64kb

[Webmaster]

From: Wilbert

Incredible story. It was on tv again, because someone published it in a book:

Eric Smit, adjunct-director at the business magazine Quote. (ISBN 90 5759 156 1). The book is called 'the sourcecode'.

It turns out that after he gave a demonstration to Roel Pieper (who was at that time in the board of directors of Philips (vice-president), and he would be the next president of Philips when Cor Boonstra would leave), Roel Pieper flew him several times to USA to all the big IT-guys and investors. But, not in the name of Philips, but for himself (at least that's what the book claims the evidence points to).

Moreover Pieper established a compagny (I think it's duch) called 'the Fifth Force Inc.', which still exists today, and already started on a business plan.

That time there were also some dutch investors that were willing to invest (50 million dollar by ABN-AMRO bank as a startfund, and others).

Two days before he would give his system to Pieper and Co, he died because of a heart attague (it is known he had heart problems, but strange no section was done). Strange thing is that his room is cleaned, and all the paperwork is gone (no idea whether the were traces of burglary). Btw, this sourcecode was not in a house, but somewhere in a safe (which nobody can find). In 2001, he doesn't work at Philips anymore, but I can't find the date when he left.

some other links (dutch):
http://www.parool.nl/nieuws/2004/SEP/06/eco2.html
http://www.gids.nl/techno/jan-sloot.html

[Webmaster]

From: Gircobain

Has anyone heard of the product?

To anyone who doubts that such amazing compression technique could ever be developed, well that's amazing too...

[Webmaster]

From: DigitAl56K

That's completely different.

It's one thing to have some code that can generate a movie, it's another thing entirely to be able to encode an arbitrary source.

The Produkt isn't compression at all. Ok, so it does probably contain many compression routines and is probably coded extremely efficiently, but all it is really doing is generating graphics/sound based on some code somebody has written to do just that. The amazing compression factor that was derived was based on the fact that "This movie is w minutes long and has x,y,z funky things going on, so if you worked out how much space it would take to store that instead of our 64kb of code that generates it, that's pretty awesome compression."

In the same vein, I could say that my favorite WinAMP VIS plugin has uber-better-than-anything-on-earth compression because it's been generating video for years yet the download was only 3MB!

I think if this "Jan Sloot" did ever really exist, then this whole "conspiracy" theory is completely wrong. My guess would be that if this story is true, then Jan Sloot is one of the best con artists in history - walking away with many millions of dollars after convincing some of the biggest businessmen in the industry that he had stumbled upon the impossible. And hey! With that kind of cash in his pocket, I bet he could have faked his own death and disappeared real easy...

[Webmaster]

From: Gircobain

Well, I didn't say it was the same thing nor was I even referring to video compression specifically
I meant that it is amazing what could be done with so few bytes - let's reckon, better than many games which take 1, 2 or more full cds
Imagination and creativity have no limits - there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy, already said Shakespeare

[Webmaster]

From: DigitAl56K

Yes, it is very impressive - I've seen some pretty neat stuff done with 256 bytes also. Or this one, which is only 201 bytes! (probably shorter than this post).

[Webmaster]

From: Phoenyx

Gircobain wrote:
Well, I didn't say it was the same thing nor was I even referring to video compression specifically
I meant that it is amazing what could be done with so few bytes - let's reckon, better than many games which take 1, 2 or more full cds
Imagination and creativity have no limits - there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy, already said Shakespeare

Shakespeare should have said "There are more things in Heaven and Earth than *can* be dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio." (extra word is mine and I accept the consequences )

[Webmaster]

From: Dani82

al capone's vault, the holy grail, the cure for AIDS (maybe), and now "sloot's code" all said to exist, but never proven or otherwise

[Webmaster]

From: Mug Funky

lol! you forgot about the Higg's boson behind the grassy knoll...

it's a nice story, and would make a good movie itself (though they should trim back the fantastic elements a bit if they want a market outside of Hollywood).

...but i don't think there's much in it apart from "wouldn't that be cool" factors.

perhaps it's an attempt by 3 1/2" diskette manufacturers to get back into the market

[Webmaster]

From: Doom9

I've heard this before.. I guess it's the urban legend of the video encoding biz. My memory is extremely hazy already, but what I recall from college is that given a certain amount of information, there's a theoretical limit to how much this can be compressed losslessly. Existing coding systems are obviously less efficient, but by that theorem, it's simply impossible to compress a movie to 64k (assuming you expect presentable quality).

[Webmaster]

From: Unmei

you forget the 64Kb are only the "key", the data is in the 370Mb.

How about a chaotic function with 370MB parameter data that takes let's say a few descriptors as initial contidion, maybe 16K position, 16K velocity, 16K acceleration, 16K a' (whats that called, curbation?).
The "video frame" at time t would then correspond to the position calculated for that time.
Anyway, construction for the parameter data as well as finding the start values to use to get a certain movie, i think, can be said to be impossible