Between 1989 and 1995 I wrote for some tech magazines. I was a columnist for Byte and Computer Language, and did product reviews on programming tools. During the hey-day of computer magazines, some of these trade pubs grew thick with glossy advertising. Today, almost none of those magazines survive in any recognizable form. They have been made obsolete by the internet.

As I write this, the Digigami servers are being pounded by requests to look at our MPEG-2 HD VBR streams. So is there interest in MPEG-2 for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray? I think the facts speak for themselves.

I wandered over to the h.264 beesnest at Doom9.org and got my ass whooped around a bit. They proved to me that the best H.264 encoders can really crank down those file sizes. While I was doing that, I got a private email from someone who told me how to look for artifacts in H.264 files. They are quite different from MPEG-2 artifacts. So more to come on that later... But I will say that the '264 folks on doom9 are into proving points by duplicating results rather than just blah blah blah. They are more science/engineering oriented. Video compression is primarily an engineering and scientific domain. Taste is applied with respect to filtering and post-production techniques, and I believe that some types of people prefer certain artifacts to others.

If you look at our MPEG encoding tools you will see reflected back a much broader and informed approach to video compression. Knowledge. Control. Quantitative and visual feedback. I think our results speak for themselves. But be sure to audition our MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 files on a quality playback system, like VideoLAN. VideoLAN's cross-platform architecture tends to eliminate the disparity seen by different decoder implementations, some of which may be lackluster and not on par with what the future HD-DVD and Blu-Ray chipsets will be capable of. See you then. You can bet on it.