UNITED NATIONS, August 30 -- The video footage depicting the Sri Lankan Army committing summary executions will be raised to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon during his impending visit to Oslo, Norwegian Minister of the Environment and International Development Erik Solheim has vowed. On August 26 at a regular press briefing before Ban left New York, Inner City Press asked his Spokesperson Michele Montas if he or she had seen the footage, and for a UN Secretariat comment. There was no response to the video, and so the the link to the video was provided. In the four days since there has been no UN Secretariat comment.
Later on August 26 at a hastily convened stakeout in front of the UN Security Council, Inner City Press asked August's Council president and UK Ambassador John Sawers about the footage. He said he'd yet to see it but had read about it, and found it disturbing. He said the the UK would expect it to be investigated, by Sri Lanka in the first instance.
Sri Lanka has condemned Solheim for calling for a UN investigation. But it has not conducted any investigation of its own: its High Commissioner in London issued a denial as soon as the video came out. Is it Sri Lanka's vituperative reaction or something else, observers wonder, that is holding Ban back from commenting on the widely circulated video?
© Inner City Press
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Channel 4 video: The technical truth
(By : Siri Hewawitharana)
As a specialist in video coding I decided to look into this video footage and verify the technical features of the video against the claim that it came from a mobile phone. I was a head of R&D in a Major British Broadcasting company and later worked in global companies like Cisco and Cable and Wireless and Ericsson.
Looking at the footage, the first thing I found strange was the high quality of the video and lack of cascading effects and motion blur associated with mobile video coding.
I got hold of an original video that was on Quicktime format and another that was on AVI format and decide to put them through various analysers to see origin of the video from the mobile source.
Looking at the results, I can say this video never came from a mobile phone since the original video is of quite a high standard and motion vectors were of high quality. (That never comes from a mobile phone). I also found that Tamilnet had tried to put this video on 3GPP format associated with mobile phones. This also gives some clues since mobile phones that are older are on 3GPP format, while all the new ones are of H-264 which is mpeg4 part 10.
The original video is from a good quality video camera and later some one has tried to transfer this to 3GPP QT format where we can see some cascading errors.
I was involved with global Broadcast R&G for almost 25 years and Ch-4 used to have good people but it has now gone down to gutter journalism. Any broadcast engineer should have picked the lack of cascading errors on the video since Ch-4 uses Flash format on their web site.
Courtesy : The Island
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