
Highly Compressed Richard Hamming's Lectures - vackosar
http://vaclavkosar.com/2019/03/03/Highly-Compressed-Richard-Hamming-Lectures.html
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bangonkeyboard
These sound terrible. The lowest-quality audio from Youtube is about 10x the
size (which is still small), but at least it doesn't sound like a rescued wax
cylinder recording from the turn of last century.

I had hoped from the title that this would be a summarized or edited cut of
the salient points from these lectures. My limited resource these days is not
bandwidth or disk space, but time.

~~~
vackosar
I store these in an archive in my syncthing directory. I don't have to think
about running out of space on mobile or too much cost for the cellular
downlink.

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pacmansyyu
Thank you! these are very cool.

> you can save some bandwidth in exchange for recording quality by using high
> compression of Speex algo

how about using opus[0], the comparison chart[1] shows that opus is supposedly
significantly better even at a lower bitrate.

[0]: [https://www.opus-codec.org/](https://www.opus-codec.org/)

[1]: [https://www.opus-codec.org/comparison/](https://www.opus-
codec.org/comparison/)

~~~
vackosar
actually I encoded the files to 4kbps but opus goes only to 6kbps?

~~~
zamadatix
[http://www.rowetel.com/wordpress/?page_id=452](http://www.rowetel.com/wordpress/?page_id=452)
is a bit more exotic but should sound way better even though it caps out at
3.2 kbps.

~~~
vackosar
Impressive, the Codec 2 can go down to 0.7kbps!
[http://www.rowetel.com/downloads/codec2/hts1a_700c.wav](http://www.rowetel.com/downloads/codec2/hts1a_700c.wav)

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jplayer01
I really like the idea, but I find Speex distorts the audio way too much in a
way that makes it hard to understand afterwards. I'm willing to sacrifice as
much quality as I can as long as the speech remains easy to understand, but
after that, any space savings aren't worth it.

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jgalt212
I cannot recommend highly enough, You and Your Research. Great life and career
advice from a great man near the end of his life.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw)

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raister
Thank you for your service, sir.

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Luc
Why are people thanking the OP?

Cool how you CAN compress 47 minutes of audio down to 1.6MB if you're willing
to accept awful sound quality, sure. Why though? I mean, why thank the OP for
their service? I don't get it.

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ChrisRR
Because processing power,bandwidth, storage space, battery capacity are not
limitless resources. Computing power has been massively increased over the
last few decades and yet we don't often see the 1000x increase in performance
that we really should as developers have often squandered that performance.

The closer we get to pushing the limits of physics, while still expecting
computing to be faster, higher resolution, etc. We should commend any efforts
to make computing more efficient and less resource intensive.

~~~
Luc
Speex is cool technology from what I can tell, but it's not exactly designed
to run on a Commodore 64. E.g. it's used for the voice compression of commands
sent to Siri.

What it saves in bandwidth, it pays in processing power.

But anyway, that still doesn't explain why posting these files is so cool that
the post shot to the top of HN.

~~~
misterman0
>> that still doesn't explain why posting these files is so cool that the post
shot to the top of HN.

This article shot to the top because of at least three things:

1\. It was well written.

2\. It had to do with cool tech in a complicated problem space.

I only know those two.

