81–90 of 153 posts
If you read between the lines, this is an admission that patent licensing is now simply too complicated to make proprietary codecs viable. Especially when enabling an extra compression "profile" requires extra licenses. Also, that the indirect value of having an open-licensed codec to the big players in AOM is far more than the possible license revenue.
Does anyone know what happened to Daala? It seemed like it was going great but has been quiet for several years now. https://xiph.org/daala/
UPDATE: Looking at the mailing list archive, there isn't any activity there: http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/daala/
The code repo is also pretty quiet: https://git.xiph.org/?p=daala.git;a=shortlog
The primary use is to display media streams with reduced network, CPU, and battery usage. But it's a much more general field, replete with all kinds of fascinating insight about the nature of visual/aural manifestations and human perception. Anything you can remove yet still recover the relevant parts of the original signal is an opportunity to understand how our brains, and the world in general with its physical laws, work. There's a ton of interesting and useful research that could be done -- but would you really want to look into how texture is encoded, processed, and reacted to in our neurons when you have to worry about various mafia-like patent licensing consortiums? The whole licensing setup has a chilling effect on many different area of inquiry, even apart from its impact on classic compression algorithms. (Though that is harmed too -- if you come up with an incremental improvement that works really well for some type of input, and you'd like other people to build on your work, what do you do?)
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Do you know why/how?
Software patents are not recognized in Europe, where the VideoLAN organization is based. http://www.videolan.org/legal.html
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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?
The alternative is... honest business practices.
Wait... someone at MPEG actually believed their own bullshit? That a massive campaign of extortion, intentionally complex legal maneuvering, and outright intimidation is actually beneficial to technological progress in some way? (Sure, it's beneficial to some of the companies involved in the licensing extortion scheme; I don't think anyone disagrees with that.) Or is this guy just an incredibly skilled troll with 30…
Fuck the Fraunhofer Institute.
There have been a lot of mistakes in the growth of the internet, but mpeg... Trying to own an entire space isn’t about making the world a better place. It’s about being in control. Me me me.
Given how big video is now, and the interplay between available bandwidth and video quality, one wonders if certain bumps in the road would have been smoothed out if Netflix or YouTube had ramped up a few years earlier.
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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 An…
FFmpeg/libav don't do HE. FDK/libaacplus are non-free. neroAacEnc always used to have the best quality, but that's shareware.
Wait... someone at MPEG actually believed their own bullshit? That a massive campaign of extortion, intentionally complex legal maneuvering, and outright intimidation is actually beneficial to technological progress in some way? (Sure, it's beneficial to some of the companies involved in the licensing extortion scheme; I don't think anyone disagrees with that.) Or is this guy just an incredibly skilled troll with 30…
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: Fuck the Fraunhofer Institute. There have been a lot of mistakes in the growth of the internet, but mpeg... Trying to own an entire space isn’t about making the world a better place. It’s about being in control. Me me me. Given how big video is now, and the interplay between available bandwidth and video quality, one wonders if certain bumps in the road would have…
I'm convinced many big players wanted people to think mp3 was going away to push newer, patent encumbered formats.
Wait... someone at MPEG actually believed their own bullshit? That a massive campaign of extortion, intentionally complex legal maneuvering, and outright intimidation is actually beneficial to technological progress in some way? (Sure, it's beneficial to some of the companies involved in the licensing extortion scheme; I don't think anyone disagrees with that.) Or is this guy just an incredibly skilled troll with 30…
When people first started discussing which codecs to use on the web a decade ago, the argument made for the MPEG-LA stuff was that a) we're better, b) we're reasonably priced, c) we're already everywhere in hardware, and d) you don't have to worry about the patents because we've got you covered. Ultimately, they won on that basis. However, when HEVC rolled around, that argument was destroyed by the multiple patent po…
And doesn't Firefox have some special deal with Cisco to use their x264 decoder on the web?
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Software patents are not recognized in Europe, where the VideoLAN organization is based. http://www.videolan.org/legal.html
This must be an old topic for hn'ers, new to me, but this is incredible, we keep complaining about how stifling software patents are, why hasn't there been an explosion of innovation in Europe simply by having this benefit (has there been?)? Are there studies and comparisons of what has come of this policy?