Apple's petition against RED • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#11

Post by petedoyle » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 6:02 AM UTC

I believe the recently announced Afterburner card for the upcoming Mac Pro is an FPGA. [1] Maybe they're trying to make a reconfigurable accelerator? Would be amazing to be able to decode REDCODE RAW, ProRes RAW, etc, then turn around and reprogram the FPGA to accelerate encoding of H.264/H.265/AV-1/etc faster than a CPU could.

Further, I think RED has a pretty close relationship with Nvidia [2]. For RED customers, it'd stink to buy a beefy Mac Pro and not be able to edit 8K REDCODE RAW as well as they could on other OSes that have better Nvidia support.

Especially when you consider when the Mac Pro finally ships, it will probably be up against Zen 2 Threadripper (at least 32 cores, likely more), Nvidia GPUs, and PCIe 4.0 SSDs at a significantly lower price point. To not have solid REDCODE RAW support would be a huge miss for Apple.

[1] https://www.redsharknews.com/technology/item/6408-apple-s-ma...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi79vUO0GMk

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#12

Post by mlyle » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 6:05 AM UTC

Monroe13 wrote: post #10

threeseed wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is a patent warmonger company ? If that was remotely true they would be filing lawsuits all over the place. In fact the only time I can recall them suing anyone was Samsung who is hardly an innocent party.

Apple has filed more inter partes review petitions than any other company since the process came available a few years back. IPRs are very expensive for a patent owner to defend (low- to mid-six figures) so from the patent owner perspective Apple definitely fits the description of warmonger. Of course, if you think these patents are junk that never should have issued, Apple is doing God’s work.

Sure but the original comment was

> Funny how a patent warmonger company like Apple tries to fight against others' patents

Implying that Apple is a particularly aggressive company when it comes to patent enforcement. Which I think most all of us can agree they're not Qualcomm or IBM.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#13

Post by msbarnett » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 6:06 AM UTC

est31 wrote: post #5

> RED wanted to find a way to make digital compression visually lossless (i.e. no perceivable loss in quality). What does that mean? Is it lossless like lossless webp or png, or is it lossy and well performing under some metric like PSNR? "no perceivable loss in quality" can mean anything, including a lossy codec.

REDCODE and the competing ProRes RAW are lossy codecs the work off the raw Bayer mosaic data. The article does a poor job of explaining this.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#14

Post by Monroe13 » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 6:07 AM UTC

threeseed wrote: post #7

dogma1138 wrote: post #6

So I’m guessing Apple wants to use the same technique in their new phones and couldn’t come to an agreement with RED?

Could be two reasons: 1) They just discovered this British inventor's work and thought it was worth petitioning in order to save a few dollars for Final Cut Pro. 2) They plan to allow the iPhone/iPad to output to ProRes RAW and don't want to pay the significant royalties and so have been actively looking for prior art.

3) The IPR process is expensive to defend and has a high likelihood of cancelling at least some claims, so, like many patent battles is not about the patent at all but is about creating uncertainty and risk in order to alter the negotiating landscape.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#15

Post by onion2k » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 6:10 AM UTC

est31 wrote: post #5

> RED wanted to find a way to make digital compression visually lossless (i.e. no perceivable loss in quality). What does that mean? Is it lossless like lossless webp or png, or is it lossy and well performing under some metric like PSNR? "no perceivable loss in quality" can mean anything, including a lossy codec.

In audio compression most codecs remove data outside of the typical human hearing range to improve the compression ratio - people can't hear that part anyway so there's no reason to save it. I guess RED wanted to do the same thing for visual data.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#16

Post by ijiiijji1 » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 6:14 AM UTC

est31 wrote: post #5

> RED wanted to find a way to make digital compression visually lossless (i.e. no perceivable loss in quality). What does that mean? Is it lossless like lossless webp or png, or is it lossy and well performing under some metric like PSNR? "no perceivable loss in quality" can mean anything, including a lossy codec.

The resolutions of 4K/5K/8K with completely lossless at high frame rates or at native sensor resolution in terms of storage for hundreds/thousands of hours of source material for marginal audiophile-like puritanism/placebo magical beliefs is just way too expensive for essentially no marginal return, because there are fundamental limits to psychovisual and psychoacoustic thresholds that no human can discern in a given playback venue (different for large IMAX, normal theater, home theater and small phablet; and different to a degree depending on an individual's would-be double-blinded or bio-electrically/fMRI measured thresholds.) The goal of pseudo-"lossless" compression is to be very conservative on what to throw out because transcoding to other formats can always (and must) optimize (throw away) data later... it really is marketing wank because there is some compression, but the idea is it's aimed to be minimal as to not matter in the final cut product.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#17

Post by rapsey » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 6:33 AM UTC

IloveHN84 wrote: post #2

Funny how a patent warmonger company like Apple tries to fight against others' patents, when they are on the bad side. All these patents are now backing off too much the evolution

You are criticizing them for making use of a system they have no choice but to aggressively participate in or face destruction by someone who does. Patent right payments and lawsuits are in the billions.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#18

Post by markdown » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 6:45 AM UTC

petedoyle wrote: post #11

I believe the recently announced Afterburner card for the upcoming Mac Pro is an FPGA. [1] Maybe they're trying to make a reconfigurable accelerator? Would be amazing to be able to decode REDCODE RAW, ProRes RAW, etc, then turn around and reprogram the FPGA to accelerate encoding of H.264/H.265/AV-1/etc faster than a CPU could. Further, I think RED has a pretty close relationship with Nvidia [2]. For RED customers, i…

> Afterburner

> Threadripper

LOL are they marketing to children?

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#19

Post by megaremote » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 6:57 AM UTC

est31 wrote: post #5

> RED wanted to find a way to make digital compression visually lossless (i.e. no perceivable loss in quality). What does that mean? Is it lossless like lossless webp or png, or is it lossy and well performing under some metric like PSNR? "no perceivable loss in quality" can mean anything, including a lossy codec.

It can only mean lossy. It makes no sense to talk about visually lossless if it is exactly the same image.

Re: Apple's petition against RED

#20

Post by hvidgaard » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 6:57 AM UTC

ijiiijji1 wrote: post #16

est31 wrote: post #5

> RED wanted to find a way to make digital compression visually lossless (i.e. no perceivable loss in quality). What does that mean? Is it lossless like lossless webp or png, or is it lossy and well performing under some metric like PSNR? "no perceivable loss in quality" can mean anything, including a lossy codec.

The resolutions of 4K/5K/8K with completely lossless at high frame rates or at native sensor resolution in terms of storage for hundreds/thousands of hours of source material for marginal audiophile-like puritanism/placebo magical beliefs is just way too expensive for essentially no marginal return, because there are fundamental limits to psychovisual and psychoacoustic thresholds that no human can discern in a given…

It's a bit more nuanced than that. Resolution is meaningless unless you know the size of the image and the distance to the viewer - so keeping a "lossless" copy makes sense for people professionally buying very expensive hardware. It's no different than keeping the original reels of a movie so you can scan them at higher and higher resolution as technology improves. In other word, the final product will always at best be limited by the format the source is kept in. That is not to say that even amateur videophiles have a use for it, they just want the best and mimic the professionals.

As for frame rate I'm pretty sure we know from experiments that the average human eye can see the difference in frame rate all the way up to 150-160 fps, and that the trained eye can detect images shown for less than 1/200 second.

So however marginal the gain is, it makes sense for professionals that take pride in having the absolutely best quality. It's the same people that will finetune encoder settings for the individual scenes in a movie just to get that tiny improvement.