

Show HN: Media Compression that actually means something - ceraes
http://cramcore.github.io/index.html

======
jsaxton86
Cram makes an extraordinary claim: "Cram is a state-of-the-art media
compressor that is able to significantly reduce (by more than 20%) the size of
audio, video, and images losslessly without the need to re-encode or convert."

Decades of research have gone into media compression algorithms, and they
claim to get a 20% improvement for free. I'm skeptical.

I don't run OSX, so I can't try out their binary, which they're distributing
via email only. I challenge the Cram team to losslessly reduce the size of
"The Simpsons Movie – 1080p Trailer" by 20%, available here:
[http://www.h264info.com/clips.html](http://www.h264info.com/clips.html)

~~~
ceraes
Hello jsaxton86, we love challenges! So we'll be starting here in a few
moments and post the results when we're done. Also, I'm sorry to hear you
can't try if for yourself, but we wanted to point out the compressor is
readily available from our site, it's only the decompressor we've been asked
to hold back at the request of an expert. We wanted to share our primary
concern with you. Simply put: Piracy.

We hope to be accepted into ycombinator for our innovation. In, as you rightly
pointed out, over coming 40 years of research to find answers that make us
proud to say we're the first.

Piracy of digital media is not something we cannot condone as a company. We
therefore have withheld our decompressor for that reason, and we'll still need
people to test it which is why we've requested they ask via email. That way we
can know, who has it and who does not. This helps us prevent our system from
being used for questionable, if not illegal, means.

We understand your skepticism and we hope to prove it to you with our results
of your test. We're very thankful their are people like you who will give us
the chance to prove ourselves and we hope you'll follow us and keep us to our
word, because that is what we believe makes innovators honest.

We'll have: Size of file to compress, size of "Crammed" file, file size ratio,
time to compress, memory usage during compression, and machine model & config
info posted for your trailer test soon!

~~~
ceraes
jsaxton86's Test Result's: Input File: Title: The Simpsons Movie - 1080p
Trailer.mp4 Kind: MPEG-4 movie Size: 147,399,359 bytes (147.4 MB on disk)
Video Dimensions: 1920 x 800 Codecs: H.264, AAC Duration: 02:17 Audio
Channels: 6 Output Cram: Title: The Simpsons Movie - 1080p Trailer.mp4.cram
Kind: Document Size: 113,620,340 bytes (113.6 MB on disk) Time to Cram File:
Seconds: 3313.306152 (55 Minutes ~13.3 Seconds) Memory Usage: GB (Rounded):
24.67 GB Hardware Overview: Model Name: iMac Model Identifier: iMac11,1
Processor Name: Intel Core i7 Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 4 L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB L3 Cache: 8 MB Memory: 16
GB Processor Interconnect Speed: 4.8 GT/s Boot ROM Version: IM111.0034.B02 SMC
Version (system): 1.54f36

We're really proud to try our best on your test jsaxton86, and we know that
test results from the person showing you something always come with a healthy
pinch of salt. So we'll ask the community to give it a try, and back us up
here. Scientific testing means repeatable parameters, so we urge others to
take his test too. (--EDIT: Turns out this file is too big 50MB in the limit
of Github push-- We're also making our Cram file available on github, check it
out with the decompressor or in a Hex editor:
[https://github.com/Cramcore/Crams](https://github.com/Cramcore/Crams))

From these results you can clearly see areas we aren't happy with either. Time
and memory, but this is just the beginning for us, we developed this system
because 4 decades of research hadn't yielded these results. Then we sat down
and threw out the book. With some notes on the research of Marcus Hutter
([http://prize.hutter1.net/](http://prize.hutter1.net/)) and Matt Mahoney
([http://mattmahoney.net/](http://mattmahoney.net/)) plus the input of
wonderful mentors and mathematical genius like Brad Feld
([http://www.feld.com/](http://www.feld.com/)) we started code for the Cram
project over 3 years and research another 2 before that. We're very grateful
for the opportunity we have now.

We encourage everyone to try if for themselves, request the decompressor and
try it too. But let humanity never believe that innovation is impossible. In
1966, the idea of a flip open communicator was science fiction, today we have
not only communicators in our pockets, but whole computers. At Cramtec we hope
our work can help move humanity to the next set of great technologies.

~~~
nextw33k
The Cram time is what piqued my interest, I assume that the decompression is
also not real time. Video formats are obviously designed with real time
playback in mind and processing constraints. Could you give the time to
decompress that file?

Not saying this is a bad thing in anyway. I believe you are right when you
mention piracy. For a torrent swarm this format would be ideal in the same way
that RAR was a decade or two ago.

I think the trend to a centralised streaming Internet is a bad one. A
decentralised P2P one is much more in keeping with the initial ideals of the
Internet. Download, decompress (for use) and share are a much more fitting if
they respected copyright at the same time.

Best of luck.

~~~
brandonsmits
Time is interesting. There's certainly no way you could stream videos like
this right now, but the mention of future multithreading and GPU support would
help minimize the time. You could support "cramming" by blocks of bytes rather
than a whole file and leave the beginning uncompressed so you could start a
stream and decompress the rest of the file with some lead time for the viewer.
Certainly, this is pushing the bounds of hardware as of right now, but in a
few years that'd be irrelevant anyway. They also pretty clear about it being a
beta, can't wait to see what it could do in future.

------
ceraes
Hey, Hacker News! Let's talk about video compression! With the Ycombinator
winter application date bearing down on us, Cramtec has announced a new
experimental beta build of the state-of-the-art media compressor named Cram.
Cram is able to significantly reduce (by more than 20%) the size of audio,
video, and images losslessly without the need to re-encode or convert. Cram
offers companies a drop in binary with the ability to significantly reduce
overhead and bandwidth for Data Distribution, Online Backup, and Media
Streaming. Head on over to the beta's github site (cramcore.github.io), click
the Resources tab, and grab yourself a copy of the beta binary to beat up on!
We plan to add a C version, multithreading, and powerful GPGPU computation in
the weeks and months to come. We can use everyone's feedback!

------
chewxy
And your weissman score is?

(yes I know that's a fictional thing.. I'm just surprised nobody's brought up
Pied Piper yet)

~~~
ceraes
Hahaha thanks for joining us chewxy. Funny story, when that show hit screens
in April I was very much interested in seeing it, but after the first episode
it became Cramtec's worst nightmare. Here's a fictional group of people doing
the same thing we've been trying to do for years, and suddenly we're competing
for mindshare versus something that doesn't have to create real world results.

Although, we're up against such a thing we like to laugh it off. Because at
the end of the day we have what we believe to be a very wonderful invention,
that could change the world.

If you're truly interested in the Weissman Score, I'm glad to crack open my
calculator and tally it up, but it won't be anything like their score. Time
and memory are factors, if I remember right. And we're looking to improve
those numbers.

Have you gotten to give it a try chewxy? We'd love some independent results
reported. jsaxton86 had a wonderful test and offered many more files which
we'll start testing tomorrow.

