OK, not sure this is the type of thing you're wondering about, but for example, a company called Iterated Systems has been working for quite some time on fractal-based image compression. See: iterated.com
They used to have a Fractal Development Kit (FDK), although it looks like they've refined and grown the product several steps since then. The FDK allowed you to embed fractal-compression/decompression capabilities into Windows applications. There is even a Fractal Image Format (FIF) file type. Certainly these operations could be applied to multimedia streams (although it'd be one screamin' machine to encode in real time) before all the communication channel related processing. I was totally fascinated with this stuff a few years back, and wrote a bunch of code just to mess with "anything fractal," but it's sort of faded from memory.
Also, somewhere in all the digital fountain info from past posts, the group Michael Luby worked with had developed some sort of scalable transport format so that a max resolution image or audio file could be broadcast, and each user's local capabilities could extract a resolution-scaled replica based on the capabilities of their connection and local machine. I forget exactly what/how it worked, but if I come across the specific link I'll send it to you.
dh |
