Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

In other words, motion JPEG2000, and it's decoded by (no doubt extremely expensive) hardware. There's no way a general-purpose CPU can decode in realtime otherwise.

View on HN

This benchmark is showing 4k decoding on commodity hardware from 2018 fast enough for movie theaters. https://www.fastcompression.com/benchmarks/decoder-benchmark...

So, presumably they could have swapped to commodity hardware a while ago.

With a Windows Update banner and forced reboot right at the climax of the movie.

Commodity hardware doesn't require Windows...

Though lets be honest, they'd probably use Windows anyways and that probably would happen.

A couple months ago, I've been to a 2020 anime feature film in a cinema here in Estonia. To my amusement, after the credits I was greeted with the VLC interface for a brief moment (though they've turned off the projector very quickly after that).

Edit: obviously, that's not how most movies are shown here :D

I wonder if that was because that film's distributor is relaxed about DRM, or if the cinema just decided not to care about licensing it assuming that an Asian (I guess) IP holder would be unlikely to find out or take legal action against a small cinema in Estonia?

It’s almost worse than that - the common commercial playback servers I’m familiar with run Linux 2.6.x and fail in all kinds of weird and wonderful ways!

The fastest decoder there uses the GPU, not the CPU.

The fastest one that runs on a CPU, Kakadu (proprietary), is far behind.

CPU or GPU it’s still commodity hardware.

> The fastest decoder there uses the GPU, not the CPU.

How does that matter? It was a reply to your incorrect claim:

> it's decoded by (no doubt extremely expensive) hardware

See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32136471

The issue for commercial cinemas is not necessarily handling storage and playback of DCinema packages - it’s the DRM that the studios insist upon playing nice with the projectors. Most cinemas converted their screens at least a decade ago, financed partly by distributors, and the industry is sort of stuck in time as a result.

The digital cinema projectors have hardware JPEG 2000 decoders. This IP is licensed from companies like IntoPIX:

https://www.intopix.com/JPEG2000

Most post-production software that reads/writes DCPs will be using a GPU JPEG2000 encoder & decoder, like this from Comprimato:

https://comprimato.com/products/comprimato-jpeg2000/

we use comprimato which can use the GPU. It's very performant

Reply on news.ycombinator.com