We are very excited about our new THG video that despite running at 768x576 it still manages to be a compact download. We've pulled out all the stops on this one - it's a three-minute film sequence, with a resolution of 720 x 576 pixels and stereo sound, and it comes in at only 10.9 MB. When archived as a downloadable ZIP file, it's a mere 9.9 MB.

How did we pull this one off? Overall, the fact that this high-resolution video could be compressed so drastically was the result of very efficient MPEG-4 compression standards and the DivX derivative we used. In addition, the compression variables had to be tweaked considerably until the perfect combination was found.

The new THG video comes in what sounds suspiciously like a record-breaking minimal data rate of 64 KiloByte/sec. For comparison, with MPEG-1, the format in which innumerable videos and movies have been encoded and which offers a maximum resolution of 352 x 288 pixels (equivalent to half the PAL resolution), the data rate is generally 170 KiloByte/sec. Our video plays at considerably less than half the data rate and at a much higher resolution!