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BitJazz Inc. Company Milestones
2012 December
BitJazz ceases operation.
2007 February
SheerVideo for Mac Intel and SheerVideo for Mac Universal Binary ship.
2006 November
The BitJazz website is redesigned for increased flexibility and ease of use, with an all-new look.
2006 April
BitJazz makes a broadcast video breakthrough with an ultra-high-quality real-time 2:1 video codec
(code-named CutTime) that achieves bandwidth reduction without smoothing
and shows no visible degradation even on individual pixels in high-detail real-world footage.
2005 December
The first beta version of SheerVideo with support for RGB[A] 10bv (10-bit video-range RGB[A]) pixels is released.
2005 November
The first international edition of SheerVideo is released, adding nine languages to the codec user interface.
2005 June
The first beta version of SheerVideo AVI for Windows is released.
2005 February
SheerVideo HD Pro and SheerVideo HD Reader for Mac OS X and Mac OS 8|9 are released,
supporting real-time capture and playback of full-resolution (1920 x 1080 pixels/frame)
full-frame-rate (30 frames/second) high-definition video.
2004 October
BitJazz Inc. delivers SheerVideo 2.0,
including Synchromy, its revolutionary nondestructive color-conversion engine,
incorporated into SheerVideo Pro and SheerVideo Reader,
which now include Sheer RGB[A] 10bf, Sheer Y'CbCr[A] 10bv 4:4:4[:4], and Sheer Y'CbCr[A] 10bv 4:2:2[:4],
(all both pogressive and interlaced) in addition to the earlier 8-bit codecs.
All Sheer codecs now support an optional alpha channel,
and all automatically interconvert between all standard high-quality pixel formats
to the highest accuracy theoretically possible.
2004 April
At NAB in Las Vegas, BitJazz announces a breakthrough in color-space conversion technology
(code-named Sticky Color), featuring perfectly lossless interconversion
between all standard RGB and Y'CbCr color spaces.
2003 November
Beta testing of high-precision SheerVideo codecs begins.
2003 October
BitJazz Inc. delivers SheerVideo Pro and SheerVideo Reader, the fastest video codec in the world,
comprising lossless real-time QuickTime image compression, image decompression, and image transcoder components
for Sheer RGB[A] 8b, Sheer Y'CbCr[A] 8bv 4:2:2[:4], Sheer Y'CbCr 8bv 4:2:2, and Sheer Y'CbCr 8bw 4:2:2,
as well as the generic Sheer codec, all in progressive as well as interlaced flavors, for both Mac and Windows.
2003 January
At MacWorld in San Francisco, BitJazz Inc. previews the first beta version of SheerVideo under NDA to industry leaders.
The revolutionary codec turns the video compression world upside-down:
Previously, higher accuracy has always meant slower speed,
but SheerVideo, despite having the highest possible quality (perfect), is faster than all high-quality lossy codecs.
2002 July
SheerVideo, a radically pared-down version of the BitJazz nondestructive image compression algorithm
(code-named Zzap! + Poww!),
attains breakthrough lossless compression and decompression speeds of 30 MB/s on a 400 MHz G3
while still maintaining a mean compression power of 2.2 for high-detail RGB footage,
making it fast enough for real-time capture and display of standard-definition RGB video.
2001 August
BitJazz Inc. delivers real-time cross-platform 3-D & 3-D software renderer for corporate client,
featuring transparency and texturing.
2000 June
BitJazz Inc. delivers JavaMovie, a pioneer streaming audio & video codec for e-mail and the web, for a corporate client.
Written entirely in portable Java 1, JavaMovie features antialiased blending, masking, and scaling,
with a featherweight (<17KB) decompressor that can be downloaded over a T0 modem in 2.5 seconds,
and can display four times the resolution or frame rate of any comparable codec.
1999 January
At MacWorld in San Francisco, BitJazz Inc. announces PhotoJazz Expert for Mac and Windows,
including the new PhotoJazz QT module comprising QuickTime image compression, image decompression, graphics import, and graphics export components,
and enhancing the entire product line to support high-precision color of up to 16 bits per channel.
[Note that this is years before Microcosm arrived with the fraudulent claim of being the first 64-bit QuickTime codec.]
1998 October
BitJazz Inc. delivers PhotoJazz Pro and PhotoJazz Reader, including
PhotoJazz, PhotoJazz XT, and BitJazz SDK (software development kit) for Mac.
1998 September
At Seybold in San Francisco, BitJazz Inc. announces PhotoJazz Pro and PhotoJazz Reader,
comprising the PhotoJazz plug-in for Adobe Photoshop
and the PhotoJazz XT module for QuarkXPress,
using the BitJazz nondestructive image compression engine,
the world's most powerful lossless image compressor,
with support for RGB, CMYK, Lab, duotone, Grayscale, and multichannel images,
with any number of alpha channels and spot-color channels,
along with ICC color profiles and CRC data-integrity verification.
1998 June
The BitJazz nondestructive image compression algorithm (code-named Alice)
attains a breakthrough mean lossless compression power of 2.47
for high-detail real-world images,
at a speed 3 times faster than PNG,
far surpassing our marketing goals.
1998 May
BitJazz Inc. incorporates in Marin County as a California C Corporation.
1997 September
Andreas Wittenstein founds BitJazz, with initial focus on lossless compression of high-detail real-world images,
a poorly served market with a simple objective measure of merit: lossless compression power.
The competitors at the time are
RLE (Run-Length Encoding), with a mean compression power of 1.03;
Huffman coding, 1.44;
LZ-78 (Lempel-Ziv-Walsh 1978, as in TIFF-LZW), 1.58;
and LZ-77 (Lev-Zimpel 1977, as in Portable Network Graphics), 1.75.
Our marketing survey shows that we would have to average 2.0 or better for the product to be considered worthwhile.
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