Euclid Technologies invents video compression technology

Euclid Discoveries claims to have developed a revolutionary video compression technology that can compress digital images to make them much smaller than today's most common compressions techniques such as MPEG2 and MPEG4.

The company claims it's technology only requires 50MB for a full-length movie that would normally require 700MB when compressed using MPEG-4.

Euclid Discoveries chief executive Richard Wingard said EuclidVision will let movie companies shrink a video so small that it becomes easy to distribute films over the Internet. He said that his company has filed 15 US patents on its compression system and is in discussions with a number of companies to bring it to market.

That could be good news for Hollywood, which launched new services last week to sell downloadable copies of recent films. Reducing the size of these downloads could boost Internet movie sales. But it could also popularize Internet movie piracy, just as MP3 music compression caused a global boom in illicit music downloads.

EuclidVision uses ''object-based compression," which identifies individual objects shown in a video, then calculates the optimum level of compression for each of them. The current generation of EuclidVision is designed for videoconferencing over telephone lines with limited bandwidth. Euclid Discoveries says its scientists compressed a 25-megabyte conference video to just over 8,000 bytes using MPEG-4, but EuclidVision did four times better, shrinking the file to about 1,800 bytes.

Read more over at Boston.com.