If you encode their test-video with an off-the-shelf open source H264 codec on normal settings, you end up with a video that is smaller than their sample video. Their "amazing new technology" is just vanilla h264 compression.
My boss as at an internship charged a client 1200 euros for adding a Facebook button. I believe he sold it as a social marketing something or other. He liked to overpromise, overcharge and underdeliver. Oh, and sold stuff we couldn't do. Needless to say the company shrinked by 400% by the end of the internship.
They're not "fine-tuned" in the slightest; they're cargo cult options that are going to give worse results on a compression-per-speed basis than the presets that already come with x264. Many of those options are completely redundant; they're specifying things that are already default!
There are quite literally dozens of scam companies built off x264, claiming in many cases that they made an "incredible" magical proprietary encoder with "revolutionary" compression. Of course they just run x264.
Fortunately it is extremely easy to identify an x264-encoded stream, even if all the headers are stripped and rewritten: it would be extremely difficult to modify x264 to cloak such a stream entirely unless you knew the code line for line, and even then, some of the features of x264 that are responsible for much of its compression advantage are extremely obvious in an analyzer (variance adaptive quantization).
You hit the nail on the head here. While it's possible that the video they posted is 6fps (which is close to what those mencoder flags will achieve), it's more likely that they simply saved the first video with no compression and saved the second one as a regular video file with compression.
This is crazy... the website is a shell of an investment pitch. These guys need to get reported. Anyone want to make some money off the collapse.
Wow, their first 'contract' is with a company called edgefactory OMNIMEDIA, which I think is owned by martha stewart OMNIMEDIA?
edit: Wow, I just posted a link to this article and this thread on their facebook account and now the item has been deleted off their wall within minutes. everyone should let me know....
My guess, based on the man page for mencoder linked on the page where he got the mencoder options, you can encode a source video file to target video file aiming for either quality of frames, or speed of frames (per second). "Very high quality" options results in a video output of roughly 6 frames per second. Comparing the file size of the output file hoax.avi, its basically identical. So the revelation is that this company's miracle method is simply delivering video at 6fps.
If you've ever played a video game that was too much for your system, you've seen 6fps before, and you know it is intolerable.
That's my take on it, I really wish the author would have elaborated more on the result.
quote:
The Commission is authorized by Congress to provide monetary awards to eligible individuals who come forward with high-quality original information that leads to a Commission enforcement action in which over $1,000,000 in sanctions is ordered. The range for awards is between 10% and 30% of the money collected.
Whoa - thanks for the nostalgia. I remember spending SO MUCH time trying to work around RAM limitations using all these techniques only to find the best you could get was the ability to trick a piece of software into thinking more RAM is there, but the performance hit made it a worthless practice.
What is it about scammers and impossibly high compression? Is it because it's easy to explain but hard to prove the concept to non-tech savvy investors, or is it just because they read about it having been done before and copy it verbatim?
Guessing the latter, as there's other technologies (cryptography and semiconductor fabrication come to mind as easy to explain/hard to disprove) that could hoodwink unsophisticated investors.
I've seen quite a number of such "Trader Advisor" Websites and have always wondered - how is their business model anything but a self fulfilling prophecy? I mean - you make a bet on a stock (or manufacture a stock to bet on), but tell an audience to follow your advice, thus increasing demand and drive up the price of the stock.
Seriously - how is this not transparently fraud to people in the stock market? How is this not transparently fraud to everybody, actually? Or is it just praying on the hobbyist investors who are deluded into thinking "get rich quick" works for ordinary folks while the people "in the know" are delighted to have an army of zombies to commandeer?
Would be great to hear if anybody has some insight into how fraudsters like this are prosecuted (or avoid prosecution).
A simple way of finding out if it's a scam is by looking at the balance sheet. If you see little to no assets it is most certainly a pump & dump; this "firm" has not assets. These scams are usually formed through reverse mergers, that is how they are able to sell stock.
The RAYS campaign was run by the same guys who did LEXG, the latter being one of the best pump and dumps last year-- ran from $1 to $10 in a short amount of time.
"Raystream Version" - 480p H.264 AAC, ~1200kb data rate
Nothing that fishy here. They seem to be advertising to broadcasters. It's possible they have some nice custom algorithms for their videos. That isn't uncommon - take a look at Apple movie trailers and iTunes videos: they have their own magic juice too.
With that, maybe the investment is a scam, but posting a "hoax" via "ihatelawyers3" on github is waaaaaaay more suspect to me.
[EDIT] they seem to be pretty active for being supposedly fake. Check their twitter feed. They tweet as much if not more than most video companies and it's not fluff.
Specifically, the "standard compression" version is MainConcept at 10 Mbit, and the "Raystream" version is x264 at 1.15 Mbit using the following options:
Though I get the impression that there is a big overlap in terms of the people who frequent Reddit, this site and 4chan. They just express themselves differently depending on where they are.
"Custom magic algorithms" in this case being "off-the-shelf free software, using completely default parameters, that we've stolen and claimed is our magic algorithm".
I hate to burst your bubble, but "custom magic algorithms" actually exist. I was involved with a contract that accomplished the same end as mentioned in the article - compressed video data, playable within standard video players. The company wasn't achieving the same level of compression that this article is claiming, but they did manage to reduce video size while maintaining quality.
Sure, you can "improve compression" -- just compare yourself to an awful encoder! This is the strategy used by thousands of marketing whitepapers.
But x264 isn't an awful one; it's the best, by a factor of ~30% over the nearest competition according to the most recent independent comparison (http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/h264_2011/). Every company loves to claim that their "custom magic algorithms" are amazing and magic, but when push comes to shove, nothing compares to what free software can put out, and this shows no signs of changing, at least before the release of HEVC.
If you have a "magic algorithm" that does better than the current state of the art, send it in to be benchmarked! I mean, if you can do better than the encoder used by Google, Youtube, Netflix, Facebook, and thousands of other companies around the world, surely you'll be able to get some customers if you publicize this super-amazing-magic algorithm, right?
Or maybe, like the thousands of other companies claiming the same, your "magic algorithm" is bullshit -- or a good idea, just already implemented in dozens of other encoders out there too, and you're demonstrating its efficacy by comparing it to a junk heap like Quicktime.
I can assure you that we did our testing against x264, and that we produced encodings that were better than x264. You're also assuming that compression optimization can only occur in the encoder - which I assure you is false (damn you NDA!! You'll have to take my word on these statements.)
As to the business of selling said encoders, I couldn't agree with you more, if you've got something that improves the most widely used encoder then surely customers should be clamoring to get a hold of this algorithm. That is if you're selling it properly.
However, I was merely a contractor, and not making the business decisions. I worked with multiple contractors that thought similar things to yourself (myself included.) And when you're taking investor money, telling them that you're going to open source a technology that took 2+ years to develop, and hope that you'll make money from it is a great way to lose your investor money.
I can assure you that we did our testing against x264, and that we produced encodings that were better than x264
By what measurement, PSNR? x264 doesn't optimize for PSNR by default.
And when was this? x264 has improved dramatically in the past 4 years. In 2007, Mainconcept could beat x264 in many cases and Ateme's 2004 encoder was still sometimes better! There are cases where x264 has improved by a factor of 2 in this time period, or more.
You're also assuming that compression optimization can only occur in the encoder
Do you mean prefiltering? Such a thing is a dishonest comparison, as you can prefilter before using any particular encoder, and there are whole frameworks built for exactly that purpose which are widely used with x264 -- and other encoders too.
And when you're taking investor money, telling them that you're going to open source a technology that took 2+ years to develop, and hope that you'll make money from it is a great way to lose your investor money.
If your technology takes 2+ years to develop, your programmers are incompetent or your management is broken. Probably no single algorithm in x264's history has taken more than a few days to develop. Coming up with good ideas is a matter of thinking, combined with trial and error: once you have a idea that actually works, implementing it is dead trivial. The time-consuming part is the other 99 ideas you tried that didn't work so well -- and you can't plan for that.
I used the term "algorithm" as a crutch, but it seems likely there are tools out there than can do fantastic keyframe & data rate shaping.
The most apparent is whatever Apple's been using for years for their movie trailers. Not a single artifact, low data rate, etc. It's better than your average 2-pass. But who knows, the "magic" could simply be to start with uncompressed source...
> However, I was merely a contractor, and not making the business decisions. I worked with multiple contractors that thought similar things to yourself
Do you know you're not talking to some contractor, you're talking to the guy behind x264?
If you don't know him, read his analysis of VP8 (note copyright footer):
Having been in the streaming industry since the mid 90's, with heavy work in live and on demand encoding, I've seen dozens of these companies make similar claims, usually in pursuit of investment dollars. For years running, regardless of open source versus closed source, none stack up well against x264 when measured for the way people see video and for the resources taken to produce the encoded content.
You really don't have to read past the first graph:
This is an informative study, and has been for the last seven years. If you have a better compression that would let me, as a CDN, offer clients movie delivery to users with enough less bandwidth and storage it's worth retooling for, we're all ears. Again, I've talked to dozens upon dozens. None really had it. So far, given their original source, I could personally produce an even smaller x264 file that end users prefer.
You've just described the business model of a surprisingly large number of consultancies. One man's obvious is the next man's "magic". AFAICT businesses are happy to pay for this sort of thing, so I'm not sure who deserves blame here.
>Before Raystream, a one hour video converted to 720p using the best compression algorithms resulted in files in excess of 1 GB, far too large to be streamed over commercial Internet connections. Using Raystream, the same one hour 720p video can be compressed up to 90% of its original file size, which makes it easily streamable over connection speeds ranging from 0.4 to 1.0 Mbs per second." ... "Raystream compresses online videos, reducing their file size by up to 90%, with no loss in video quality or clarity."
That's not possible unless Raystream developed H.264. Apple uses H.264 for their encoding too. The magic is just H.264.
they seem to be pretty active for being supposedly fake. Check their twitter feed. They tweet as much if not more than most video companies and it's not fluff.
A good pump and dump scam requires a believable company presence. You just fell for the smoke screen.
They seem to have some PR "help" too. For example, this story from "Bedford Research" made the wires and at first glance seems to imply, falsely, that Raystream and Level 3 worked together: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Breakthrough-Technology-From-i...
There was another PR release that mentioned Raystream and Netflix together, to ever so gently insinuate they were on the same level or somehow related.
You underestimate the power of BS. I worked for a company that raised capital hand over fist and sucked in companies like nobody's business. We could have been doing nothing or been awesome as hell, but it didn't matter- it was all about the slick CEO selling his wares. And in the end, the company still exists even after seemingly burning up in a significant blaze of glory. Money is more important than technology. Unfortunately, many here don't realize that yet.
Here's a comparison of Raystream's "own" encoding side-by-side with their "uncompressed" video after being run through Handbrake with default H.264 settings.
He could be a short-seller trying to get the stock to tank. This is what is interesting about small-cap public companies, you never know who is telling the truth (since there are so many forces at play from longs, shorts etc.) until you check it out yourself (or somebody you know/trust).
Edit: after checking it out I am 95% certain that this is a fraud. shame there is no stock to short :( (even though it is +6% today)
Technically, they could be using pre-compression schemes / filters which modify the source to be more compressible by standard encoders. However, if that was the case, both files should appear to be encoded with the same settings to be a fair comparison.
I worked for a couple of years investigating frauds and I was blown away at the lack of law enforcement activity. There's a whole community of people who work together to steal huge amounts of money from anyone who will give it up.
These people are amongst the biggest spenders on lawyers, as they try to keep their names off websites through the use of libel laws.
It's a 'company' operated by Paul Simms, a disbarred solicitor in the UK, and Srinivasan Solaraj, an Indian national. Both were declared bankrupt in 2007 after a non-existent deal blew up in their faces. The business has no assets, everything on the site is puff. They chose the name because it's similar to a legitimate Malaysian company. Simms' old legal firm was called Citilegal, until Citibank noticed it was a little too similar for comfort.
Generally, law enforcement are happy to leave frauds targeting the wealthy to civil courts. The police simply aren't interested.
Raystream was a publicly traded company called InterDom Corp, which was purchased for 200k by Unlimited Trade Incorporated, operated by Ramon Rumpf renamed it Raystream.
103 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadWhat's going on here?
bash$ mencoder -ovc x264 -oac mp3lame -x264encopts \ subq=6:partitions=all:8x8dct:me=umh:frameref=5:bframes=3:b_pyramid=normal:weight_b \ -o hoax.avi ray_480p_normal.mp4
then o god o god.. is this a porn?
Their product is a standard recommended video optimization.
The people behind RayStream are either lying and/or don't understand what they are talking about.
Basically they're claiming something revolutionary, which in the end is just using the x264 encoder with the right fine-tuned options.
There are quite literally dozens of scam companies built off x264, claiming in many cases that they made an "incredible" magical proprietary encoder with "revolutionary" compression. Of course they just run x264.
Fortunately it is extremely easy to identify an x264-encoded stream, even if all the headers are stripped and rewritten: it would be extremely difficult to modify x264 to cloak such a stream entirely unless you knew the code line for line, and even then, some of the features of x264 that are responsible for much of its compression advantage are extremely obvious in an analyzer (variance adaptive quantization).
subq=6 Default is 7. This makes compression worse.
partitions=all Higher than the default, but for negligible gain. This is only enabled on the slowest presets.
8x8dct The default.
me=umh Higher than the default, for small gain.
frameref=5 Default is 3; 5 gives small gain.
bframes=3 The default.
b_pyramid=normal The default.
weight_b The default.
Wow, their first 'contract' is with a company called edgefactory OMNIMEDIA, which I think is owned by martha stewart OMNIMEDIA?
edit: Wow, I just posted a link to this article and this thread on their facebook account and now the item has been deleted off their wall within minutes. everyone should let me know....
http://www.facebook.com/RaystreamInc
If you've ever played a video game that was too much for your system, you've seen 6fps before, and you know it is intolerable.
That's my take on it, I really wish the author would have elaborated more on the result.
quote: The Commission is authorized by Congress to provide monetary awards to eligible individuals who come forward with high-quality original information that leads to a Commission enforcement action in which over $1,000,000 in sanctions is ordered. The range for awards is between 10% and 30% of the money collected.
What is it about scammers and impossibly high compression? Is it because it's easy to explain but hard to prove the concept to non-tech savvy investors, or is it just because they read about it having been done before and copy it verbatim?
Guessing the latter, as there's other technologies (cryptography and semiconductor fabrication come to mind as easy to explain/hard to disprove) that could hoodwink unsophisticated investors.
http://www.timothysykes.com/2011/11/how-a-penny-stock-promot...
http://www.smauthority.com/raystream/
Seriously - how is this not transparently fraud to people in the stock market? How is this not transparently fraud to everybody, actually? Or is it just praying on the hobbyist investors who are deluded into thinking "get rich quick" works for ordinary folks while the people "in the know" are delighted to have an army of zombies to commandeer?
Would be great to hear if anybody has some insight into how fraudsters like this are prosecuted (or avoid prosecution).
The RAYS campaign was run by the same guys who did LEXG, the latter being one of the best pump and dumps last year-- ran from $1 to $10 in a short amount of time.
"Original Version" - 1080p, AVC uncompressed
"Standard Compression" - 480p, AVC uncompressed
"Raystream Version" - 480p H.264 AAC, ~1200kb data rate
Nothing that fishy here. They seem to be advertising to broadcasters. It's possible they have some nice custom algorithms for their videos. That isn't uncommon - take a look at Apple movie trailers and iTunes videos: they have their own magic juice too.
With that, maybe the investment is a scam, but posting a "hoax" via "ihatelawyers3" on github is waaaaaaay more suspect to me.
[EDIT] they seem to be pretty active for being supposedly fake. Check their twitter feed. They tweet as much if not more than most video companies and it's not fluff.
> x264 - core 112 - H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codec - Copyleft 2003-2010 - http://www.videolan.org/x264.html - options: cabac=1 ref=3 deblock=1:0:0 analyse=0x3:0 me=hex subme=7 psy=1 psy_rd=1.00:0.00 mixed_ref=1 me_range=16 chroma_me=1 trellis=0 8x8dct=1 cqm=0 deadzone=21,11 fast_pskip=1 chroma_qp_offset=-2 threads=6 sliced_threads=0 nr=0 decimate=1 interlaced=0 constrained_intra=0 bframes=3 b_pyramid=2 b_adapt=0 b_bias=0 direct=2 weightb=1 open_gop=0 weightp=0 keyint=250 keyint_min=24 scenecut=40 intra_refresh=0 rc_lookahead=40 rc=crf mbtree=1 crf=22.0 qcomp=0.70 qpmin=10 qpmax=51 qpstep=3 ip_ratio=1.41 aq=1:1.00
... the default x264 parameters. Yay!
But x264 isn't an awful one; it's the best, by a factor of ~30% over the nearest competition according to the most recent independent comparison (http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/h264_2011/). Every company loves to claim that their "custom magic algorithms" are amazing and magic, but when push comes to shove, nothing compares to what free software can put out, and this shows no signs of changing, at least before the release of HEVC.
If you have a "magic algorithm" that does better than the current state of the art, send it in to be benchmarked! I mean, if you can do better than the encoder used by Google, Youtube, Netflix, Facebook, and thousands of other companies around the world, surely you'll be able to get some customers if you publicize this super-amazing-magic algorithm, right?
Or maybe, like the thousands of other companies claiming the same, your "magic algorithm" is bullshit -- or a good idea, just already implemented in dozens of other encoders out there too, and you're demonstrating its efficacy by comparing it to a junk heap like Quicktime.
As to the business of selling said encoders, I couldn't agree with you more, if you've got something that improves the most widely used encoder then surely customers should be clamoring to get a hold of this algorithm. That is if you're selling it properly.
However, I was merely a contractor, and not making the business decisions. I worked with multiple contractors that thought similar things to yourself (myself included.) And when you're taking investor money, telling them that you're going to open source a technology that took 2+ years to develop, and hope that you'll make money from it is a great way to lose your investor money.
By what measurement, PSNR? x264 doesn't optimize for PSNR by default.
And when was this? x264 has improved dramatically in the past 4 years. In 2007, Mainconcept could beat x264 in many cases and Ateme's 2004 encoder was still sometimes better! There are cases where x264 has improved by a factor of 2 in this time period, or more.
You're also assuming that compression optimization can only occur in the encoder
Do you mean prefiltering? Such a thing is a dishonest comparison, as you can prefilter before using any particular encoder, and there are whole frameworks built for exactly that purpose which are widely used with x264 -- and other encoders too.
And when you're taking investor money, telling them that you're going to open source a technology that took 2+ years to develop, and hope that you'll make money from it is a great way to lose your investor money.
If your technology takes 2+ years to develop, your programmers are incompetent or your management is broken. Probably no single algorithm in x264's history has taken more than a few days to develop. Coming up with good ideas is a matter of thinking, combined with trial and error: once you have a idea that actually works, implementing it is dead trivial. The time-consuming part is the other 99 ideas you tried that didn't work so well -- and you can't plan for that.
The most apparent is whatever Apple's been using for years for their movie trailers. Not a single artifact, low data rate, etc. It's better than your average 2-pass. But who knows, the "magic" could simply be to start with uncompressed source...
Do you know you're not talking to some contractor, you're talking to the guy behind x264?
If you don't know him, read his analysis of VP8 (note copyright footer):
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377
Having been in the streaming industry since the mid 90's, with heavy work in live and on demand encoding, I've seen dozens of these companies make similar claims, usually in pursuit of investment dollars. For years running, regardless of open source versus closed source, none stack up well against x264 when measured for the way people see video and for the resources taken to produce the encoded content.
You really don't have to read past the first graph:
http://compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/h264_2011/
This is an informative study, and has been for the last seven years. If you have a better compression that would let me, as a CDN, offer clients movie delivery to users with enough less bandwidth and storage it's worth retooling for, we're all ears. Again, I've talked to dozens upon dozens. None really had it. So far, given their original source, I could personally produce an even smaller x264 file that end users prefer.
There is a large market for proprietary optimised implementations of various codecs for use in industry. The same goes for mp3 and so on.
Unless people have found x264 headers left in the files, in which case, fail.
>Before Raystream, a one hour video converted to 720p using the best compression algorithms resulted in files in excess of 1 GB, far too large to be streamed over commercial Internet connections. Using Raystream, the same one hour 720p video can be compressed up to 90% of its original file size, which makes it easily streamable over connection speeds ranging from 0.4 to 1.0 Mbs per second." ... "Raystream compresses online videos, reducing their file size by up to 90%, with no loss in video quality or clarity."
That's not possible unless Raystream developed H.264. Apple uses H.264 for their encoding too. The magic is just H.264.
A good pump and dump scam requires a believable company presence. You just fell for the smoke screen.
http://imgur.com/a/uQsiU
See if you can guess which is which.
Edit: after checking it out I am 95% certain that this is a fraud. shame there is no stock to short :( (even though it is +6% today)
These people are amongst the biggest spenders on lawyers, as they try to keep their names off websites through the use of libel laws.
For example, these guys: http://www.petraenergy.net/
It's a 'company' operated by Paul Simms, a disbarred solicitor in the UK, and Srinivasan Solaraj, an Indian national. Both were declared bankrupt in 2007 after a non-existent deal blew up in their faces. The business has no assets, everything on the site is puff. They chose the name because it's similar to a legitimate Malaysian company. Simms' old legal firm was called Citilegal, until Citibank noticed it was a little too similar for comfort.
Generally, law enforcement are happy to leave frauds targeting the wealthy to civil courts. The police simply aren't interested.
Probably because it isn't their area. Stock frauds and pump-and-dumps should be reported to the sec:
http://www.sec.gov/complaint/select.shtml
They are getting better at investigating them :)
Registrar ID: CORE-123 (Klute-Thiemann Informationstechnologie GmbH & Co.KG)
Created On: 2005-06-16 19:22:24 GMT
Last Updated On: 2011-09-15 12:17:38 GMT
Expiration Date: 2012-06-16 19:22:24 GMT
Status: member-lock
Registrant ID: COCO-10657700
Registrant Name: Roman Rumpf
Registrant Organization: Raystream Inc
Registrant Street: 2101 Midway Road, Suite 140
Registrant City: Carrollton
Registrant State/Province: Texas
Registrant Postal Code: 75006
Registrant Country: US
Registrant Phone:
Registrant Phone Ext:
Registrant Fax:
Registrant Fax Ext:
Registrant Email: roman@raystream.com
Not that I don't believe it's a hoax...
If you're confident it's a pump and dump and it will fall you could short it, of course.
http://reversemerger.dealflow.com/wires/article.cfm?id=xhtjs...