Slashdot recently linked to this excellent article on MPEG-4, which is an extension of the MPEG-2 video and audio compression scheme that is currently used to compress video in DVD format.
Why should you know about MPEG-4? Because although it is somewhat difficult at the moment, MPEG-4 can be used to take an MPEG-2 encoded movie on DVD which typically takes up 3 to 4 gigabytes for a full length movie and compress it to fit on a CD-ROM with surprisingly little loss in quality. If you put them side by side, you’ll notice a quality difference between your MPEG-2 encoded DVD and the MPEG-4 version, but its still far superior to the enormously successful VHS format and its far more portable.
The real downside at the moment is that MPEG-4 is extremely processor intensive. The article at Tom’s Hardware notes that it can take up to 10 hours to encode a DVD into MPEG-4 format even on a very fast machine, and you’ll want a pretty serious system for playback too, but since even Best Buy’s selling 800MHZ Pentium III machines for $1,300 these days this is less of an issue than it would have been a couple years ago.
Thanks to the controversy over MP3s, inevitably the discussion about MPEG-4 is going to come back to piracy issues. A 650mb to 700mb file might seem a lot to transfer today, but the students at the college I work at regularly use the fast pipes here to download new DVD releases in MPEG-4 format. My attitude toward movie piracy is the same as it is for music piracy — DVD’s are dirt cheap for most new releases.
What I’m really excited about is the possibility of creating a supercharged media server sometime within the next 12 to 18 months. I’m envisioning a tower system with a 1GHZ or better processor, a DVD-ROM, high end sound card, 384 mb of RAM, an AGP video card like the Matrox products that has both analog video in and out ports, and four 100-gig ATA/100 hard drives in a striped RAID array (yes I know there are no 100 gig hard drives out yet, but they are not too far away).
That way you’ve got 100 gig for MP3s (even encoding at 256 like I do, that’s room for about 1100 CDs worth of music), 100 gig for storing DVDs converted to MPEG-4 format (enough room for about 140 films depending on the length), set aside another 150 gig or so for using Matrox card as a TIVO type system and capturing television shows you want to see (imagine having the entire run of Babylon 5 on a HD by recording it off the SciFi channel), and just leave 50 gig to spare for the heck of it. Connect it to your home audio/video system and you’re in business.