Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

MPEG: A crisis, the causes and a solution

blog.chiariglione.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 153 posts

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

#111

Post by icebraining »

vetinari wrote: post #110
rayiner wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many areas, engineers need to get paid to innovate. Dating back to at least the standardization of CD-ROM, that was mediated through the use of patents. Note that until recently, there was almost no open source development of media codecs. Today, there is an advertising and entertainment industry generating huge surpluses that can also bankroll engineers to develop codecs. I’m not convinced that this is a better m…

> Note that until recently, there was almost no open source development of media codecs. Vorbis was released in 2002. That's 16 years ago. That's hardly 'until recently'.

Also FLAC and Musepack, which I think are even older. Plus for video, Theora's initial release was in 2004.

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

#112

Post by pluma »

thinkloop wrote: post #105
haasn wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, one question we could ask is why basically every single popular open source multimedia project (FFmpeg, x264, MPC-HC/madVR, mpv, avisynth/VapourSynth, MVtools/SVP, heck even LAME, .....) is made mostly by european authors? Some projects are almost 100% european, some are partially european with some russian and other non-american countries thrown in. The only projects I can actually think of that are based in t…

I wonder why compression seems to be extra sensitive to the existence patents. What about all other fields, aren't there ripe opportunities for European companies to be able to build software that Americans simply can't compete against? Shouldn't there be a cottage industry that does exactly that? What are some of the most stifling non-media patents?

While software patents impact every company's long-term survivability, short-term survivability for startups strongly hinges on investors. European investors are more risk averse and investments in Europe tend to be smaller than in the US. American investors prefer to invest in US companies for obvious reasons.

So a good portion of the startups you're imagining die early due to a lack of investment or incorporate in the US at some point in order to have a better chance of finding investors. And then some of the rest simply aren't as growth-focused because they need to focus on short-term profitability to survive, which means they'll likely end up silently dominating a particular industry niche rather than making a big entrance on the global stage.

Software patents are only a problem if you can survive long enough to be sued. If you're not exceptionally unlucky, you're more likely to go bankrupt before that happens.

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

#114

Post by vetinari »

revelation wrote: post #57
clouddrover wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 art…

VP9 support is mandatory in Android. If you want to ship Play Store, that is. So it is not due to mobile Chrome installs.

The amount of Android devices dwarfs iOS devices and Apple knows that it is not viable position in long term. That's why they joined AV1. People in near future would not give a fuck about the Apple, if they couldn't play their Youtube or Netflix videos in 4K on them.

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

#115

Post by KozmoNau7 »

hajile wrote: post #73
CharlesW wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> …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…

That comparison appears to says that the difference in quality between opus and he-aac is the same as the difference between he-aac and vorbis. Opus is definitely better, but we have basically hit the wall in audio compression (we'll need a serious breakthrough to go much farther). There also isn't as much interest in audio codec research because even very large raw audio files pale in comparison to fully compressed…

Incremental improvements are happening in opusenc, current status (as of 1.2 and 1.3-beta) is that musical content is generally transparent at ~96kbps VBR, with a few needing ~128kbps and a tiny minority needing ~160kbps.

The developers are slowly reducing the required bitrate for transparency, it wouldn't surprise me if they reach transparency at ~64kbps VBR in a year or two.

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

#116

Post by dahauns »

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.

>which finance themselves from patent licenses.

Patent licenses are only a tiny fraction of their finances.

https://www.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/zv/de/publikationen/Ja...

2016 they made 134 million € from patent licenses, about 6% from their total income of 2.1 billion €.

Of which about two thirds come from either public grants or direct government funding.

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

#117

Post by rayiner »

icebraining wrote: post #111
vetinari wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Note that until recently, there was almost no open source development of media codecs. Vorbis was released in 2002. That's 16 years ago. That's hardly 'until recently'.

Also FLAC and Musepack, which I think are even older. Plus for video, Theora's initial release was in 2004.

Theora was the result of open sourcing a proprietary patented codec (VP3). Musepack is based on MPEG.

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

#118

Post by dahauns »

kuschku wrote: post #67
ohazi wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that they're worth keeping, but patent income isn't the only way to fund this research. It's just been one of the easier ways to fund it up to now. Also note that I never claimed that the patent income wasn't being put to good use by funding research. I was arguing that many of the patents themselves were bullshit, and that many of the companies that own them had acquired them from universities on slightly-to…

There isn't really another way to fund Fraunhofer institutes — they're supposed to turn theoretical research into something that can be directly applied ny corporations, so they have to have an incentive to create something like that. With funding through patent fees, exactly this happens. The alternatives are government funded research, or companies like Google doing it all internally, but then Google will keep some…

As I've stated above: Fraunhofer is predominantly government funded.

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

#119

Post by kuschku »

dahauns wrote: post #116
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.

>which finance themselves from patent licenses. Patent licenses are only a tiny fraction of their finances. https://www.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/zv/de/publikationen/Ja... 2016 they made 134 million € from patent licenses, about 6% from their total income of 2.1 billion €. Of which about two thirds come from either public grants or direct government funding.

I'll recommend reading the other pages on Fraunhofer's site explaining their goals and why they were created, and how they differ from the other German research societies .

But of course, government funding is today one of the largest sources still.

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

#120

Post by dahauns »

kuschku wrote: post #119
dahauns wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>which finance themselves from patent licenses. Patent licenses are only a tiny fraction of their finances. https://www.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/zv/de/publikationen/Ja... 2016 they made 134 million € from patent licenses, about 6% from their total income of 2.1 billion €. Of which about two thirds come from either public grants or direct government funding.

I'll recommend reading the other pages on Fraunhofer's site explaining their goals and why they were created, and how they differ from the other German research societies . But of course, government funding is today one of the largest sources still.

I don't need to, I'm fully aware of the differences between Fraunhofer and the others (basically PPP, applied sciences etc.).

I simply posit that (software) patents actually aren't needed for that. Or to be more specific: economic exploitation of their patents - nowadays, I could e.g. imagine them to offer their considerable patent pools for defensive purposes, to "disarm" patent minefields in problematic fields. Of course, that would be a tightrope walk in regards to cooperation with private entities...

Post reply on HN