Tag: Blog

I’ve been waiting for a little to mull over Google’s announcement about dropping H.264 support in Chrome in favor of VP8. Although my partner Ben Mesander would take the other side of the argument, I think the world needs VP8 like a fish needs a bicycle.

The use of transforms in data compression algorithms is at least 40 years old. The goal of this three-part series of posts is to provide the mathematical background necessary for understanding transforms and to explain why they are a valuable part of many compression algorithms. I’m focusing on video since that’s my particular interest. Part... View Article

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Discover the power of transforms in video compression. Part 1 explains vectors, dot products, and orthonormal bases—essential for understanding advanced compression algorithms. Ready to transform your approach?

Learn how Cardinal Peak navigates project planning challenges with realistic estimates. Discover effective techniques for accurate engineering timelines.

In all the sturm und drang of bad economic news, Cardinal Peak is on a bit of a hiring spree. If you’re a talented engineer who is interested in embedded application development and lives in the Denver/Boulder area, please get in touch! We’re working on some very cool products that I hope to be able... View Article

One time last winter I shot a photo with my camera phone out the windshield of my car and got a strange image with curved wiper blades: No, my wipers don’t look like this! I’ve been meaning to track down the reason why this happened. It is clear that cellphone cameras don’t usually use mechanical... View Article

We recently became aware of another contract engineering firm that had appropriated our Why Contract Engineering page for their own website. This other firm (and no, I’m not going to link to them) claims on their home page that they “operate in an honest, ethical and professional manner,” so I guess they’ve got that going... View Article

Discover the controversy of Auto-Tune in jazz vocals. Can you detect its subtle use in Manhattan Transfer's latest album?

Based on a Slashdot link, I read a blog post today about the Oracle/Google lawsuit over Java virtual machine patents. Among the list of software patents that Oracle has decided to sue Google with are two that I’m fairly certain that I wrote prior art for. This was in 1983 or 1984 while I was... View Article

A recent project for a customer was to implement a transport for a real-time signal processing application over Gigabit Ethernet (GbE). The project was especially interesting because our customer’s requirement was for extremely low latency: The transport needed to be able to send replies to incoming packets with a custom EtherType within 74.4 μsec. This... View Article

I just saw this news about research that says you notice compression artifacts less if you like the content of a particular video clip: Using four studies, Kortum, along with co-author Marc Sullivan of AT&T Labs, showed 100 study participants 180 movie clips encoded at nine different levels, from 550 kilobits per second up to... View Article