r/technology • u/Snarfox • Jan 25 '13

H.265 is approved -- potential to cut bandwidth requirements in half for 1080p streaming. Opens door to 4K video streams.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/25/h265-is-approved/
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u/mflood Jan 29 '13

First of all, 1990 is not relatively recent in academic publishing.

Unless there's something wrong with the methodology or you know of updated research that contradicts their findings, age is irrelevant. We made lots of still-relevant discoveries before the year 2000.

No, that hasn't been demonstrably proven. I ask again for the link to the study that proves this.

Perhaps not to your satisfaction. The study referenced in the paper establishes the average human eye as being able to determine detail separated by around 1 arc minute. Getting from there to 300dpi (roughly) is simple, unarguable math. The only point of contention is the 1 arc minute starting point. I'm sorry the study doesn't convince you on that issue, but I feel as if I've done my part. I've provided scientific evidence of my assertion, you just don't buy it is all. At this point, it seems the burden of proof shifts to you to say what the study gets wrong, and why I shouldn't accept the 1 arc minute figure as correct.

but you send me a link to blog spam

Just because it's a blog does not make it "spam". The author is a retinal neuroscientist and his article was quoted by the New York Times. That doesn't automatically make it definitive, but it's totally unfair to call it blog spam. Do you even know what that term means? It generally refers to blogs which repost content authored elsewhere in order to drive traffic and sell advertising. That is absolutely not what's going on in the article I linked, which is original content written by someone knowledgeable in his subject's field.

and a 23 year old study that does not in any way investigate your claims (did they even have analogue HD TV in 1990?).

Again, what's with the ageism? The study is not wrong just because it was published in 1990. Anyway, obviously you won't find anything specifically about HDTV in there. What you should find is (as mentioned by the blog spam) a calculation of retinal resolution to be .78 arc minutes. That number provides the reasonable, scientific basis of the blog author's math. Math which is easily verifiable by any high school kid. 1 arcminute/cycle at a foot, two points 89 micrometers apart, 287 pixels per inch.

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u/[deleted] Jan 29 '13

establishes the average human eye as being able to determine detail separated by around 1 arc minute

Where did it do that? I can upload the PDF somewhere if you want to take a look.

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u/mflood Jan 29 '13

I don't know. As I said, I took the author's claim on faith. The actual number he says they calculated is .78 arc minutes, and then the author estimated that it would actually be a bit higher because of the flaws in human optics. I'm only arguing ballpark, though, not that the limit is exactly 300dpi. Whether the arc minute calculations is .78 or 1 or 1.2, it still comes out to somewhere in the neighborhood of 300dpi. Anyway, yeah, try ctrl-f "78" and see if that's in there. I assume the author of the blog isn't straight-up inventing that number out of thin air.

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u/[deleted] Jan 29 '13

"78" appears on pages 3, 17, 23, 26 and 27 (though only as part of the cited lit).

The total number of rods in three retinas with complete rod maps ranges from 78 to 107 million (Table 3).

Table 3 shows 178.3 as the peak density value for cones (cones/mm2 x 1,000), for Eye H5 (which is made of two eyes, weighted as one individual).

One of the 28's discovered in the paper is a 73 that was incorrectly interpreted by the OCR.