Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG
leonardo.chiariglione.org
Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG
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Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG
#2As someone who hasn't had any exposure to the human stories behind mpeg before, it feels to me like it's been a force for evil since long before 2020. Patents on h264, h265, and even mp3 have been holding the industry back for decades. Imagine what we might have if their iron grip on codecs was broken.
Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG
#3As someone who hasn't had any exposure to the human stories behind mpeg before, it feels to me like it's been a force for evil since long before 2020. Patents on h264, h265, and even mp3 have been holding the industry back for decades. Imagine what we might have if their iron grip on codecs was broken.
Enough codecs out there. Just no adoption.
Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG
#4As someone who hasn't had any exposure to the human stories behind mpeg before, it feels to me like it's been a force for evil since long before 2020. Patents on h264, h265, and even mp3 have been holding the industry back for decades. Imagine what we might have if their iron grip on codecs was broken.
Possibly, nothing. Codec development is slow and expensive. Free codecs only came along at all because Google decided to subsidize development but that became possible only 15 years or so after MPEG was born, and it's hardly a robust strategy. Plus free codecs were often built by acquiring companies that had previously been using IP licensing as a business model rather than from-scratch development.
Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG
#5As someone who hasn't had any exposure to the human stories behind mpeg before, it feels to me like it's been a force for evil since long before 2020. Patents on h264, h265, and even mp3 have been holding the industry back for decades. Imagine what we might have if their iron grip on codecs was broken.
Enough codecs out there. Just no adoption.
Yes, because mpeg got there first, and now their dominance is baked into silicon with hardware acceleration. It's starting to change at last but we have a long way to go. That way would be a lot easier if their patent portfolio just died.
Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG
#6As someone who hasn't had any exposure to the human stories behind mpeg before, it feels to me like it's been a force for evil since long before 2020. Patents on h264, h265, and even mp3 have been holding the industry back for decades. Imagine what we might have if their iron grip on codecs was broken.
Possibly, nothing. Codec development is slow and expensive. Free codecs only came along at all because Google decided to subsidize development but that became possible only 15 years or so after MPEG was born, and it's hardly a robust strategy. Plus free codecs were often built by acquiring companies that had previously been using IP licensing as a business model rather than from-scratch development.
It's not just about new codecs. There's also people making products that would use codecs just deciding not to because of the patent hassle.
Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG
#7As someone who hasn't had any exposure to the human stories behind mpeg before, it feels to me like it's been a force for evil since long before 2020. Patents on h264, h265, and even mp3 have been holding the industry back for decades. Imagine what we might have if their iron grip on codecs was broken.
Enough codecs out there. Just no adoption.
This might be an oversimplification, but as a consumer, I think I see a catch-22 for new codecs. Companies need a big incentive to invest in them, which means the codec has to be technically superior and safe from hidden patent claims. But the only way to know if it's safe is for it to be widely used for a long time. Of course, it can't get widely used without company support in the first place. So, while everyone waits, the technology is no longer superior, and the whole thing fizzles out.
Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG
#8As someone who hasn't had any exposure to the human stories behind mpeg before, it feels to me like it's been a force for evil since long before 2020. Patents on h264, h265, and even mp3 have been holding the industry back for decades. Imagine what we might have if their iron grip on codecs was broken.
Possibly, nothing. Codec development is slow and expensive. Free codecs only came along at all because Google decided to subsidize development but that became possible only 15 years or so after MPEG was born, and it's hardly a robust strategy. Plus free codecs were often built by acquiring companies that had previously been using IP licensing as a business model rather than from-scratch development.
This is the sort of project that should be developed and released via open source from academia.
Audio and video codecs, document formats like PDF, are all foundational to computing and modern life from government to business, so there is a great incentive to make it all open, and free.
Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG
#9As someone who hasn't had any exposure to the human stories behind mpeg before, it feels to me like it's been a force for evil since long before 2020. Patents on h264, h265, and even mp3 have been holding the industry back for decades. Imagine what we might have if their iron grip on codecs was broken.
Who would develop those codecs? A good video coding engineer costs about 100-300k USD a year. The really good ones even more. You need a lot of them. JVET has an attendance of about 350 such engineers each meeting (four times a year).
Not to mention the computer clusters to run all the coding sims, thousands and thousands of CPUs are needed per research team.
People who are outside the video coding industry do not understand that it is an industry. It’s run by big companies with large R&D budgets. It’s like saying ”where would we be with AI if Google, OpenAI and Nvidia didn’t have an iron grip”.
MPEG and especially JVET are doing just fine. The same companies and engineers who worked on AVC, HEVC and VVC are still there with many new ones especially from Asia.
MPEG was reorganized because this Leonardo guy became an obstacle, and he’s been angry about ever since. Other than that I’d say business as usual in the video coding realm.
Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG
#10As someone who hasn't had any exposure to the human stories behind mpeg before, it feels to me like it's been a force for evil since long before 2020. Patents on h264, h265, and even mp3 have been holding the industry back for decades. Imagine what we might have if their iron grip on codecs was broken.
Who would develop those codecs? A good video coding engineer costs about 100-300k USD a year. The really good ones even more. You need a lot of them. JVET has an attendance of about 350 such engineers each meeting (four times a year). Not to mention the computer clusters to run all the coding sims, thousands and thousands of CPUs are needed per research team. People who are outside the video coding industry do not un…
> It’s like saying ”where would we be with AI if Google, OpenAI and Nvidia didn’t have an iron grip”.
We'd be where we are. All the codec-equivalent aspects of their work are unencumbered by patents and there are very high quality free models available in the market that are just given away. If the multimedia world had followed the Google example it'd be quite hard to complain about the codecs.