[HN Gopher] Leonardo Chiariglione - Co-founder of MPEG
___________________________________________________________________
Leonardo Chiariglione - Co-founder of MPEG
Author : eggspurt
Score : 199 points
Date : 2025-08-07 10:09 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (leonardo.chiariglione.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (leonardo.chiariglione.org)
| wheybags wrote:
| As someone who hasn't had any exposure to the human stories
| behind mpeg before, it feels to me like it's been a force for
| evil since long before 2020. Patents on h264, h265, and even mp3
| have been holding the industry back for decades. Imagine what we
| might have if their iron grip on codecs was broken.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Enough codecs out there. Just no adoption.
| wheybags wrote:
| Yes, because mpeg got there first, and now their dominance is
| baked into silicon with hardware acceleration. It's starting
| to change at last but we have a long way to go. That way
| would be a lot easier if their patent portfolio just died.
| egeozcan wrote:
| This might be an oversimplification, but as a consumer, I
| think I see a catch-22 for new codecs. Companies need a big
| incentive to invest in them, which means the codec has to be
| technically superior and safe from hidden patent claims. But
| the only way to know if it's safe is for it to be widely used
| for a long time. Of course, it can't get widely used without
| company support in the first place. So, while everyone waits,
| the technology is no longer superior, and the whole thing
| fizzles out.
| Taek wrote:
| Companies only need a big incentive to invest in new codecs
| because creating a codec that has a simple incremental
| improvement would violate existing patents.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Jxl has been around for years.
|
| Av1 for 7
|
| The problem is every platform wants to force their own
| codec, and get earn royalties from the rest of the world.
|
| They literally sabotaging it. Jxl support even got removed
| from chrome.
|
| Investment in adopting in software is next to 0.
|
| In hardware it's a different story, and I'm not sure to
| what extent which codec can be properly accelerated
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Because every codec has 3+ different patent pools wanting
| rent. Each with different terms.
| rs186 wrote:
| Not all codecs are equal, and to be honest, most are probably
| not optimized/suitable for today's applications, otherwise
| Google wouldn't have invented their own codec (which then
| gets adopted widely, fortunately).
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Possibly, nothing. Codec development is slow and expensive.
| Free codecs only came along at all because Google decided to
| subsidize development but that became possible only 15 years or
| so after MPEG was born, and it's hardly a robust strategy. Plus
| free codecs were often built by acquiring companies that had
| previously been using IP licensing as a business model rather
| than from-scratch development.
| wheybags wrote:
| It's not just about new codecs. There's also people making
| products that would use codecs just deciding not to because
| of the patent hassle.
| newsclues wrote:
| This is the sort of project that should be developed and
| released via open source from academia.
|
| Audio and video codecs, document formats like PDF, are all
| foundational to computing and modern life from government to
| business, so there is a great incentive to make it all open,
| and free.
| oblio wrote:
| You're also describing technologies with universal use and
| potential for long term rent seeking.
|
| Basically MBA drool material.
| newsclues wrote:
| Yeah, and if MBAs want to reap that reward, they need to
| fund the development exclusively without government
| funding.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Universities love patent licensing. I don't think academia
| is the solution you're looking for.
| yxhuvud wrote:
| The solution to that is to remove the ability to patent
| codecs.
| master-lincoln wrote:
| I think we should go a step further and remove the
| ability to patent algorithms (software)
| immibis wrote:
| Some people even think we should remove intellectual
| property.
| newsclues wrote:
| So do companies.
|
| But education receives a lot of funding from the
| government.
|
| I think academia should build open source technology
| (that people can commercialize on their own with the
| expertise).
|
| Higher education doesn't need to have massive endowments
| of real estate and patent portfolio to further educ...
| administration salaries and vanity building projects.
|
| Academia can serve the world with technology and educated
| minds.
| nullc wrote:
| Incentives in academia as things are is ... uh. Not so
| awesome.
|
| My expectation from experience when implementing something
| from a DSP paper is that the result will be unreproducable
| without contacting the authors for some undisclosed table
| of magic constants. After obtaining it, the results may
| match but only for the test images they reported results
| on. Results on anything else will be much worse.
|
| Also it's normal for techniques from the literature to have
| computational/memory bandwidth costs two orders of
| magnitude greater than justified for even their (usually
| exaggerated) stated levels of performance.
|
| And then their comparison points are almost always
| inevitably implemented so naively as to make the comparison
| useless.
|
| It's always difficult because improvements in this domain
| (like many other engineering domains) are significantly
| about tradeoffs ... and tradeoffs are difficult to weigh in
| a pure research environment without the context of concrete
| applications. They're also difficult to weigh with
| implementation cleverness having such a big impact
| particularly since industry heavily drains academia of
| naturally skilled software engineers.
|
| And as other comments have pointed out, academia is in some
| sense among the worst of the patent abusers. They'll often
| develop technology just far enough to lay patent mines
| around the field, but not far enough to produce something
| useful out of it. The risk that you spend the significant
| effort to turn a concept into something usable only to have
| some patent holder show up with a decade old patent to
| shake you down is a big incentive against investment.
| thinkingQueen wrote:
| Not sure why you are downvoted as you seem to be one of the
| few who knows even a little about codec development.
|
| And regarding "royalty-free" codecs please read this
| https://ipeurope.org/blog/royalty-free-standards-are-not-
| fre...
| bjoli wrote:
| At least two of the members of ipeurope are companies you
| could use as ann argument why we shouldn't have patents at
| all.
| blendergeek wrote:
| > And regarding "royalty-free" codecs please read this
| https://ipeurope.org/blog/royalty-free-standards-are-not-
| fre...
|
| Unsurprisingly companies that are losing money because
| their rent-seeking on media codecs is now over will spread
| FUD [0] about royalty free codecs.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear%2C_uncertainty_and_doubt
| chrismorgan wrote:
| That article is a scare piece designed to spread fear,
| uncertainty and doubt, to prop up an industry that has
| already collapsed because _everyone_ else hated them, and
| make out that they're the good guys and you should go back
| to how things were.
| cnst wrote:
| _> The catch is that while the AV1 developers offer their
| patents (assuming they have any) on a royalty-free basis,
| in return they require users of AV1 to agree to license
| their own patents royalty-free back to them._
|
| Such a huge catch that the companies that offer you a
| royalty-free license, only do so on the condition that
| you're not gonna turn around and abuse your own patents
| against them!
|
| How exactly is that a bad thing?
|
| How is it different from the (unwritten) social contracts
| of all humans and even of animals? How is it different from
| the primal instincts?
| pornel wrote:
| IP law, especially defence against submarine patents, makes
| codec development expensive.
|
| In the early days of MPEG codec development was difficult,
| because most computers weren't capable of encoding video, and
| the field was in its infancy.
|
| However, by the end of '00s computers were fast enough for
| anybody to do video encoding R&D, and there was a ton of
| research to build upon. At that point MPEG's role changed
| from being a pioneer in the field to being an incumbent with
| a patent minefield, stopping others from moving the field
| forward.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| IP law _and_ the need for extremely smart people with a
| rare set of narrow skills. It 's not like codec development
| magically happens for free if you ignore patents.
|
| The point is, if there had been no incentives to develop
| codecs, there would have been no MPEG. Other people would
| have stepped into the void and sometimes did, e.g.
| RealVideo, but without legal IP protection the codecs would
| just have been entirely undocumented and heavily
| obfuscated, relying on tamper-proofed ASICs much faster.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| That sounds like the 90s argument against FLOSS: without
| the incentive for people to sell software, nobody would
| write it.
| strogonoff wrote:
| Without IP protections that allow copyleft to exist
| arguably there would be no FOSS. When anything you
| publish can be leveraged and expropriated by Microsoft et
| al. without them being obligated to contribute back or
| even credit you, you are just an unpaid ghost engineer
| for big tech.
| immibis wrote:
| I thought your argument was that Microsoft wouldn't be
| able to exist in that world. Which is it?
| strogonoff wrote:
| Why would it not be able to exist?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| This is still the argument for software copyright. And I
| think it's still a pretty persuasive argument, despite
| the success of FLOSS. To this day, there is very little
| successful consumer software. Outside of browsers,
| Ubuntu, Libre Office, and GIMP are more or less it, at
| least outside certain niches. And even they are a pretty
| tiny compared to Windows/MacOS/iOS/Android, Office/Google
| Docs, or Photoshop.
|
| The browsers are an interesting case. Neither Chrome nor
| Edge are _really_ open source, despite Chromium being so,
| and they are both funded by advertising and marketing
| money from huge corporations. Safari is of course closed
| source. And Firefox is an increasingly tiny runner-up. So
| I don 't know if I'd really count Chromium as a FLOSS
| success story.
|
| Overall, I don't think FLOSS has had the kind of effect
| that many activists were going for. What has generally
| happened is that companies building software have
| realized that there is a lot of value to be found in
| treating FLOSS software as a kind of barter agreement
| between companies, where maybe Microsoft helps improve
| Linux for the benefit of all, but in turn it gets to use,
| say, Google's efforts on Chromium, and so on. The fact
| that other companies then get to mooch off of these big
| collaborations doesn't really matter compared to getting
| rid of the hassle of actually setting up explicit
| agreements with so many others.
| _alternator_ wrote:
| The value of OSS is estimated at about $9 trillion
| dollars. That's more valuable than any company on earth.
|
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=46931
| 48
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Sure. Almost all of it supported by companies who sell
| software, hardware, or ads.
| sitkack wrote:
| > don't think FLOSS has had the kind of effect that many
| activists were going for
|
| The entire internet, end to end, runs on FLOSS.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| If you ignore the proprietary routers, the proprietary
| search engines, the proprietary browsers that people use
| out-of-the-box (Edge, Safari and even Chrome), and the
| fact that Linux is a clone of a proprietary OS.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| That's great, but it's not what FLOSS activists hoped and
| fight for.
|
| It's still almost impossible to have a digital life that
| doesn't involve significant use of proprietary software,
| and the vast majority of users do their computing almost
| exclusively through proprietary software. The fact that
| this proprietary software is a bit of glue on top of a
| bunch of FLOSS libraries possibly running on a FLOSS
| kernel that uses FLOSS libraries to talk to a FLOSS
| router doesn't really buy much actual freedom for the end
| users. They're still locked in to the proprietary
| software vendors just as much as they were in the 90s
| (perhaps paying with their private data instead of actual
| money).
| immibis wrote:
| On my new phone I made sure to install F-Droid first
| thing, and it's surprising how many basic functions are
| covered by free software if you just bother to look.
| thwarted wrote:
| >> _That sounds like the 90s argument against FLOSS_
|
| > _This is still the argument for software copyright._
|
| And open source licensing is based on and relies on
| copyright. Patents and copyright are different kinds of
| intellectual property protection and incentivize
| different things. Copyright in some sense encourages
| participation and collaboration because you retain
| ownership of your code. The way patents are used
| discourages participation and collaboration.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Software wasn't always covered by copyright, and people
| wrote it all the same. In fact they even sold it, just
| built-to-order as opposed to any kind of retail mass
| market. (Technically, there _was_ no mass market for
| computers back then so that goes without saying.)
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| That argument seems to have been proven basically
| correct, given that a _ton_ of open source development
| happens only because companies with deep pockets pay for
| the developers ' time. Which makes perfect sense - no
| matter how altruistic a person is, they have to pay rent
| and buy food just like everyone else, and a lot of people
| aren't going to have time/energy to develop software for
| free after they get home from their 9-5.
| sitkack wrote:
| You continue to make the same unsubstantiated claims
| about codecs being hard and expensive. These same tropes
| were said about every other field, and even if true, we
| have tens of thousands of folks that would like to
| participate, but are locked out due to broken IP law.
|
| The firewall of patents exist precisely because digital
| video is a way to shakedown the route media would have to
| travel to get to the end user.
|
| Codecs are not, "harder than" compilers, yet the field of
| compilers was blown completely open by GCC. Capital
| didn't see the market opportunity because there wasn't
| the same possibility of being a gatekeeper for so much
| attention and money.
|
| The patents aren't because it is difficult, the patents
| are there because they can extract money from the revenue
| streams.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Codecs not harder than compilers? Sounds like an
| unsubstantiated claim!
|
| Modern video codecs are harder than compilers. You have
| to have good ASIC development expertise to do them right,
| for example, which you don't need for compilers. It's
| totally feasible for a single company to develop a
| leading edge compiler whereas you don't see that in video
| codecs, historically they've been collaborations.
| pornel wrote:
| (I've worked on both codecs and compilers. You may be
| underestimating the difficulty of implementing sound
| optimizers).
|
| Hardware vendors don't benefit from the patent pools.
| They usually get nothing from them, and are burdened by
| having to pass per-unit licensing costs on to their
| customers.
|
| It's true that designing an ASIC-friendly codec needs
| special considerations, and benefits from close
| collaboration with hardware vendors, but it's not magic.
| The general constraints are well-known to codec designers
| (in open-source too). The commercial incentives for
| collaboration are already there -- HW vendors will profit
| from selling the chipsets or licensing the HW design.
|
| The patent situation is completely broken. The commercial
| codecs "invent" coding features of dubious utility,
| mostly unnecessary tweaks on old stuff, because everyone
| wants to have their patent in the pool. It ends up being
| a political game, because the engineering goal is to make
| the simplest most effective codec, but the financial
| incentive is to approve everyone's patented add-ons
| regardless of whether they're worth the complexity or
| not.
|
| Meanwhile everything that isn't explicitly covered by a
| patent needs to be proven to be 20 years old, and this
| limits MPEG too. Otherwise nobody can prove that there
| won't be any submarine patent that could be used to set
| up a competing patent pool and extort MPEG's customers.
|
| So our latest-and-greatest codecs are built on 20-year-
| old ideas, with or without some bells and whistles added.
| The ASICs often don't use the bells and whistles anyway,
| because the extra coding features may not even be
| suitable for ASICs, and usually have diminishing returns
| (like 3x slower encode for 1% better quality/filesize
| ratio).
| mafuy wrote:
| With all due respect, to say that codecs are more
| difficult to get right than optimizing compilers is
| absurd.
|
| The only reason I can think of why you would say this is
| that nowadays we have good compiler infrastructure that
| works with many hardware architectures and it has become
| easy to create or modify compilers. But that's only due
| to the fact that it was so insanely complicated that it
| had to be redone from scratch to become generalizible,
| which led to LLVM and the subsequent direct and indirect
| benefits everywhere. That's the work of thousands of the
| smartest people over 30 years.
|
| There is no way that a single company could develop a
| state of the art compiler without using an existing one.
| Intel had a good independent compiler and gave up because
| open source had become superior.
|
| For what it's worth, look at the state of FPGA compilers.
| They are so difficult that every single one of them that
| exists is utter shit. I wish it were different.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| _> There is no way that a single company could develop a
| state of the art compiler without using an existing one.
| Intel had a good independent compiler and gave up because
| open source had become superior._
|
| Not only can they do it but some companies have done it
| several times. Look at Oracle: there's HotSpot's C2
| compiler, and the Graal compiler. Both state of the art,
| both developed by one company.
|
| Not unique. Microsoft and Apple have built many compilers
| alone over their lifespan.
|
| This whole thing is insanely subjective, but that's why
| I'm making fun of the "unsubstantiated claim" bit. How
| exactly are you meant to objectively compare this?
| cornholio wrote:
| That's unnecessarily harsh. Patent pools exist to promote
| collaboration in a world with aggressive IP legislation,
| they are an answer to a specific environment and they
| incentivize participants to share their IP at a reasonable
| price to third parties. The incentive being that you will
| be left out of the pool, the other members will work around
| your patents while not licensing their own patents to you,
| so your own IP is now worthless since you can't work around
| theirs.
|
| As long as IP law continues in the same form, the
| alternative to that is completely closed agreements among
| major companies that will push their own proprietary
| formats and aggressively enforce their patents.
|
| The fair world where everyone is free to create a new
| thing, improve upon the frontier codecs, and get a fair
| reward for their efforts, is simply a fantasy without
| patent law reform. In the current geopolitical climate,
| it's very very unlikely for nations where these
| developments traditionally happened, such as US and western
| Europe, to weaken their IP laws.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| They actually messed up the basic concept of a patent
| pool, and that is the key to their failure.
|
| They didn't get people to agree on terms up front, they
| made the final codec with interlocking patents embedded
| from hundreds of parties and made no attempt to avoid
| random outsider's patents and then once it was done tried
| to come to a licence agreement when every minor patent
| holder had an effective veto on the resulting pool.
| That's how you end up with multiple pools plus people who
| own patents and aren't members of any of the pools. It's
| ridiculous.
|
| My minor conspiracy theory is that if you did it right,
| then you'd basically end up with something close to open
| source codecs as that's the best overall outcome.
|
| Everyone benefits from only putting in freely available
| ideas. So if you want to gouge people with your patents
| you need to mess this up and "accidentally" create a
| patent mess.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Patent pools exist to make infeasible system look not so
| infeasible so people won't recoginize how it's stifling
| innovation and abolish it.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> That's unnecessarily harsh. Patent pools exist to
| promote collaboration in a world with aggressive IP
| legislation, they are an answer to a specific environment
| and they incentivize participants to share their IP at a
| reasonable price to third parties.
|
| You can say that, but this discussion is in response to
| the guy who started MPEG and later shut it down. I don't
| think he'd say its harsh.
| Taek wrote:
| I avoided a career in codecs after spending about a year in
| college learning about them. The patent minefield meant I
| couldn't meaningfully build incremental improvements on what
| existed, and the idea of dilligently dancing around existing
| patents and then releasing something which intentionally
| lacked state-of-the-art ideas wasn't compelling.
|
| Codec development is slow and expensive becuase you can't
| just release a new codec, you have to dance around patents.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Well, a career in codec development means you'd have done
| it as a job, and so you'd have been angling for a job at
| the kind of places that enter into the patent pools and
| contribute to the standards.
| voakbasda wrote:
| I don't know about you, but I became a software engineer
| to write code for myself and my own interests, not to get
| a job where all of my labor will be vacuumed up and
| exploited to maximize anonymous shareholder value.
| scottLobster wrote:
| That's all great and noble, but at the end of the day
| it's about who has the resources. If you can get the
| necessary resources yourself and have complete control
| over their allocation, congratulations you won the
| jackpot of life. Plenty of people, some of whom are
| smarter and better than you, tried to do the same and
| failed due to reasons beyond their control. Try to remain
| a good person and not waste the opportunity if you ever
| get to that stage.
|
| For the remaining 99.99% of us, we have to negotiate for
| resources as best we can. That typically means maximizing
| shareholder value in exchange for a cut of the profits.
| Not all your labor needs to be vacuumed up, I make enough
| to support my family, live a relatively safe and
| comfortable life with some minor luxuries and likely a
| secure retirement. Better deal than most people get
| today.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Why are you arguing so hard against someone that simply
| stated "I was interested in pursuing this topic as a
| career when I was in college but then I learned more
| about the field and decided to pursue something else"?
| scottLobster wrote:
| Different posters, Taek made the post you're referring
| to, I'm responding to voakbasda.
|
| Regardless, why are you white-knighting for him? He made
| a moral argument about career choice, and I responded to
| said argument as someone who took the other side. This is
| a discussion board, we discuss things.
| nullc wrote:
| More codec development work is done outside of patent-
| centric organizations by a significant margin. Just like
| any other domain technological/communication standard the
| most significant impetuous comes from the drive to make
| superior products.
|
| Work inside patent driven development groups also suffers
| substantial complexity bloat because there is a huge
| incentive for each participant to get a patentable
| component into the standard in order to benefit from
| cross-licensing. Often these 'improvements' are
| insignificant or even a net loss (the cost of the
| bitstream to signal them on is greater than their
| improvement over any credible collection of material).
| astrange wrote:
| Software patents aren't an issue in much of the world; the
| reason I thought there wasn't much of a career in codec
| development was that it was obvious that it needed to move
| down into custom ASICs to be power-efficient, at which
| point you can no longer develop new ones until people
| replace all their hardware.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Software patents aren't an issue in most of the world.
| Codecs however are used all over the world. No one is
| going to use a codec that is illegal to use in the US and
| EU.
| astrange wrote:
| EU would be one of the places that doesn't have software
| patents, which is why VLC is based there.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| It's not that simple. Software patents exists in the EU,
| the requirements are much more strict though. For example
| Netflix was ordered to cease their use of H265 in
| germany: https://www.nexttv.com/news/achtung-baby-
| netflix-loses-paten...
| dylan604 wrote:
| By the time software is robust enough to make it worth
| while to be placed into hardware, it's pretty damn
| efficient. For something like ASICs, you could at least
| upgrade the firmware with new code, but what about
| Apple's chips that do the decoding? Can they be upgraded,
| or does that mean needing to wait for the M++ chip?
| TheTon wrote:
| Typically you wait for the new chip.
|
| Sometimes there are hybrid coders that can use some of
| the resources on the chip and some shader code to handle
| new codecs or codec features after the fact, but you pay
| a power and performance penalty to use these.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Why not just use AI?
| account42 wrote:
| Why not ask about blockchains?
| ghm2199 wrote:
| For the uninitiated, could you describe why codec development
| is slow and expensive?
| thinkingQueen wrote:
| It's a bit like developing an F1 car. Or a cutting edge
| airplane. Lots of small optimizations that have to work
| together. Sometimes big new ideas emerge but those are
| rare.
|
| Until the new codec comes to together all those small
| optimizations aren't really worth much, so it's a long term
| research project with potentially zero return on
| investement.
|
| And yes, most of the small optimizations are patented,
| something that I've come to understand isnt't viewed very
| favorably by most.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> And yes, most of the small optimizations are patented,
| something that I've come to understand isn't viewed very
| favorably by most.
|
| Codecs are like infrastructure not products. From cameras
| to servers to iPhones, they all have to use the same
| codecs to interoperate. If someone comes along with a
| small optimization it's hard enough to deploy that across
| the industry. If it's patented you've got another
| obstacle: nobody wants to pay the incremental cost for a
| small improvement (it's not even incremental cost once
| you've got free codecs, it's a complete hassle).
| mike_hearn wrote:
| They're hardware accelerated so it's not worth making a new
| codec until you have a big improvement over the prior
| baseline, because it takes a long time to manufacture and
| roll out devices that are better. Verifying an optimization
| is worth it requires testing against a big library of
| videos using standardized perception metrics, it requires
| ensuring there's an efficient way to decode it in both
| hardware and software, including efficient encoding. It's
| easy to improve one kind of input but regress another. Most
| of the low hanging fruit is taken already. Just the usual
| stuff that makes advancing the frontier hard.
| bsindicatr3 wrote:
| > Free codecs only came along ... and it's hardly a robust
| strategy
|
| Maybe you don't remember the way that the gif format (there
| was no jpeg, png, or webp initially) had problems with
| licensing, and then years later having scares about it
| potentially becoming illegal to use gifs. Here's a mention of
| some of the problems with Unisys, though I didn't find info
| about these scares on Wikipedia's GIF or Compuserve pages:
|
| https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-in-1994-the-company-
| wh...
|
| Similarly, the awful history of digital content restriction
| technology in-general (DRM, etc.). I'm not against companies
| trying to protect assets, but data assets historically over
| all time are inherently prone to "use", whether that use is
| intentional or unintentional by the one that provided the
| data. The problem has always been about the means of
| dissemination, not that the data itself needed to be encoded
| with a lock that anyone with the key or means to get/make one
| could unlock nor that it should need to call home, basically
| preventing the user from actually legitimately being able to
| use the data.
| adzm wrote:
| > I didn't find info about these scares on Wikipedia's GIF
| or Compuserve pages
|
| The GIF page on wikipedia has an entire section for the
| patent troubles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Unisys_an
| d_LZW_patent_enfo...
| tomrod wrote:
| Free codecs have been available a long time, surely, as we
| could install them in Linux distributions in 2005 or earlier?
|
| (I know nothing about the legal side of all this, just
| remembering the time period of Ubuntu circa 2005-2008).
| zappb wrote:
| Free codecs without patent issues were limited to things
| like Vorbis which never got wide support. There were FOSS
| codecs for patented algorithms, but those had legal issues
| in places that enforce software patents.
| notpushkin wrote:
| > which never got wide support
|
| Source? I've seen Vorbis used in a whole bunch of places.
|
| Notably, Spotify only used Vorbis for a while (still
| does, but also includes AAC now, for Apple platforms I
| think).
| scott_w wrote:
| Pre-Spotify, MP3 players would usually only ship with MP3
| support (thus the name), so people would only rip to MP3.
| Ask any millennial and most of them will never have heard
| of Ogg.
| notpushkin wrote:
| Of course, but this is not what I'd call "never got wide
| support".
| scott_w wrote:
| So you'd say that a format that most consumers couldn't
| use (because only a few devices could play it) is "widely
| supported?"
| nullc wrote:
| There is a lot more audio codecs embedded in other things
| than there ever were personal music players, by orders of
| magnitude. Vorbis was ubiquitous in video games, for
| example.
| darkwater wrote:
| Pre-Spotify (and pre-iPod) there were plenty of cheap MP3
| players that also supported Ogg Vorbis. I owned one, for
| example. Obviously MP3 was THE standard, but Vorbis
| reached a good adoption HW wise (basically because it was
| free as in beer to implement)
| scott_w wrote:
| I also owned one but I had to look for it. It certainly
| wasn't "widely supported."
| darkwater wrote:
| Have a look at audio hardware from 10-15 ago (so long
| after the mp3 player wave ended in first world countries)
| but basically everything that plays mp3 plays ogg vorbis
| as well.
| account42 wrote:
| I had an MP3 player that did Vorbis.
| breve wrote:
| AV1, VP9, and Opus are used on YouTube and Netflix right
| now.
|
| It's hard to get more mainstream than YouTube and
| Netflix.
| account42 wrote:
| Now, not in 2005.
| lightedman wrote:
| "Free codecs only came along at all because Google decided to
| subsidize development"
|
| No, just no. We've had free community codec packs for years
| before Google even existed. Anyone remember CCCP?
| notpushkin wrote:
| Yes. Those won't help you if you use them for commercial
| use and patent holders find out about it.
| leguminous wrote:
| CCCP was just a collection of existing codecs, they didn't
| develop their own. Most of the codecs in CCCP were
| patented. Using it without licenses was technically patent
| infringement in most places. It's just that nobody ever
| cared to enforce it on individual end users.
| tristor wrote:
| As one of the people that helped start CCCP and was
| involved extensively through almost its entire lifespan, I
| think you misunderstand what it means to be "free" in this
| case. CCCP was "free as in beer" but not "free as in
| speech", /many/ of the codecs in CCCP were patent
| encumbered, but were included because there were open-
| source implementations of them by authors that didn't care
| about those patents, and many of the licensing arrangements
| didn't effectively apply to end-users (either due to
| language or care to prosecute). CCCP also almost
| exclusively included /decoders/, but /encoders/ are much
| more likely to be targeted by licensing authorities.
|
| We started CCCP because at the time, anime fansubs were
| predominantly traded on P2P filesharing services like
| Kazaa, Gnutella, eDonkey, Direct Connect, and later
| Bittorrent. The most popular codec pack at the time was
| K-Lite / Kazaa Codec Pack which was a complete and utter
| mess, and specifically for fansubbing, it was hard to get
| subtitles to work properly unless they were hard embedded.
| Soft-subbing allowed for improvements, and there were a lot
| of improvements to subtitling in the fansubbing community
| over the years, one of the biggest came when the Matroska
| (MKV) container format came about, that allowed arbitrarily
| different formats/encodings to share a single media
| container, and the community shifted almost entirely to ASS
| formatted subtitles, but because an MKV could contain many
| different encodings, any given MKV file may play correctly
| or not on any given system. CCCP was intended to provide an
| authoritative, canonical, single-source way to play
| fansubbed anime correctly on Windows, and we achieved that
| objective.
|
| But let's be clear, nobody involved was under any illusions
| that the MPEG-LA or any other license holders of for
| instance h264 were fans of our community or what we're
| doing. Anime fansubbing at all came out of piracy of
| foreign-language media into the English market via the
| Internet and P2P filesharing. None of us gave a shit, and
| the use of Soviet imagery in the CCCP was exactly a nod to
| the somewhat communist ideal that knowledge and access to
| media should be free, and that patent encumbering codecs
| and patenting software isn't just stupid, it's morally
| wrong. I still strongly feel software patents are evil.
|
| Nonetheless, at no point was CCCP through it's life fully
| legal/licenses appropriately for usage, and effectively
| nobody cared, not even the licensing authorities, because
| the existence of these things made their licenses for
| encoders more valuable for companies producing media, as it
| was easier for actual people to consume.
| cxr wrote:
| > Free codecs only came along at all because Google decided
| to subsidize development but that became possible only 15
| years or so after MPEG was born
|
| The release of VP3 as open source predates Google's later
| acquisition of On2 (2010) by nearly a decade.
| zoeysmithe wrote:
| This is impossible to know. Not that long ago something like
| Linux would have sounded like a madman's dream to someone
| with your perspective. It turns out great innovations happen
| outside the capitalist for-profit context and denying that is
| very questionable. If anything, those kinds of setups often
| hinder innovation. How much better would linux be if it was
| mired in endless licensing agreements, per monthly rates, had
| a board full of fortune 500 types, and billed each user a
| patent fee? Or any form of profit incentive 'business logic'?
|
| If that stuff worked better, linux would have failed
| entirely, instead near everyone interfaces with a linux
| machine probably hundreds if not thousands of times a day in
| some form. Maybe millions if we consider how complex just
| accessing internet services is and the many servers, routers,
| mirrors, proxies, etc one encounters in just a trivial app
| refresh. If not linux, then the open mach/bsd derivatives ios
| uses.
|
| Then looking even previous to the ascent of linux, we had all
| manner of free/open stuff informally in the 70s and 80s.
| Shareware, open culture, etc that led to today where this
| entire medium only exists because of open standards and open
| source and volunteering.
|
| Software patents are net loss for society. For profit systems
| are less efficient than open non-profit systems. No 'middle-
| man' system is better than a system that goes out of its way
| to eliminate the middle-man rent-seeker.
| derf_ wrote:
| _> ...it 's hardly a robust strategy._
|
| I disagree. Video is such a large percentage of internet
| traffic and licensing fees are so high that it becomes
| possible for any number of companies to subsidize the
| development cost of a new codec on their own and still net a
| profit. Google certainly spends the most money, but they were
| hardly the only ones involved in AV1. At Mozilla we developed
| Daala from scratch and had reached performance competitive
| with H.265 when we stopped to contribute the technology to
| the AV1 process, and our team's entire budget was a fraction
| of what the annual licensing fees for H.264 would have been.
| Cisco developed Thor on their own with just a handful of
| people and contributed that, as well. Many other companies
| contributed technology on a royalty-free basis. Outside of
| AV1, you regularly see things like Samsung's EVC (or LC-EVC,
| or APV, or...), or the AVS series from the Chinese.... If the
| patent situation were more tenable, you would see a lot more
| of these.
|
| The cost of developing the technology is not the limitation.
| I would argue the cost to get all parties to agree on a
| common standard and the cost to deploy it widely enough for
| people to rely on it is much higher, but people manage that
| on a royalty-free basis for many other standards.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Mozilla is just Google from a financial perspective, it's
| not an independent org, so the financing point stands.
|
| H.264 was something like >90% of all video a few years ago
| and wasn't it free for streaming if the end user wasn't
| paying? IIRC someone also paid the fees for an open source
| version. There were pretty good licensing terms available
| and all the big players have used it extensively.
|
| Anyway, my point was only that expecting Google to develop
| every piece of tech in the world and give it all away for
| free isn't a general model for tech development, whereas IP
| rights and patent pools are. The free ride ends the moment
| Google decide they need more profit, feel threatened in
| some way or get broken up by the government.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Part of the reason h.264 was such a big percentage of
| video was that they messed up the licencing of the follow
| up so badly which was supposed to supplant it.
|
| Not that the licencing of h.264 wasn't a mess too. You
| suggest it was free for web use but they originally only
| promised not to charge for free streaming up until 2015
| and reserved the right to do so once it was embedded in
| the web. Pressure from Google/Xiph/etc's WebM project
| forced them to promise not to enforce it after that point
| either.
|
| https://www.wired.com/2010/08/mpeg-la-extends-web-video-
| lice...
|
| Cisco paid for a binary version of a decoder that could
| be downloaded by Firefox as a plugin. They could only do
| so because of a loophole around a cap in fees that they
| were already hitting so it wouldn't cost them more to
| supply to every Firefox user.
| thinkingQueen wrote:
| You're comparing apples to oranges.
|
| Daala was never meant to be widely adopted in its original
| form -- its complexity alone made that unlikely. There's a
| reason why all widely deployed codecs end up using similar
| coding tools and partitioning schemes: they're proven,
| practical, and compatible with real-world hardware.
|
| As for H.265, it's the result of countless engineering
| trade-offs. I'm sure if you cherry-picked all the most
| experimental ideas proposed during its development, you
| could create a codec that far outperforms H.265 on paper.
| But that kind of design would never be viable in a real-
| world product -- it wouldn't meet the constraints of
| hardware, licensing, or industry adoption.
|
| Now the following is a more general comment, not directed
| at you.
|
| There's often a dismissive attitude toward the work done in
| the H.26x space. You can sometimes see this even in
| technical meetings when someone proposes a novel but
| impractical idea and gets frustrated when others don't
| immediately embrace it. But there's a good reason for the
| conservative approach: codecs aren't just judged by their
| theoretical performance; they have to be implementable,
| efficient, and compatible with real-world constraints. They
| also have to somehow make financial sense and cannot be
| given a way without some form of compensation.
| weinzierl wrote:
| _" Free codecs only came along at all because Google decided
| to subsidize development but that became possible only 15
| years or so after MPEG was born, and it's hardly a robust
| strategy"_
|
| I don't know about video codecs but MP3 (also part of MPEG)
| came out of Fraunhofer and was paid by German tax money. It
| should not have been patented in the first place (and wasn't
| in Germany).
| thinkingQueen wrote:
| Who would develop those codecs? A good video coding engineer
| costs about 100-300k USD a year. The really good ones even
| more. You need a lot of them. JVET has an attendance of about
| 350 such engineers each meeting (four times a year).
|
| Not to mention the computer clusters to run all the coding
| sims, thousands and thousands of CPUs are needed per research
| team.
|
| People who are outside the video coding industry do not
| understand that it is an industry. It's run by big companies
| with large R&D budgets. It's like saying "where would we be
| with AI if Google, OpenAI and Nvidia didn't have an iron grip".
|
| MPEG and especially JVET are doing just fine. The same
| companies and engineers who worked on AVC, HEVC and VVC are
| still there with many new ones especially from Asia.
|
| MPEG was reorganized because this Leonardo guy became an
| obstacle, and he's been angry about ever since. Other than that
| I'd say business as usual in the video coding realm.
| roenxi wrote:
| > It's like saying "where would we be with AI if Google,
| OpenAI and Nvidia didn't have an iron grip".
|
| We'd be where we are. All the codec-equivalent aspects of
| their work are unencumbered by patents and there are very
| high quality free models available in the market that are
| just given away. If the multimedia world had followed the
| Google example it'd be quite hard to complain about the
| codecs.
| thinkingQueen wrote:
| That's hardly true. Nvidia's tech is covered by patents and
| licenses. Why else would it be worth 4.5 trillion dollars?
|
| The top AI companies use very restrictive licenses.
|
| I think it's actually the other way around and AI industry
| will actually end up following the video coding industry
| when it comes to patents, royalties, licenses etc.
| roenxi wrote:
| Because they make and sell a lot of hardware. I'm sure
| they do have a lot of patents and licences, but if all
| that disappeared today it'd be years to decades before
| anyone could compete with them. Even just getting a foot
| in the door in TSMC's queue of customers would be hard.
| Their valuation can likely be justified based on their
| manufacturing position alone. There is literally no-one
| else who can do what they do, law or otherwise.
|
| If it is a matter of laws, China would just declare the
| law doesn't count to dodge around the US chip sanctions.
| Which, admittedly, might happen - but I don't see how
| that could result in much more freedom than we already
| have now. Having more Chinese people involved is
| generally good for prices, but that doesn't have much to
| do with market structure as much as they work hard and do
| things at scale.
|
| > The top AI companies use very restrictive licenses.
|
| These models are supported by the Apache 2.0 license ~
| https://openai.com/open-models/
|
| Are they lying to me? It is hard to get much more
| permissive than Apache 2.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| The top AI companies don't release their best models
| under _any_ license. They 're not even distributed at
| all. If you did steal the weights out from underneath
| Anthropic they would take you to court and probably win.
| Putting software you develop exclusively behind a network
| interface is a form of ultra-restrictive DRM. Yes, some
| places are currently trying to buy mindshare by releasing
| free models and that's fantastic, thank you, but they can
| only do that because investors believe the ROI from
| proprietary firewalled models will more than fund it.
|
| NVIDIA's advantage over AMD is largely in the drivers and
| CUDA i.e. their software. If it weren't for IP law or if
| NVIDIA had foolishly made their software fully open
| source, AMD could have just forked their PTX compiler and
| NVIDIAs advantage would never have been established. In
| turn that'd have meant they wouldn't have any special
| privileges at TSMC.
| oblio wrote:
| I imagine a chunk of it is also covered by trade secrets
| and NDAs.
| rwmj wrote:
| Who would write a web server? Who would write Curl? Who would
| write a whole operating system to compete with Microsoft when
| that would take thousands of engineers being paid $100,000s
| per year? People don't understand that these companies have
| huge R&D budgets!
|
| (The answer is that most of the work would be done by
| companies who have an interest in video distribution - eg.
| Google - but don't profit directly by selling codecs. And
| universities for the more research side of things. Plus
| volunteers gluing it all together into the final system.)
| thinkingQueen wrote:
| Are you really saying that patents are preventing people
| from writing the next great video codec? If it were that
| simple, it would've already happened. We're not talking
| about a software project that you can just hack together,
| compile, and see if it works. We're talking about rigorous
| performance and complexity evaluations, subjective testing,
| and massive coordination with hardware manufacturers--from
| chips to displays.
|
| People don't develop video codecs for fun like they do with
| software. And the reason is that it's almost impossible to
| do without support from the industry.
| eqvinox wrote:
| > Are you really saying that patents are preventing
| people from writing the next great video codec? If it
| were that simple, it would've already happened.
|
| You wouldn't know if it had already happened, since such
| a codec would have little chance of success, possibly not
| even publication. Your proposition is really unprovable
| in either direction due to the circular feedback on
| itself.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > People don't develop video codecs for fun like they do
| with software. And the reason is that it's almost
| impossible to do without support from the industry.
|
| Hmm, let me check my notes: - Quite OK
| Image format: https://qoiformat.org/ - Quite OK
| Audio format: https://qoaformat.org/ - LAME
| (ain't a MP3 Encoder): https://lame.sourceforge.io/
| - Xiph family of codecs: https://xiph.org/
|
| Some of these guys have standards bodies as supporters,
| but in all cases, bigger groups formed _behind them_ ,
| after they made considerable effort. QOI and QOA is
| written by a single guy _just because he 's bored_.
|
| For example, FLAC is a _worst of all worlds_ codec for
| industry to back. A streamable, seekable, hardware-
| implementable, error-resistant, _lossless_ codec with 8
| channels, 32 bit samples, and up to 640KHz sample rate,
| _with no DRM support_. Yet we have it, and it rules
| consumer lossless audio while giggling and waving at
| everyone.
|
| On the other hand, we have LAME. An encoder which also
| uses psycho-acoustic techniques to improve the resulting
| sound quality and almost everyone is using it, because
| the closed source encoders generally sound lamer than
| LAME in the same bit-rates. Remember, MP3 format doesn't
| have an reference encoder. If the decoder can read the
| file and it sounds the way you expect, then you have a
| valid encoder. There's no spec for that.
|
| > Are you really saying that patents are preventing
| people from writing the next great video codec?
|
| Yes, yes, and, yes. MPEG and similar groups _openly
| threatened_ free and open codecs by opening "patent
| portfolio forming calls" to create portfolios to fight
| with these codecs, because they are _terrified of being
| deprived of their monies_.
|
| If patents and license fees are not a problem for these
| guys, can you tell me why all professional camera gear
| which can take videos only come with "personal, non-
| profit and non-professional" licenses on board, and you
| have pay blanket extort ^H^H^H^H^H licensing fees to
| these bodies to take a video you can monetize?
|
| For the license disclaimers in camera manuals, see [0].
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42736254
| Taek wrote:
| People don't develop video codecs for fun because there
| are patent minefields.
|
| You don't *have* to add all the rigour. If you develop a
| new technique for video compression, a new container for
| holding data, etc, you can just try it out and share it
| with the technical community.
|
| Well, you could, if you weren't afraid of getting sued
| for infringing on patents.
| fires10 wrote:
| I don't do video because I don't work with it, but I do
| image compression for fun and no profit. I do use some
| video techniques due to the type of images I am
| compressing. I don't release because of the minefield. I
| do it because it's fun. The simulation runs and other
| tasks often I kick to the cloud for the larger compute
| needs.
| unlord wrote:
| > People don't develop video codecs for fun like they do
| with software. And the reason is that it's almost
| impossible to do without support from the industry.
|
| As someone who lead an open source team (of majority
| volunteers) for nearly a decade at Mozilla, I can tell
| you that people _do_ work on video codecs for fun, see
| https://github.com/xiph/daala
|
| Working with fine people from Xiph.Org and the IETF (and
| later AOM) on royalty free formats Theora, Opus, Daala
| and AV1 was by far the most fun, interesting and
| fulfilling work I've had as professional engineer.
| tux3 wrote:
| Daala had some really good ideas, I only understand the
| coding tools at the level of a curious codec enthusiast,
| far from an expert, but it was really fascinating to
| follow its progress
|
| Actually, are Xiph people still involved in AVM? It seems
| like it's being developed a little bit differently than
| AV1. I might have lost track a bit.
| scott_w wrote:
| > Are you really saying that patents are preventing
| people from writing the next great video codec?
|
| Yes, that's exactly what people are saying.
|
| People are also saying that companies aren't writing
| video codecs.
|
| In both cases, they can be sued for patent infringement
| if they do.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Patents, by design, give inventors claims to ideas, which
| gives them the money to drive progress at a pace that
| meets their business needs.
|
| Look at data compression. Sperry/Univac controlled key
| patents and slowed down invention in the space for years.
| Was it in the interest of these companies or Unisys
| (their successor) to invest in compression development?
| Nope.
|
| That's by design. That moat of exclusivity makes it
| difficult to compensate people to come up with novel
| inventions in-scope or even adjacent to the patent. With
| codecs, the patents are very granular and make it
| difficult for anyone but the largest players with key
| financial interests to do much of anything.
| raverbashing wrote:
| These are bad comparisons
|
| The question is more, "who would write the HTTP spec?"
| except instead of sending text back and forth you need
| experts in compression, visual perception, video formats,
| etc
| rwmj wrote:
| Did TBL need to patent the HTTP spec?
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Google funding free stuff is not a real social mechanism.
| It's not something you can point to and say that's how
| society should work in general.
|
| Our industry has come to take Google's enormous corporate
| generosity for granted, but there was zero need for it to
| be as helpful to open computing as it has been. It would
| have been just as successful with YouTube if Chrome was
| entirely closed source and they paid for video codec
| licensing, or if they developed entirely closed codecs just
| for their own use. In fact nearly all Google's codebase is
| closed source and it hasn't held them back at all.
|
| Google did give a lot away though, and for that we should
| be very grateful. They not only released a ton of useful
| code and algorithms for free, they also inspired a culture
| where other companies also do that sometimes (e.g. Llama).
| But we should also recognize that relying on the
| benevolence of 2-3 idealistic billionaires with a browser
| fetish is a very time and place specific one-off, it's not
| a thing that can be demanded or generalized.
|
| _In general_ , R&D is costly and requires incentives.
| Patent pools aren't perfect, but they do work well enough
| to always be defining the state-of-the-art and establish
| global standards too (digital TV, DVDs, streaming.... all
| patent pool based mechanisms).
| breve wrote:
| > _Google funding free stuff is not a real social
| mechanism._
|
| It's not a social mechanism. And it's not generosity.
|
| Google pushes huge amounts of video and audio through
| YouTube. It's in Google's direct financial interest to
| have better video and audio codecs implemented and
| deployed in as many browsers and devices as possible. It
| reduces Google's costs.
|
| Royalty-free video and audio codecs makes that
| implementation and deployment more likely in more places.
|
| > _Patent pools aren 't perfect_
|
| They are a long way from perfect. Patent pools will
| contact you and say, "That's a nice codec you've got
| there. It'd be a shame if something happened to it."
|
| Three different patent pools are trying to collect
| licencing fees for AV1:
|
| https://www.sisvel.com/licensing-programmes/audio-and-
| video-...
|
| https://accessadvance.com/licensing-programs/vdp-pool/
|
| https://www.avanci.com/video/
| chubot wrote:
| > Who would write a whole operating system to compete with
| Microsoft when that would take thousands of engineers being
| paid $100,000s per year?
|
| You might be misunderstanding that almost all of Linux
| development is funded by the same kind of companies that
| fund MPEG development.
|
| It's not "engineers in their basement", and never was
|
| https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members
|
| e.g. Red Hat, Intel, Oracle, Google, and now MICROSOFT
| itself (the competitive landscape changed)
|
| This has LONG been the case, e.g. an article from 2008:
|
| https://www.informationweek.com/it-sectors/linux-
| contributor...
|
| 2017 Linux Foundation Report:
| https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/press-release/linux-
| fo...
|
| _Roughly 15,600 developers from more than 1,400 companies
| have contributed to the Linux kernel since the adoption of
| Git made detailed tracking possible_
|
| _The Top 10 organizations sponsoring Linux kernel
| development since the last report include Intel, Red Hat,
| Linaro, IBM, Samsung, SUSE, Google, AMD, Renesas and
| Mellanox_
|
| ---
|
| curl does seem to be an outlier, but you still need to
| answer the question: "Who would develop video codecs?" You
| can't just say "Linux appeared out of thin air", because
| that's not what happened.
|
| Linux has funding because it serves the interests of a
| large group of companies that themselves have a source of
| revenue.
|
| (And to be clear, I do not think that is a bad thing! I
| prefer it when companies write open source software. But it
| does skew the design of what open source software is
| available.)
| rwmj wrote:
| I've used and developed for Linux since 1994 (long before
| major commercial interests), and I work for Red Hat so
| it's unlikely I misunderstand how Linux was and is
| developed.
| cwizou wrote:
| > You can't just say "Linux appeared out of thin air",
| because that's not what happened.
|
| It kinda did though
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux#Creation !
|
| The corporate support you mentioned arrived years after
| that.
| chubot wrote:
| You could say "Linux was CREATED out of thin air", and I
| wouldn't argue with you.
|
| But creation only counts for so much -- without support,
| Linux could still be a hobby project that "won't be big
| and professional like GNU"
|
| I'm saying Linux didn't APPEAR out of thin air, or at
| least it's worth looking deeper into the reasons why.
| "Appearing" to the general public, i.e. making widely
| useful software, requires a large group of people over a
| sustained time period, like 10 years.
|
| ----
|
| i.e. Right NOW there are probably hundreds of projects
| like Linux that you haven't heard of, which don't
| necessarily align with funders
|
| I would actually make the comparison to GNU -- GNU is a
| successful project, but there are various efforts
| underneath it that kind of languish.
|
| Look at _High Priority Free Software Projects_ -
| https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/
|
| - Decentralization, federation, and self-hosting
|
| - Free drivers, firmware, and hardware designs
|
| - Real-time voice and video chat
|
| - Internationalization of free software
|
| - Security by and for free software
|
| - Intelligent personal assistant
|
| I'm saying that VIDEO CODECS might be structurally more
| similar to these projects, than they are to the Linux
| kernel.
|
| i.e. making a freely-licensed kernel IS aligned with Red
| Hat, Intel, Google, but making an Intelligent Personal
| Assistant is probably not.
|
| Somebody probably ALREADY created a good free intelligent
| personal assistant (or one that COULD BE as great as
| Linux), but you never heard of them. Because they don't
| have hundreds of companies and thousands of people
| aligned with them.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Who would develop those codecs? A good video coding
| engineer costs about 100-300k USD a year. The really good
| ones even more. You need a lot of them.
|
| How about governments? Radar, Laser, Microwaves - all
| offshoots of US military R&D.
|
| There's nothing stopping either the US or European
| governments from stepping up and funding academic progress
| again.
| rs186 wrote:
| Yeah, counting on governments to develop codecs optimized
| for fast evolving applications for web and live streaming
| is a great idea.
|
| If we did that we would probably be stuck with low-bitrate
| 720p videos on YouTube.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Yeah, counting on governments to develop codecs
| optimized for fast evolving applications for web and live
| streaming is a great idea.
|
| Give universities the money, let them care about the
| details.
| rs186 wrote:
| It seems that you have a massive misunderstanding of how
| this works.
|
| University research labs, usually with a team of no more
| than 10 people (at most 20), are good at producing early,
| proof-of-concept work, but not incredibly complex
| projects like creating an actual codec. They are not
| known for producing polished, mature commerical
| _products_ that can be immediately used in the real
| world. They don 't have the resources or the incentive to
| do so.
| somethingsome wrote:
| Hey, I attend MPEG regularly (mostly lvc lately), there's a
| chance we've crossed paths!
| wmf wrote:
| I'm not opposed to codecs having patents but Chiariglione set
| up a system where each codec has as many patent holders as
| possible and any one of those patent holders could hold the
| entire world hostage. They should have set up the patent pool
| and pricing before developing each codec and not allowed any
| techniques in the standard that aren't part of the pool.
| fidotron wrote:
| The fact h264 and h265 are known by those terms is key to the
| other part of the equation: the ITU Video Coding Experts Group
| has become the dominant forum for setting standards going back
| to at least 2005.
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _" Patents on h264, h265, and even mp3 have been holding the
| industry back for decades. Imagine what we might have if their
| iron grip on codecs was broken."_
|
| Has AV1 solved this, to some extent? Although there are patent
| claims against it (patents for technologies that are
| fundamental to all the modern video codecs), it still seems
| better than the patent & licensing situation for h264 / h265.
| afroboy wrote:
| The power of H264 and H265 comes from pirates, and since AV1
| team don't work with pirates then it will always be inferior
| to H265.
|
| Just check pirated releases of TV shows and movies.
| philistine wrote:
| At least for MP3, our collective nightmare is over. MP3 is
| completely patent-unencumbered and can be used freely.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| To me, 2007 is when the evil forces really took hold. mySpace
| era was the last fun era. Everything after that kind of lacks.
| riedel wrote:
| MPEG-7 includes a binary XML standard [0] which is quite useful
| IMHO in comparison to others (I think it is used in DVB Meta
| data streams). But beyond patents it is even hard to find open
| documentation of BIM. I think the group was technically quite
| competent in comparison with other standard groups, but the
| business models around it really turn me off.
|
| [0] https://mpeg.chiariglione.org/standards/mpeg-7/reference-
| sof...
|
| EDIT: Here is the Wikipedia page of BiM which evidently made it
| even into an ISO Standard [1]
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BiM
| bokchoi wrote:
| Interesting. I've used EXI in a past project but I hadn't
| heard of BiM.
| fweimer wrote:
| The really silly part is that even if you have a license from
| MPEG LA for your product, you still have to put in a notice
| like this:
|
| THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE
| FOR THE PERSONAL AND NON-COMMERCIAL USE OF A CONSUMER TO (I)
| ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC STANDARD ("AVC VIDEO")
| AND/OR (II) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED BY A CONSUMER
| ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL AND NON-COMMERCIAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS
| OBTAINED FROM A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO.
| NO LICENSE IS GRANTED OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE.
| ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. SEE
| HTTP://WWW.MPEGLA.COM
|
| It's unclear whether this license covers videoconferencing for
| work purposes (where you are paid, but not specifically to be
| on that call). It seems to rule out remote tutoring.
|
| MPEG LA probably did not have much choice here because this
| language requirement (or language close to it) for outgoing
| patent licenses is likely part of their incoming patent license
| agreements. It's probably impossible at this point to
| renegotiate and align the terms with how people actually use
| video codecs commercially today.
|
| But it means that you can't get a pool license from MPEG LA
| that covers commercial videoconferencing, you'd have to
| negotiate separately with the individual patent holders.
| wmf wrote:
| Yeah, he ran an incubator for patent trolls for 30 years and
| now the patent trolls have eaten his face.
| dostick wrote:
| The article does not give much beyond what you already read in
| the title. What obscure forces and how? Isn't it an open
| standards non-profit organisation, then what could possible
| hinder it? Maybe because technologically closed standards became
| better and nonprofit project has no resources to compete with
| commercial standards? USB Alliance have been able to work things
| out, so maybe compression standards should be developed in
| similar way?
| baobun wrote:
| Supposedly the whole story is told in their linked book.
| eggspurt wrote:
| From Leonardo, who founded MPEG, on the page linked: "Even
| before it has ceased to exists, the MPEG engine had run out of
| steam - technology- and business wise. The same obscure forces
| that have hijacked MPEG had kept it hostage to their interests
| impeding its technical development and keeping it locked to
| outmoded Intellectual Property licensing models delaying market
| adoption of MPEG standards. Industry has been strangled and
| consumers have been deprived of the benefits of new
| technologies. From facilitators of new opportunities and
| experiences, MPEG standards have morphed from into roadblocks."
| dostick wrote:
| Exactly. That passage only making it more confusing.
| karel-3d wrote:
| I... don't understand how AI related to video codecs. Maybe
| because I don't understand either video codecs or AI on a deeper
| level.
| bjoli wrote:
| It is like upscaling. If you could train AI to "upscale" your
| audio or video you could get away with sending a lot less data.
| It is already being done with quite amazing results for audio.
| jl6 wrote:
| It has long been recognised that the state of the art in data
| compression has much in common with the state of the art in AI,
| for example:
|
| http://prize.hutter1.net/
|
| https://bellard.org/nncp/
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Some view these as so interconnected that they will say LLMs
| are "just" compression.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Which is an interesting view when applied to the IP. I
| think it's relatively uncontroversial that an MP4 file
| which "predicts" a Disney movie which it was "trained on"
| is a derived work. Suppose you have an LLM which was
| trained on a fairly small set of movies and you could
| produce any one on demand; would that be treated as a
| derived work?
|
| If you have a predictor/compressor LLM which was trained on
| _all the movies in the world_ , would that not also be
| infringement?
| mr_toad wrote:
| MP4s are compressed data, not a compression algorithm. An
| MP4 (or any compressed data) is not a "prediction", it is
| the difference between what was predicted and what you're
| trying to compress.
|
| An LLM is (or can be used) as a compression algorithm,
| but it is not compressed data. It is possible to have an
| overfit algorithm exactly predict (or reproduce) an
| output, but it's not possible for one to reproduce all
| the outputs due to the pigeonhole principle.
|
| To reiterate - LLMs are not compressed data.
| Retr0id wrote:
| AI and data compression are the same problem, rephrased.
| oblio wrote:
| Which makes Silicon Valley, the TV show, even funnier.
| chisleu wrote:
| holy shit it does. The scene with him inventing the new
| compression algorithm basically foreshadowed the gooning to
| follow local LLM availability.
| tdullien wrote:
| Every predictor is a compressor, every compressor is a
| predictor.
|
| If you're interested in this, it's a good idea reading about
| the Hutter prize (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutter_Prize)
| and going from there.
|
| In general, lossless compression works by predicting the next
| (letter/token/frame) and then encoding the difference from the
| prediction in the data stream succinctly. The better you
| predict, the less you need to encode, the better you compress.
|
| The flip side of this is that all fields of compression have a
| lot to gain from progress in AI.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Also check out this contest:
| https://www.mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html
|
| Fabrice Bellard's nncp (mentioned in a different comment)
| leads.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| There's nothing obscure about them.
|
| His comment immediately after describes exactly what happened:
|
| > Even before it has ceased to exists, the MPEG engine had run
| out of steam - technology- and business wise. The same obscure
| forces that have hijacked MPEG had kept it hostage to their
| interests impeding its technical development and keeping it
| locked to outmoded Intellectual Property licensing models
| delaying market adoption of MPEG standards. Industry has been
| strangled and consumers have been deprived of the benefits of new
| technologies. From facilitators of new opportunities and
| experiences, MPEG standards have morphed from into roadblocks.
|
| Big companies abused the setup that he was responsible for.
| Gentlemen's agreements to work together for the benefit of all
| got gamed into patent landmines and it happened under his watch.
|
| Even many of the big corps involved called out the bullshit,
| notably Steve Jobs refusing to release a new Quicktime till they
| fixed some of the most egregious parts of AAC licencing way back
| in 2002.
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-shuns-mpeg-4-licensing-t...
| sanjit wrote:
| From ZiffDavis article: > QuickTime 6 media player and
| QuickTime Broadcaster, a free application that aims to simplify
| using MPEG-4 in live video feeds over the Net.
|
| It was sweet to see "over the Net"...
| burnte wrote:
| I think video over Internet could be a huge business.
| maxst wrote:
| In 1998, the idea seemed so ridiculous, TheOnion mocked it:
|
| https://theonion.com/new-5-000-multimedia-computer-system-
| do...
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Haha that article is wild. Thanks for sharing
| dan353hehe wrote:
| At the time, the mocking was well deserved. I remember
| downloading trailers for moves over my dial-up
| connection. Took the entire night for 3 minutes of video.
| Can't imagine paying $5k for that privilege.
|
| Today though, the mocking doesn't make sense and is
| confusing. I haven't ever owned a TV.
| UltraSane wrote:
| I downloaded episodes of South Park using eMule over
| dial-up. It took days.
| BuildTheRobots wrote:
| By 99 it wasn't that bad. I remember screaming along with
| V.92 56k modems. Futurama episodes were about 50mb
| encoded as RealVideo and took a mere two and a half hours
| to download o.0
|
| (and it really was v.92; I still have the double-bong
| towards the end of the handshake emblazoned in my memory)
| dspillett wrote:
| Picking 300MB as a ridiculous amount of data to download
| dates that nicely without needing to look at the article
| header.
|
| Though using the codecs and hardware of that time I doubt
| the quality at even that size would be great. Compare an
| old 349MB (sized to fit two on a CD-R/-RW, likely 480p
| though smaller wasn't uncommon) cap of a Stargate episode
| picked up in the early/mid 20XXs to a similarly sized
| file compressed using h265 or even h264 on modern
| hardware.
| xp84 wrote:
| I appreciate the usage of SG-1 as an example, as I
| definitely still have several seasons of SG-1 episodes of
| that size floating around old hard drives somewhere.
| XVID, of course.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| I wonder if the 6000 series from nvidia will finally be
| able to deliver on the prognostication of being able to
| make toast with a PC?
| Henchman21 wrote:
| You can make a flambe with Nvidia's new 12VHPWR
| connectors
| lenerdenator wrote:
| It's a fad. I'm going long on Blockbuster.
| jandrese wrote:
| I remember when YouTube first appeared and my thought was
| "This is a really nice service. It's going to be a shame in
| a couple of years when it runs out of VC money and shuts
| down."
|
| I also remember when they went through and re-encoded all
| of the videos so they could play on the original model
| iPhone.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > The same obscure forces that have hijacked MPEG had kept it
| hostage to their interests impeding its technical development and
| keeping it locked to outmoded Intellectual Property licensing
| models delaying market adoption of MPEG standards. Industry has
| been strangled and consumers have been deprived of the benefits
| of new technologies.
|
| Copyright is cancer. The faster AI industry is going to run it
| into the ground, the better.
| knome wrote:
| This has nothing to do with copyright. It is an issue of
| patents.
| rurban wrote:
| Does he talk about Fraunhofer there? The guys, subsidized by
| German taxpayers, starting to charge license or patent fees.
|
| Or is it MPEG LA?
| https://wiki.endsoftwarepatents.org/wiki/MPEG_LA
| ronsor wrote:
| I hate copyright too, but this is about patents. Software
| patents are also cancer.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I think if IP rights holders were mandated to pay property tax it
| would make the system much healthier.
| londons_explore wrote:
| This. You should have to declare the _value_ of a patent, and
| pay 1% of that value every year to the government. Anyone else
| can force-purchase it for that value, but leaving you with a
| free perpetual license.
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| Wouldn't that only help the "big guys" who can afford to pay
| the tax?
| MyOutfitIsVague wrote:
| Presumably the tax would be based on some estimated value of
| the property, and affordability would therefore scale.
| marcodiego wrote:
| > My Christian Catholic education made and still makes me think
| that everybody should have a mission that extends beyond their
| personal interests.
|
| I remember this same guy complaining investments in the MPEG
| extortionist group would disappear because they couldn't fight
| against AV1.
|
| He was part of a patent Mafia is is only lamenting he lost power.
|
| Hypocrisy in its finest form.
| maxloh wrote:
| Any link to his comment?
| marcodiego wrote:
| > all the investments (collectively hundreds of millions USD)
| made by the industry for the new video codec will go up in
| smoke and AOM's royalty free model will spread to other
| business segments as well.
|
| https://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-
| solu...
|
| He is not a coder, not a researcher, he is only part of the
| worst game there is in this industry: a money maker from
| patents and "standards" you need to pay for to use, implement
| or claim compatibility.
| DragonStrength wrote:
| You missed the first part of that quote:
|
| > At long last everybody realises that the old MPEG
| business model is now broke
|
| And the entire post is about how dysfunctional MPEG is and
| how AOM rose to deal with it. It _is_ tragic to waste so
| much time and money only to produce nothing. He 's
| criticizing the MPEG group and their infighting. He's
| literally criticizing MPEG's licensing model and the
| leadership of the companies in MPEG. He's an MPEG member
| saying MPEG's business model is broken yet no one has a
| desire to fix it, so it will be beaten by a competitor.
| Would you not want to see your own organization reform
| rather than die?
|
| Reminder AOM is a bunch of megacorps with profit motive
| too, which is why he thinks this ultimately leads to
| stalled innovation:
|
| > My concerns are at a different level and have to do with
| the way industry at large will be able to access
| innovation. AOM will certainly give much needed stability
| to the video codec market but this will come at the cost of
| reduced if not entirely halted technical progress. There
| will simply be no incentive for companies to develop new
| video compression technologies, at very significant cost
| because of the sophistication of the field, knowing that
| their assets will be thankfully - and nothing more -
| accepted and used by AOM in their video codecs.
|
| > Companies will slash their video compression technology
| investments, thousands of jobs will go and millions of USD
| of funding to universities will be cut. A successful
| "access technology at no cost" model will spread to other
| fields.
|
| Money is the motivator. Figuring out how to reward
| investment in pushing the technology forward is his
| concern. It sounds like he is open to suggestions.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Fixing a business model that was always a force that
| slowed down development, implementation and adoption is
| not something that should be "fixed". MPEG dying is
| something to celebrate not whine about.
| DragonStrength wrote:
| Could you please point to the whining? He says MPEG is
| broken, but AOM will stagnate. You're mad at the
| messenger.
| overfeed wrote:
| > There will simply be no incentive for companies to
| develop new video compression technologies, at very
| significant cost because of the sophistication of the
| field, knowing that their assets will be thankfully - and
| nothing more - accepted and used by AOM in their video
| codecs.
|
| I don't think he fully considered the motivations of
| Alliance members like Google (YouTube), Meta and Netflix
| and the lengths they'll go to optimize operational costs
| of delivering content to improve their bottom line.
| cnst wrote:
| His argument is blatantly invalid.
|
| He first points out that a royalty-free format was actually
| better than the patent-pending alternative that he was
| responsible for pushing.
|
| In the end, he concludes that the that the progress of
| video compression would stop if developers can't make money
| from patents, providing a comparison table on codec
| improvements that conveniently omits the aforementioned
| royalty-free code being better than the commercial
| alternatives pushed by his group.
|
| Besides the above fallacy, the article is simply full of
| boasting about his own self-importance and religious
| connotations.
| selvan wrote:
| May be, we are couple of years away from experiencing patent free
| video codecs based on deep learning.
|
| DCVC-RT (https://github.com/microsoft/DCVC) - A deep learning
| based video codec claims to deliver 21% more compression than
| h266.
|
| One of the compelling edge AI usecases is to create deep learning
| based audio/video codecs on consumer hardwares.
|
| One of the large/enterprise AI usecases is to create a coding
| model that generates deep learning based audio/video codecs for
| consumer hardwares.
| _bent wrote:
| https://mpai.community/standards/mpai-spg
|
| This makes zero sense, right? Even if this was applicable, why
| would it need a standard? There is no interoperability between
| game servers of different games
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| One detail for context: when "closing" MPEG, he also deleted all
| of its all pages and materials and redirected them to the AI
| stuff.
| gcr wrote:
| Goodbye MPEG group, and to be frank, good riddance I think. I'm
| glad that open codecs are now taking over on the frontier of SOTA
| encoding.
|
| Maybe these sorts of handshake agreements and industry
| collaboration were necessary to get things rolling in 198x. If
| so, then I thank the MPEG group for starting that work. But by
| 2005 or so when DivX and XviD and h264 were heating up, it was
| time to move beyond that model towards open interoperability.
| zazazx wrote:
| "...and industry to exploit."
|
| And, boy howdy, they did.
| kouru225 wrote:
| So what's the take on his new organization MPAI? I don't know
| much about writing codecs... would love to hear someone's take on
| the organization.
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