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Digital cinema: movie distribution

Published on March 4, 2006 in bandwidth and digital cinema. 3 Comments

I wrote about digital cinema earlier. I want to focus now on the distribution of movies to theatres.

FILESIZE OF A MOVIE

The movie’s video signal is compressed and encrypted into a bitrate of max 250 Mbps, which translates in 31.25 MB/second or 112.50 GB/hour footage. So a ‘short’ 90-minute movie is something like 170GB, and a 2h30 movie, with some audio thrown in, is more like 300 GB. The estimates from the DCI specification are even higher: around 140 GB per hour running length (video, audio and subtitles together) or around 38 MB/s.
movie storage requirements
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Broadband in Brussels

Published on February 17, 2006 in bandwidth, Belgium, Brussel and internet. 2 Comments

(post seems to have disappeared when I migrated to WordPress
I have what is proving to be an expensive habit: I’m subscribed to over 30 podcasts (including e.g. Diggnation at 300MB/week), I regularly download software to try out, I use BitTorrent on a regular basis, I buy stuff on iTunes. All that adds up to more than my allowance my ISP subscription gives me (20GB per month). Most of the months I pay an extra €8 per 10GB.

I’m a Coditel customer (cable provider in the part of Brussels where I live). I started out on ADSL until I got loads of technical problems and Belgacom/Skynet could not solve them. My current bandwidth is not bad (although not as fast as Telenet):

http://www.adslbox.be speed test results:
- Download speed : 4415 kbit/s or 552 kbyte/s
(in theory it should be 10.000 kbit/s)
- Upload speed : 233 kbit/s or 29 kbyte/s
Wed Feb 15 2006 at 20:59:42 UTC+0100

But now I want to know: do I have the best formula? So I collected some data. On vergelijking.be all the provider formulas are listed, but the list is not up-to-date. I collected all the latest numbers from the ISPs’ homepages. I got some real throughput statistics from adslbox.be and ispmonitor.be.

BROADBAND PRICES

Broadband in Belgium: sorted by price
The cheapest broadband one can get is Coditel LightClick: 22,90 € for 1 Mbps. The best price/speed you can get is Telenet ExpressnetTurbo (60€ for a theorethical 20Mbps and an actual throughput of about 11 Mbps). The one to avoid is Belgacom ADSL Light: 30 € for a meager 0,5 Mbps.

COST OF 50GB/MON

Now let’s see what happens if I would go to 50GB data transfer per month. Only 6 providers allow for this, either because their GB/mon allowance is big enough or because the price per extra GB is acceptable:
Broadband in Belgium: cost of 50GB/mon
Where I live, I cannot get BruTele or Chello, so the only options are Coditel (cable) and Dommel, RealDSL or Mobistar (ADSL).

GB/MON ALLOWANCE

Broandband in Belgium: GB/mon allowance
There are a 6 broadband subscriptions that allow unlimited download allowances: Dommel Netconnect Pro, BruTele @Home and @Turbo, RealDSL Basic and GeekDSL and Chello Extreme. The only options for me in Brussels are the 2 ADSL ones, of which the Dommel one is excessively expensive (€150/month).

CONCLUSION

For Brussels, Coditel is still a very good option (now if they could update that empty FAQ page that doesn’t seem to have been updated since the nineties). There is no point in switching from SpeedClick to MegaClick for the GB/mon only, but if the speed is really the double (in theory 20Mbps instead of 10Mbps) it might be a nice upgrade. I don’t need something like 200GB/month yet, but if I would, then RealDSL would be the best option.

If you live in Flanders and your main concern is speed, go Telenet ExpressNet Turbo. If you need loads of GB/month, go Chello Extreme (where possible) or RealDSL.

UPDATE
RealDSL does NOT accept any new subscriptions since October 2005, since there seem to be a capacity problem with its bandwidth provider Telenet. Luc and Cindy blogged about this earlier, so I have no excuse for my sloppy research. The only DSL provider with a unlimited bandwidth offer seems to be Dommel, but at an extreme high price. Their €33/50GB is however a good offer. Thanks for the update, Smetty!

Filling a terabyte iPod

Published on November 23, 2005 in Apple, bandwidth, hardware and podcast. 2 Comments

Muster said that within five years, Apple could release an iPod with one terabyte of storage — that’s almost 17 times the maximum amount of iPod storage Apple currently offers.
Munster envisions a one terabyte iPod as a portable, “coffee table” media center that would allow users to store hundreds of movies and thousands of photos and songs.
cnn.com

A 1000 GB iPod, that is

  • 200 movies or 370 hours of full quality DVD
  • up to 2000 hours (almost 3 months non-stop) at DivX/Xvid/MPEG-4 quality
  • using the H.264 video compression: 120 days or 4 months of video!
  • 1500 music albums of full quality CD (which means, no Sony XCP)
  • 15.000 albums if your rip/compress them to MP3 first, maybe 20.000 if you use WMA/AAC (that is over 2 years of audio to listen to!)
  • 2500 episodes or 100 seasons of TV series like Lost, L-Word, Desperate Housewives, Sopranos, … in compressed format (hey, it’s a 2,5″ screen, who cares about HD?)
  • If your terabyte iPod breaks down and you buy a new one, it will take you between 3 hours (FireWire 800 Mbps) to 2 days (Wifi 802.11g) to fill it up again (from the backup you of course had put on your snug little home 10GB RAID-5 storage cluster thingy).
    If by then all portable devices have 10-Gbit Ethernet built in: 15 minutes will be enough to fill ‘er up.
  • Our then-standard 48 megapixel camera would create 72MB RAW images, of which the iPod could store 14.000, or if you would compress them to 5MB JPEG: 200.000 pictures.

Other predictions: the iPhone (or Apple as mobile virtual network operator) and the iTIVO, a media-center/time-shifting/TV/video/DVD hub , all in the next 12-24 months. Let’s hope this inspires some people to seriously vamp up their design/user interface teams (Nokia, Microsoft, I’m looking at you!).

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Know Your (Metric) Limits

Published on April 28, 2005 in bandwidth, hardware and science. 2 Comments


From Wired – July 2004:

The universe comes in a box. It’s a big box, and you almost never see the walls, but its boundaries are immovable – the speed of light, gravity, the way atoms interact. Even if time and space are unlimited and illimitable, physics, chemistry, and biology dictate maxima and minima in the universe. Like the strict meter and structure of a sonnet, they make the final product all the more beautiful. – Adam Rogers

5 billion Years – Maximum time Earth has left.

That’s when the sun goes red giant and expands past Earth’s orbit.

5.4 * 10-44 seconds – Shortest possible time.

Any shorter and quantum mechanics can’t tell whether events are simultaneous.

1.419 * 1026 meter (15 billion light-years) – Maximum distance we can see.

The universe is about 15 billion years old - this is light’s travel time.

1.6256 * 10-35 meter (6.4 * 10-34 inches) – Shortest possible distance.

Planck length: any shorter and quantum mechanics can’t tell between here and there.

34.92 km (21.7 miles) – Maximum height of a mountain on Earth.

Uplift reaches equilibrium with pressure at the base.

3.048 * 10-7 m (1.2 * 10-5 inches) – Minimum size of an actively growing cell.

Free-living cells need room for a full genome, proteins, and guts.

130 m (427 feet) – Maximum height for a tree on Earth.

Gravity overcomes surface tension in the plant’s circulatory system.

265 – Minimum number of protein-coding genes for life.

As seen in the smallest known single-cell organism.

200 million years – Maximum age of sub-oceanic crust.

Older than that: it cools, becomes denser, and “subducts” back into magma.

-273.15 ° Celsius (-459.67 ° Fahrenheit) – Minimum possible temperature.

Heat is a function of molecular motion, which stops at absolute zero.

338 km/h (210 MPH) – Maximum wind speed for an Earth hurricane.

A storm can acquire only so much energy from the sea.

0.24 second – Minimum delay of a signal sent via geosynchronous satellite.

It’s light speed up 35.600 km (22.300 miles), and back down.

430.000 Mbps – Maximum speed to record data to magnetic media.

Bits won’t flip reliably with a pulse under 2.3 picoseconds.

100 Tbps – Maximum information bandwidth over optical fiber.

Higher power levels mash signals together.

1051 operations per second – Maximum computational power.

Quantum rules won’t let the ideal 1-liter, 1-kilogram laptop crunch data any faster.

Contributors: Sunny Bains, Thomas Hayden, Greta Lorge, Michael Myser, and Boyce Rensberger / Sources: Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order (Knopf, 1995); Institute for Genomic Research; Lucent Technologies; MIT; NASA; National Institute of Standards and Technology; Nature; UC Berkeley; Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Yale

via Andrew Ferguson and bytehead.org

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