Joat42 wrote:As someone who has worked with video-compression, you'd be amazed how much you can compress video if you cheat or are smart about it. You can for example totally suppress any noise in an video which makes it look unreal/artificial but it'll compress extremely well - you then re-introduce artificial noise when decompressing the video to make it look "real".
Regardless, considering the amount of processing-power available in the Honorverse and the progress on entropy encoding would probably mean the bitrate to transfer any kind if HD-video could be magnitudes less than we are capable of today. So a 1.5MBit video-stream today could for example be a 15kbit or less in Honorverse.
And in regards to the improvements in bandwidth, we are talking about something that's improved from a very primitive platform up to something that's quite sophisticated - that leap in performance from the beginning isn't linear, it's usually logarithmic so as the technology matures we will se it converge towards being linear.
My main job for the last ~25 years has been in the Video conference and Telepresence space. Currently, I'm using $5-10K devices running the H.265 compression codec getting 1080P60 plus 96K spatial audio and a 1080p5 content channel with network headers in less than 1 meg of bandwidth on corporate networks (usually 768K + IP headers). This has acceptable, phone conversation latency. The video compression is >2000:1 and the audio compression is ~10:1.
When I started, we were running H.260 over 6 ISDN channels (64K x 6) and getting SIF (180I) resolution (that's 1/4 of a 4:3 analog TV screen), 16K audio, and no content channel. and latency... sucked.
In 2009, I installed my first Telepresence system, a Cisco 3010- you feed this system 18 Megs of dedicated bandwidth (these things ran on private internets, called exchanges, owned by the major telecoms, to ensure clean connections), to 3 1080p screens, 3x 192K spatial audio channels, and 1 1080P5 content channel. It ran the H.264 Baseline codec (and later H.264 Highline) for encryption, giving first 800:1, then 1000:1 compression.
These cost $250,000 apiece.
About the same time I could buy a Cisco C40, a mainstream VC device, for @10K and it ran H.264 Highline, then SVC (special Video Codec) then AVC (Advanced Video Codec), toping out at ~1500:1. It used 2-4 Megs for 1080P60, 92K spatial audio and 1080p5 video, with phone levels of latency.
The Telepresence system had a better image - it had 3 massive computers and tons of bandwidth, but never got the advanced codecs - why? The images the device displayed had practically Zero extra latency over the network ping, all computing had to be immediately so it maintained the illusion that all participants were in the same room (the CTS 3010 looked like a 12 person board room table cut in 1/2 lengthwise, with 3 70" plasma monitors sitting on the table in the place of the other 6 participants. And the illusion works very well....within 7 minutes, >90% of users forget they are on a video conference)
But the C40 is allowed an extra 100 or so milliseconds to do it's computing (that phone system latency), meaning it has longer to do the compression/uncompression, allowing it to use advanced codecs to do more in the extra time - and reducing the bandwidth needed for said quality of call.
My "little" tiptoe through VC history brings me to my point. Since we know massive latency in the Honorverse ship to ship communications will always be present, computers can spend more time (both in clock cycles and actual time) compressing the video before it is transmitted in the Honorverse, using less bandwidth, because the computer time to compress is irrelevant, especially with advanced computers.