My mother probably would chose the day she lost her son. My father almost certainly too.

I’m not surprised. In fact if we start to question ourselves, most of us would, eventually, recall a tragic moment.

“I remember like it was yesterday!”

Well so do I. Who wouldn’t? How could we not to?! I still remember perfect and clearly of all that day. All the confusion of not understanding what was going on.

The most vivid memory I have from 1997 (my oldest one) is to be sitting in the stairwell of my building, in my navy blue dress, while I see my mother stretched on the ground, crying and screaming out all the air she hold in her lungs. And our neighbors, in that sorrow state, trying to calm my mother (oh, my poor mother!). Quietly blaring how everything would turn out fine and how strong she had to be, for me!

Honestly, coming from a daughter that witness the collapse of my parents’ world, people who saw that same world of theirs be shattered and thrown violently and abruptly

Why the hell would you say such words to someone in such pain?!

(Seriously. Why?!)

While my mother was losing herself in the chock, I more neatly remember my nanny, gently swinging my brother’s body on her arms as if he was trapped a deep sleep. D was curled up in his favorite blanket, his bib had been removed and the blood on his chin rinsed. She was, peacefully, singing him a lullaby, like a mother trying to sleep her baby.

And motionless, I just stayed there. On the stairs. Observing.

I do not remember almost nothing of the following days. I do not recall being alone, neither my father’s or my mother’s presence. So little I recall of the intense therapy I had to go through after the fateful event.

All I had left from 1997 was this:

Someone caressing a lifeless baby.

Sometimes I even wonder if he felt this last gesture of tenderness or if he just sat there, next to me, motionless while watching an inconsolable mother.

Think of that moment that completely breaks your heart. You know. That moment you saw your mother crying. Are you feeling that grief, that heaviness? That moment that scatters your heart entirely.

My second oldest memory is already so much cheerful.

There it was. My mother, in her jeans’ jump suit, pregnant again in 1998 (baby I on her way!). She looked remarkably beautiful.

Happier days, right?

Right.

Either way, lets get to the point with all of this.

There’s a pattern over here. Generally when you ask someone the same question, that’s what people answer. A sad episode. A bad moment. A life or death type of thing. The day they lost someone or something.

A thing I noticed along time ago (especially because I was one of them until recently) is that people tend to define themselves and their major breakpoints in life by bad/sad episodes.

Yes. Bad things change you. They change your perspective. They make you question your life and your choices.

How can you expect to perceive the light if you don’t experience darkness?

Here’s what no one ever told you: You’re not defined by your lack of luck or by loss or any other dreadful moment.

You are defined by how you deal with those moments. By how much you grow. By which perspective you choose to see your life afterwards.

That being said:

The day that marked my life the most was the day I decided to finally start to be happy!

And I started taking responsibility for my choices, my life and my happiness. I fight for my happiness everyday. (Do you?)

So, think about it. If you had to answer again, what was really the day that marked your life?

P.S. I’ll tell you all about the journey back to my happiness 💙. Just Follow me (👍) and stay tuned (♬).

Remember those frustrating times when you were watching a video or a movie online and all of the sudden you experienced a loss of quality? Now it can be possible to stream high-quality videos in congested network environments in a faster and virtuous way. Conceived to boost video streaming, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), or H.265, is a video compression standard designed to substantially improve coding efficiency when compared to its precedent, the Advanced Video Coding (AVC), or H.264. With an increasing growth of video streaming on the Internet over popular websites such as Netflix and YouTube, and with 4K cameras gaining new ground in the market, a considerable amount of storage and bandwidth is required. HEVC promises a 50% storage reduction as its algorithm uses efficient coding by encoding video at the lowest possible bit rate while maintaining a high image quality level.

As many of us, Stream4s believes HEVC will revolutionize how video data is displayed, either online, on television and even in the surveillance industry. With this new format, image resolutions around 8192×4320 become possible to display and stream. To demonstrate the incredible power of this codec, a subjective video performance study was made between these two codecs to understand how intensely is this bit reduction. The study showed the bit reduction is inversely proportional to the video image quality, where HEVC/H.265 presented a bit reduction of 52% at 480p and 64% at 4K UHD when compared to H.264. Besides this outstanding bit reduction, when compared to H.264, HEVC/H.265 delivers a significantly better visual quality, when compressed to the same file size or bitrate.

Powerful Streaming — at what cost?

Even though HEVC is already finalized, it is still not popular. Apart from the fact that the codec is patented by various parties and it is associated with high licensing fees, HEVC/H.265 comes with the trade-off requiring almost 10x more computing power. This new technology is on standby until the hardware market adapts to it, as it happened already with H.264, launched in 2003 but only gaining popularity a few years later. Hardware manufacturers are already starting to adjust their products to support this new format to fulfill the intense market need. Even though some softwares such as VideoLAN are capable to decode such codec, software decoding, although more flexible, is not an option since hardware decoding is usually faster and saves battery life tremendously. Nevertheless, hardware still takes up valuable disc space on either the CPU or GPU.

HVEC vs H.264 — a technical comparison

Both codecs work by comparing different parts of a video frame in order to find the ones that are redundant within the subsequent frames. These areas are replaced with a short information, describing the original pixels. What differs HEVC/H.265 from H.264 is the ability to expand the size of these areas into bigger or smaller blocks, called coding tree units (CTU) in the HEVC/H.265. The pattern CTU sizes can be from 4×4 to 64×64, whilst H.264 only allows a maximum block-size of 16×16 (CTU is particular feature of HEVC). An improved CTU segmentation, as well as a better motion compensation and spatial prediction require much more signal processing capability for video compression, but has a significantly less impact on the amount of computation needed for decompression. Motion compensated prediction, another great progress in HEVC/H.265, references blocks of pixels to another area in the same frame (intra prediction) or in another frame (inter prediction).

As mentioned above, CTU are one of the HEVC’s main coding tools. Apart from this, the codec relies on paralleling processing computing techniques to make it even faster and supports advanced extensions as AVX/AVX2 and FMA3/FMA4. The individual rectangular regions that divide the image are independent and enable parallel processing. Besides, HEVC also has another feature that H.264 doesn’t possess: Wavefront Parallel Processing (WPP), a sort of decision tree that grants a more productive and effectual compression.

Several other coding tools used in H.264 are continued in this new codec, although with some slight, yet unprecedented, changes. The lossless data compression entropy coding, the Context-adaptive binary arithmetic coding (CABAC), is preserved in HEVC/H.265 but in a slightly upgraded version. Intra prediction is another feature that suffered significantly improvements in relation to H.264. HEVC stipulates 33 directional modes while H.264 limits them to 8 and allows DC intra prediction as well as planar prediction. An additional improvement is mainly due to the Adaptive Motion Vector Prediction, the newest method for inter prediction as it uses the picture information in a more concise way.

Thanks to the notably improvements that can be seen in this new codec, Stream4s is confident that HEVC/H.265 will become the universal standard codec, as soon as the hardware catches up.

HEVC/H.265 not only has a better visual quality at a low storage and bandwidth but also a dexterously coding algorithm by encoding motion vectors with much greater precision and minimal residual errors. Besides the preeminent method used for inter prediction, this new codec also presents an improved deblocking filter and sample adaptive offset to reduce even more artifacts.

It’s merely tales. Tales as old as time.

She shouted.

But I’m not old. I’m wise. I’m the wizard of life!

Retorted the Time.

She flinched. Like she always does. She never trusts herself. This was the first time that Time actually spoke to her.

In fact, Time had stopped for her before. Time had stole from her before. But had never speak to her before.

You’re an incurable romantic. Hopeless!

She asked. The darn Time! The anathematize, excruciating Time! How dare he?!

You are too! Be patient and give me time. I’ll take care of you.

What did Time mean with “give me time?”. She thought he gone mad more than usual. How can someone give time…to Time? How are you suppose to give that time away when neither she, you or anyone have it?

How many of us have felt the clock ticking and immediately stopping? And who can blame the ones who rebelled against Time?!
When your love fails, Time ceases to exist. When your love fails, Time becomes someone else. When your love fails, you become just one more in the crowd. You stop running against Time itself. When your love fails you get lost. Days become longer and longer. Pointless. Heavy. Countless.

Happy is not a word in your vocabulary anymore.

She felt that. She felt abandoned by Time. Time departed together with her her love. And all she wanted was her love back.

Everyday she wakes up disillusioned. Disillusioned for waking up and Time didn’t take her along. Everyday she falls asleep and implores Time to take her away. But Time never does.