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Mobile phone company Orange this week displayed a prototype video-capable
mobile phone at London’s Live 98 consumer technology exhibition. It uses a
proprietary image compression system developed at Strathclyde University that
can send 12 frames per second over 9.6 kilobit-per-second mobile phone networks.
Last week, Philips demonstrated a rival system that uses MPEG-4, the agreed
compression standard for very-low-data-rate-video for mobile phones. MPEG-4 is
designed to cut the data rate by distinguishing a stationary background from
moving objects and compressing them separately.

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