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MPEG: A crisis, the causes and a solution

blog.chiariglione.org

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Re: MPEG: A crisis, the causes and a solution

#51

Post by ohazi »

kuschku wrote: post #49
ohazi wrote: post #27

The idea that private companies were responsible for the majority of the innovation that led to these video compression standards is a complete fabrication. The majority of the work was done by the grad students of the professors who are on the standards committee. Private companies then race to patent or buy up anything that's tangentially related during the draft period, so that they can sign on and receive royalti…

A major part of the research — e.g.the entire audio part of the MPEG standards — was done at research institutes such as the Fraunhofer institutes, which finance themselves from patent licenses. So your comment is also missing a major part ofthe picture.

The professors and their friends on the committee are self-dealing when allocating the committee's research funds. Grad students at the Fraunhofer partner universities still do the bulk of the work. I don't see how I've missed anything.

Re: MPEG: A crisis, the causes and a solution

#52

Post by snvzz »

The article completely glosses over the existence of the Alliance for Open Media[1]. They mention it and go straight into "Can something be done?". To me, the real question: Why should we care about MPEG anymore?

It is indeed true that the MPEG approach is dead. Once AV1[2] is out, the open, royalty-free codecs will be the better performing codecs for both audio (Opus[3]) and video.

So yes, if MPEG is dead, its components are free to join AOMedia, as long as they leave their silly RAND ideas behind.

[1] http://aomedia.org/.

[2] https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-spec/

[3] https://opus-codec.org/

Re: MPEG: A crisis, the causes and a solution

#54

Post by kuschku »

ohazi wrote: post #51
kuschku wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A major part of the research — e.g.the entire audio part of the MPEG standards — was done at research institutes such as the Fraunhofer institutes, which finance themselves from patent licenses. So your comment is also missing a major part ofthe picture.

The professors and their friends on the committee are self-dealing when allocating the committee's research funds. Grad students at the Fraunhofer partner universities still do the bulk of the work. I don't see how I've missed anything.

Fraunhofer can't pay its researchers anymore if their patent income goes away? Research then is only done with government funds or in corporations, where the corporations definitely won't license their research (e.g. selfdriving tech) to competitors.

In places where the research is done like you said, all your points are true, but IMO institutions such as the Fraunhofer institutes are worth keeping.

Re: MPEG: A crisis, the causes and a solution

#56

Post by ryandrake »

guelo wrote: post #11
clouddrover wrote: post #2

> 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 a company to develop new video compression technologies I don't think is correct. The driver for innovation in video compression technologies will continue to be the practical problems of encoding and distributing video. Th…

Yes. This is the lie of software patents. That somehow without thousands of lawyers and corrupt business contracts engineers will stop innovating. We don't need them.

It's the lie of intellectual property in general: Without a way to own ideas and inventions, and control how others use them, nobody will invent or create new ideas.

Re: MPEG: A crisis, the causes and a solution

#57

Post by revelation »

clouddrover wrote: post #45
revelation wrote: post #22

You can buy a $50 SBC today with 4k HEVC decode HW blocks, enabled out of the box. For me, that puts the technology deep into the established box, and last I checked, whoever is making the IP core for it neither the many manufacturers shipping it are the least bit concerned. This post sounds like scaremongering.

HEVC and VP9 were released at around the same time, but today VP9 has twice the installed base of HEVC: https://ngcodec.com/news/2017/10/21/why-we-are-supporting-vp... The simplicity of VP9's licensing versus the complexity HEVC's licensing probably has a lot to do with that.

Ehh, this is counting 1.7 billion mobile users for VP9 but not HEVC because of mobile Chrome installs. It's hard to take this serious when it's counting software decoding on mobile (if Chrome will even decode it on a lot of those phones, they know its pointless in SW.)

Meanwhile, nothing iOS supports VP9 HW decode. Until they come around, people could give a fuck about installed base.

Then there is the stuff this article doesn't very well measure. Like DVB-T2 in Germany using 1080p50 10 bit HEVC. That is expected to be around for a decade or more. That is a whole lot of TV settop boxes.

Re: MPEG: A crisis, the causes and a solution

#59

Post by theandrewbailey »

snvzz wrote: post #52

The article completely glosses over the existence of the Alliance for Open Media[1]. They mention it and go straight into "Can something be done?". To me, the real question: Why should we care about MPEG anymore? It is indeed true that the MPEG approach is dead. Once AV1[2] is out, the open, royalty-free codecs will be the better performing codecs for both audio (Opus[3]) and video. So yes, if MPEG is dead, its compo…

The article mentions AOM (and vaguely what it is) about 5 times, and even dedicates a paragraph to AOM:

> Alliance for Open Media (AOM) has occupied the space left free by MPEG: outdated video compression standard (AVC), no competitive Options 1 standard (IVC) and no usable modern standard (HEVC). AOM’s AV1 codec, due to be released soon, is claimed to perform better than HEVC and will be offered royalty free.

Re: MPEG: A crisis, the causes and a solution

#60

Post by CharlesW »

jchw wrote: post #48
ecesena wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And so what do you think is the solution? Do you think that "Only by becoming a Technical Committee can MPEG [...] stay competitive in the market." is true, or what could be a valuable alternative?

It seems like there's an answer: the market actually wants free standards because they're realizing it's more beneficial to them than any other outcome. So money and effort is being pumped into developing free video encoding standards. It seems there is an incentive for the foreseeable future to continue to improve video codecs simply because it saves on bandwidth and disk space costs, and improves user experience. T…

> …Vorbis and Opus have been outperforming the competition for a long time now.

Sorry to be pedantic about one bit of an otherwise-fine post, but AAC is comparable to Opus at any given bitrate[1]. Plus, even the most esoteric flavor of AAC has the enormous advantage of 7+ years of ubiquity[2].

[1] See the multiple charts at http://opus-codec.org/comparison/, for one presumably-unbiased source.

[2] All versions of Android support HE-AACv2 playback, iOS introduced support for HE-AACv2 playback in iOS 4 (released 2010), macOS introduced support for HE-AACv2 playback with iTunes 9.2 (released 2010), Adobe Flash Player introduced support for HE-AACv2 in 2007, All versions of Windows Phone support HE-AACv2 playback, all open source players support HE-AACv2 playback via FAAD2

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