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The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

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Re: The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

#61

Post by kasabali »

jbk wrote: post #39
at1as wrote: post #11

Moving in the right direction, but unfortunately it's still quite a few years before H264 is off patent, globally: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M... At which point, the continued march towards higher resolution and bandwidth video will probably limit their utility

Read the list of patents left: a lot of them are on SVC (no one uses this) and on higher profile. For a lot of use cases, including Basic and Main profile, H.264 is already free.

Main profile is very mediocre. Any file I see in the wild is encoded in high profile.

Re: The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

#62

Post by crote »

superxpro12 wrote: post #58
matheusmoreira wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intellectual property is total bullshit as a concept but I suppose patents are at least tolerable since they only last 10 to 20 years, unlike copyright which lasts for our lifetimes plus a million billion years.

I really have a hard time accepting software patents. Like amazon patenting the one click to buy shopping cart for example. Crazy Taxi patented a directional arrow... The infamous "nemesis" patent for shadow of mordor. IDK.... its all bits and bytes. This seems to stifle innovation more than anything imo.

What annoys me the most is that they are so damn obvious! I can understand patenting the steam machine, but most software patents are simply the first solution which would come to mind to any developer encountering the same problem.

What's next, I can charge people money for using the number 65234563124 because I'm the first to file a patent for it?

Re: The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

#63

Post by anal_reactor »

ColdStream wrote: post #51
theandrewbailey wrote: post #3

> While the US and EU patents around MPEG-4 Part 2 expired in recent years, until today there remained one patent still active in Brazil. Since MPEG-this Part that is hard to keep straight, this is the MPEG standard backing Xvid and DivX codecs. So let's encode video and torrent like it's 2002!

Time do get out the old CD of The.Matrix.1999-DVDrip(aXXo).Xvid.

I specifically remember that my dad brought from work crappy projector and I watched Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix that was RMVB encoded camera rip from cinema. RMVB was all the rage on my 128kbps internet.

Re: The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

#64

Post by matheusmoreira »

crote wrote: post #62
superxpro12 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really have a hard time accepting software patents. Like amazon patenting the one click to buy shopping cart for example. Crazy Taxi patented a directional arrow... The infamous "nemesis" patent for shadow of mordor. IDK.... its all bits and bytes. This seems to stifle innovation more than anything imo.

What annoys me the most is that they are so damn obvious! I can understand patenting the steam machine, but most software patents are simply the first solution which would come to mind to any developer encountering the same problem. What's next, I can charge people money for using the number 65234563124 because I'm the first to file a patent for it?

> I can charge people money for using the number 65234563124 because I'm the first to file a patent for it?

Absolutely.

Creative works are files in a computer, data. All data is information. All information is sequences of bits. All sequences of bits are numbers.

I can even calculate how big those numbers are given their bit count.

  digits(bits) = ceil(bits * log10(2))

  digits(32)     = 10
  digits(64)     = 20
  digits(128)    = 39
  digits(256)    = 78
  digits(512)    = 155
  digits(1024)   = 309

  digits(20 KiB) = 49,321
  digits(2 GiB)  = 5,171,655,946
Intellectual property, copyright especially, is logically reducible to ownership of numbers. Humans are interesting number generators.

That's how absurd this system is.

Re: The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

#65

Post by joshspankit »

smackeyacky wrote: post #53
joshspankit wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be underestimating the desire to earn through differentiation. Assuming the product companies accept the plateau on resolution (I agree it’s likely), there are many ways to exploit the other stuff. Colour space, tacling each type of compression artifact, additional channels (probly not long until we have HDR RGBW), etc etc and those will each come with their committees made of patent-hungry companies seeing n…

I don’t think it matters in a practical sense. Our streaming overlords have already shown that by crippling the effective color space of supposedly 4K video they care little for quality of broadcast. Crushed blacks and smeared video are all you’ll get no matter what the standards say. They were, are and remain terrible on 1080 video, 4K is a farce.

You’ve missed the point: each addition can (and likely will, based on history) be the way to bring more patents into the market. It rarely has anything to do with objective quality (except in the marketing)

Re: The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

#66

Post by fragmede »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #64
crote wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What annoys me the most is that they are so damn obvious! I can understand patenting the steam machine, but most software patents are simply the first solution which would come to mind to any developer encountering the same problem. What's next, I can charge people money for using the number 65234563124 because I'm the first to file a patent for it?

> I can charge people money for using the number 65234563124 because I'm the first to file a patent for it? Absolutely. Creative works are files in a computer, data. All data is information. All information is sequences of bits. All sequences of bits are numbers. I can even calculate how big those numbers are given their bit count. digits(bits) = ceil(bits * log10(2)) digits(32) = 10 digits(64) = 20 digits(128) = 39…

Fortunately, the laws are (currently) implemented by humans, not robots. Patents aren't copyrights aren't trademarks. Copyright isn't a perfect system, but it's the system we have to promote the creation of creative works. It's been perverted by corporate interests, but it has seemed to serve us well enough over the past 250 years. Simplifying it to owning a number is an oversimplification that loses too much resolution because the numbers aren't short ones, they're because computers work on numbers, so the story of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone on a computer boils down to a number to a computer. But it's more than just a number. It's a book with meaning and words, and so logic wants us to reduce it to call it ownership of numbers, but humanly speaking, if JK Rowling wrote a book and it was popular, it doesn't seem absurd for her to get rich off of it.

Patents, unless it's for something truly exceptional, just seem like a good system for getting lawyers rich.

Trademarks I believe in though. If I buy a Caterpillar bulldozer, I should be able to believe that I'm getting a genuine Caterpillar bulldozer, and no one else is allowed to use the name.

Our systems of intellectual properties have been abused, so it's fun to think about culture shifting to one of intellectual property nihilism, but I don't see that happening in my lifetime.

Re: The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

#67

Post by ksec »

jchw wrote: post #52
ksec wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>(MP3 is in a similar place. AAC and Opus are technically superior, but everything supports MP3.) Actually MP3 is more like the H.263 / Divx here. AAC-LC is more like H.264. The difference in support of AAC-LC and MP3 is near zero, both in terms of hardware and software. While AAC-LC is vastly more superior. AAC-LC has been declared patent free ( all patent expired ) by Redhat for 9 years already. The only part that…

I was under the impression that the new FFmpeg nmr codec indeed outperforms the Apple one in every bitrate with Google's new Zimtohrli benchmark as well as ViSQOL. That would suggest Apple doesn't really have to open source anything, we should be good? Still, I don't see the point. Unlike video, audio decoding is so cheap you can practically do it on software even on fairly constrained devices. So really only in plac…

>I was under the impression.....

Yes. But subjective testing by IgorC ( of HydrogenAudio ) shows it wasn't as good as Apple. It was a lot better than previous FFMPEG though. I believe we will have a few more listening test results coming out soon.

>That may leave some niches...

iPod has over 80%+ of portable music players market share. And almost all the others shipped at the time, from Creative to other Chinese brands, car audio, TV and media player has AAC support. AAC-LC hit a sweet spot of near same MP3 hardware support while being so much better. 320Kbps MP3 still don't compete with 256Kbps AAC-LC on Apple Encoder. On the other hand, there are only a few samples where 256Kbps AAC-LC isn't transparent, barely noticeable difference but no artefacts compared to Opus in professional listening test, 95% of people wouldn't even notice. Opus do shines at 128Kbps to 160Kbps range where AAC-LC don't compete ( or dare I say wasn't even tuned ), but loses nearly all hardware compatibility.

If we were streaming, and storing music or audio tracks with 128Kbps then Opus would have had strong advantage. But we live in a world where we could even stream uncompressed audio files with plenty of bandwidth left. The file size of audio is so small it makes it negligible in consumer settings unless you are Youtube. ( I would still prefer a 256Kbps audio codec, for me it was instantly noticeable. I think Youtube at one point switched for premium but decided to switch it back )

For web then I guess there is an argument for Opus. But I keep saying the same with Video Codec as well. There is a whole world of Video and Audio Codec usage outside the web and PC / Smartphone. We could have used AAC and called it a day. And it is not just patent unencumbered, it is patent free.

If I was for a new Audio Codec, I just wish it could achieve what AAC-LC 256Kbps did with 128kbps. i.e I take quality first over potential bitrate savings. But the half bitrate marketing hasn't been true since MP3 Pro, HE-AAC, HEVC and VVC for "low bitrate". Neither HEVC or VVC could achieve what AVC did with 2Mbps in 1Mbps. VVC being very close, I would guess FVC / H.267 will finally be it, but at what complexity cost? We have hit sort of limit of compression. Both in Video and Audio. And today we have very different set of trade offs between file size, connection bandwidth, compatibility and encoding / decoding complexity then what we did 10-20 years ago. And I would choose compatibility + slightly larger file size for its simplicity.

Re: The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

#68

Post by matheusmoreira »

fragmede wrote: post #66
matheusmoreira wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can charge people money for using the number 65234563124 because I'm the first to file a patent for it? Absolutely. Creative works are files in a computer, data. All data is information. All information is sequences of bits. All sequences of bits are numbers. I can even calculate how big those numbers are given their bit count. digits(bits) = ceil(bits * log10(2)) digits(32) = 10 digits(64) = 20 digits(128) = 39…

Fortunately, the laws are (currently) implemented by humans, not robots. Patents aren't copyrights aren't trademarks. Copyright isn't a perfect system, but it's the system we have to promote the creation of creative works. It's been perverted by corporate interests, but it has seemed to serve us well enough over the past 250 years. Simplifying it to owning a number is an oversimplification that loses too much resolut…

I have the opposite opinion. Patents are tolerable, while copyright is so intolerable that copyright infringement becomes civil disobedience and arguably a moral imperative.

Tolerability is a function of how long the monopoly lasts. The social contract was we'd all pretend we couldn't trivially copy works for some years so that creators could make their well deserved profit, and then the works would enter the public domain. When's the last time you saw your culture enter the public domain? JK Rowling has made her fortunes several times over, yet you and I will be dead for around a century before those works become public.

Nearly two hundred years ago, one man warned everyone this would happen.

https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...

> At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side.

> Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men.

> Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end.

> Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly.

> Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law.

> Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot

> once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions.

> The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create.

> in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living.

Did people listen? No. They doubled down on functionally infinite copyrights. If lasts even longer now. These are merely the results.

Re: The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

#69

Post by account42 »

at1as wrote: post #11

Moving in the right direction, but unfortunately it's still quite a few years before H264 is off patent, globally: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M... At which point, the continued march towards higher resolution and bandwidth video will probably limit their utility

At least there are diminishing returns so H.264 will stay "good enough" for much longer.

Re: The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

#70

Post by account42 »

ronsor wrote: post #29
goalieca wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now if only copyright didn't last forever..

The Berne Convention has permanently burned us there

Past international agreements are only as permanent as the people alive now agree they are. Yes this one will be very hard to change but that's just because there are many powerful interests that want to keep it this way.
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