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Comment by bjornsing | Hacker News Reader

Yea, but what Daiz proves in the OP is that he personally can do a better job than this so-called "algorithm". I hear his next project will be proving the worthlessness of spell checkers by simply beating them, at spelling. That paper clip thing in Word is such Snake Oil! ;)

For the record I have nothing to do with this Beamr, but I do feel sorry for the those guys. The marketing speak on their website may be a little hyperbole, but there's nothing fraudulent there that I can see. I don't think they deserve this treatment.

UPDATE: LocalPCGuy, sorry for posting this as a reply to your comment. You obviously get it.

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Actually, no. What Diaz showed is that Beamr is offering nothing that actually improves either visual quality or bitrate; every setting that their method uses actually reduces quality compared to default x264 settings.

> What Diaz showed is that Beamr is offering nothing that actually improves either visual quality or bitrate

Well too bad Beamr never made that claim (AFAIK). What Beamr does claim is that their software can automatically find settings (per frame) that will compress a certain video file to it's smallest size without affecting quality (too much - in some subjective measure).

I'm not saying that Beamr is great. I have no idea, I've never used it. But what I can say for sure is that Daiz has not made a fair evaluation of the technology in the OP.

From Beamr's site "Beamr Video is capable of reducing the bitrate of H.264 video streams by up to 75% (4X), while preserving their visual quality."

sounds like they are claiming to work wonders on your bitrate. I think Diaz just pointed out that these claims are dubious at best

> I think Diaz just pointed out that these claims are dubious at best

He did no such thing. He just pointed out that you can get the same benefits from using x264 directly.

Most people just take the h264 stream they got from their phone / camera / BluRay rip. These are horribly compressed. x264 can consistently improve those without degrading quality by 30% without much tweaking, and by 50-70% with some tweaking.

Apparently, Beamr saves you some tweaking. Diaz' claim is that the tweaking saved is ridiculously minimal and does not warrant all the hyperbole around beamr.

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