MPEG: A crisis, the causes and a solution • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by phkahler » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 12:53 PM UTC

shmerl wrote: post #81

pjc50 wrote: post #5

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.

Between the lines he is just upset about admitting the defeat of patent trolling school of thought in media codecs.

I liked that he pointed to NPEs as a problem. I've never thought of MPEG-LA as anything but a giant NPE.

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

#132

Post by pizza234 » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 12:57 PM UTC

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #115

hajile wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you provide links to blind tests supporting these conclusions?

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

#133

Post by tincholio » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 1:01 PM UTC

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.

MP3 was based off Karlheinz Brandenburg's PhD work and subsequent work at Bell Labs, all of which was not done at Fraunhofer.

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

#134

Post by brigade » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 1:02 PM UTC

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'.

And it was under development all the back to 1993 or 1998 depending on your opinion. Including image codecs, PNG was 1996. For video codecs, Huffyuv was 2000. (Though to be fair lossless codecs are relatively easier to create, which is why there’s an unnecessarily large variety of them.)

And even lossy video codecs had some OSS experimental developments in the early 2000s that admittedly never went too far - Tarkin predates VP3 open sourcing if you want to count that, and Snow got somewhat decent results if you ignore that H.264 predates it.

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

#135

Post by phkahler » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 1:03 PM UTC

shmerl wrote: post #82

binarymax wrote: post #34

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/

I think it is still independently developed, but parts of it are included in AV1. Thea idea of lapped transforms in video is really interesting and AV1 isn't using it as far as I know. So hopefully Daala will continue on its own. 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=sh…

I agree with you on the whole lapped transforms concept. It looked quite promising, but they ran into issue. IIRC it was problems with the overlap between differing block sizes. My instinct tells me there is a way to overcome those issues but it may be a while before anyone finds it.

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

#136

Post by dahauns » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 1:03 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #124

dahauns wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, read my edit. IMO it's an incredibly reductionist view that it's only worth something to the industry if someone can make (most of?) money via patents from it. And another edit: One could argue that's a side effect from the modern anglo-american tradition of patenting (that has seemingly spilled over to continental europe) that almost completele ignores "Erfindungshöhe", stripping patents of their inherent tec…

That's a valid view — but that's specifically what separates Fraunhofer from the others. The Helmholtz-, Leibniz- and Max-Planck-Societies exist to do science for science's sake. They build stellerators and map the oceans, because it provides knowledge. The Fraunhofer soxiety exists to turn theoretical research into something companies can directly implement. That is what separates it from all the others. It is suppo…

I know - and that's where wanted to get at: I'd argue that, esp. in regard to their cooperation with SMBs and the benefits for the latter, nowadays it's the sheer concentration of R&D expertise (resulting in better risk mitigation, faster time-to-market etc.) that's the main driver for institutes like Fraunhofer, and monetization to third parties might sound that it is, but is actually incidental in practice.

(Ironically - in contrast to defense against patent violations/litigation, where having Fraunhofer's back is certainly a big benefit! :) )

I mean, we are in a time where e.g. even Sony (of all companies!) freely licenses their LDAC codec to the AOSP. To me it seems that after decades of countless multi-front patent wars many finally start to admit they are sick and tired of it. (Esp. when looking to the rising China, which seems to do well at the innovation front while not giving much of a damn about patent protection...)

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

#137

Post by KozmoNau7 » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 1:18 PM UTC

pizza234 wrote: post #132

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you provide links to blind tests supporting these conclusions?

https://www.opus-codec.org/comparison/

https://i.imgur.com/zxwOBMJ.png

Etc.

Discussion of 1.3-beta here:

https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,115156.0.html

Discussion of preferred bitrate and point of transparency:

https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,115386.0.html

https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,114656.0.html

I would highly recommend that you give it a go yourself. Take a FLAC source, encode Opus files yourself. The encoder is freely available from https://opus-codec.org/downloads/ and integrates nicely into Foobar2000's converter function (Opus is already there as a profile, it will ask for the location of opusenc.exe the first time you use it).

Use the ABX Comparator plugin for Foobar2000 (both available from http://foobar2000.org) and run a few trials.

After all, public listening tests are one thing, but to be absolutely sure a format/bitrate is transparent to you, individual testing is needed.

I have run a number of tests myself (of Opus and other formats) and found general transparency at ~96kbps Opus, lower for some tracks. For those tracks that weren't transparent at that bitrate, the artifacts were generally benign and not that annoying (slightly increased noise levels, mostly).

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

#138

Post by ksec » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 2:06 PM UTC

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #115

hajile wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh god, let define a few thing.

Generally Transparent = MP3 LAME @ ~ 128kbps. That is the good old standard.

There has been PR and marketing materials, much like Video Codec making claiming they are 50% better then H.264 or AVC or whatever. AAC or MP3Pro even claim to be MP3 128kbps quality at 64Kbps. Of course which never happened even after years of fine tuning.

Opus is the first and only codec in years, or decades that had better music quality then MP3 @ 96Kbps. Even AAC cant do that, at least not in majority of cases.

I have come to the conclusion that Audio compression has come to end of the S curve, with diminishing returns. It literally took us all the years till all MP3 patents has expired to get an Audio codec that is better at it with 20% less bit rate.

I very much doubt we could have 64Kbps VBR to sound better without many more breakthroughs.

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

#139

Post by ksec » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 2:13 PM UTC

mbebenita wrote: post #36

binarymax wrote: post #34

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/

Mozilla is an AOM member. A lot of the technology in Daala has been integrated into AV1, along with Cisco's Thor.

Some of the technology*. Not all.

As a matter of fact only a few were made in AV1 because the two codec were so different.

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

#140

Post by ksec » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 2:41 PM UTC

This is writing as someone who flavours HEVC, but still support the AOM initiative, hopefully AV2.

1. AOM was formed in 2015, and the idea of collaborating between Mozilla and Google and others were very well known within the industry before the formation of AOM. But let's just call it 2015, so three years later in 2018, the head of MPEG, just a year ago ( 2017 ) has seen this a threat coming.

May I ask What was he doing between 2015 and 2017?

2. >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.

Collectively Hundreds of millions? If there were only 10 companies paying the max cap of 25M per year, that is $250M per year from HEVC and to MPEG LA alone, excluding the other two groups and NPEs. And that is devices maker, excluding content producers. Assuming a video codec has a life time of 10 years, that is a total of $2.5 Billion minimum. Do you not think wasting hundreds of millions to save a few billion for the industry is a very good deal?

I do not known how the US and Canadian University works, but at least what the article said is true in terms of Universities funding in EU, Cooperate Sponsor etc for the work. Well at least it was true in my era of studying.

And I do not have a solution to this problem.

And I guess I cant really blame MPEG, what was originally an outrageous amount $25M now seems fair and reasonable compared to what others were asking. It is likely the greed that every company has for their IP portfolio wanted more.