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

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

#11

Post by guelo » Mon, Jan 29, 2018, 11:58 PM UTC

clouddrover wrote: post #2

> AOM will certainly give much needed stability to the video codec market but this will come at the cost of reduced if not entirely halted technical progress. There will simply be no incentive for a company to develop new video compression technologies I don't think is correct. The driver for innovation in video compression technologies will continue to be the practical problems of encoding and distributing video. Th…

Yes. This is the lie of software patents. That somehow without thousands of lawyers and corrupt business contracts engineers will stop innovating. We don't need them.

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

#12

Post by ttoinou » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 12:03 AM UTC

   Standard 	MPEG-1 	MPEG-2 	MPEG-4 Visual 	MPEG-4 AVC 	MPEG-H HEVC
   Bitrate vs previous 		25% less 	25% less 	30% less 	60% less

The table at the end is hiding one factor : the computation cost of each new codecs. Have we really found new better ways to compress videos, or is it just Moore's law in action ?

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

#13

Post by genericpseudo » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 12:04 AM UTC

clouddrover wrote: post #2

> AOM will certainly give much needed stability to the video codec market but this will come at the cost of reduced if not entirely halted technical progress. There will simply be no incentive for a company to develop new video compression technologies I don't think is correct. The driver for innovation in video compression technologies will continue to be the practical problems of encoding and distributing video. Th…

This means that codec development makes no sense for anyone who doesn't own either a large distribution platform or a large playback platform. (Much of the research has been done by middleware companies attempting to tax the two; their business goes from royalties to work-for-hire, at best, which is way less attractive for them).

This is fine – in a macroeconomic sense – but of course it sucks if you're one of the companies being disrupted.

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

#14

Post by ChuckMcM » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 12:06 AM UTC

clouddrover wrote: post #2

> AOM will certainly give much needed stability to the video codec market but this will come at the cost of reduced if not entirely halted technical progress. There will simply be no incentive for a company to develop new video compression technologies I don't think is correct. The driver for innovation in video compression technologies will continue to be the practical problems of encoding and distributing video. Th…

I agree it isn't correct, the implication is that the only "value" that generate new codecs is 'money for royalties.'

There are many reasons for developing better codecs, whether they perform better on hardware, they allow for more channels in a pipe with fixed bandwidth, or optimize the viewing experience for particular types of signals.

When I read the reference post I heard the echos of rationalizations that have been used for years and years to justify applying rents against someone else's labor. I can only hope that the author is correct in that this rent seeking behavior has become unsustainable. That would be a good thing indeed.

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

#15

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 12:10 AM UTC

clouddrover wrote: post #2

> AOM will certainly give much needed stability to the video codec market but this will come at the cost of reduced if not entirely halted technical progress. There will simply be no incentive for a company to develop new video compression technologies I don't think is correct. The driver for innovation in video compression technologies will continue to be the practical problems of encoding and distributing video. Th…

[deleted]

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

#16

Post by nightcracker » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 12:13 AM UTC

clouddrover wrote: post #2

> AOM will certainly give much needed stability to the video codec market but this will come at the cost of reduced if not entirely halted technical progress. There will simply be no incentive for a company to develop new video compression technologies I don't think is correct. The driver for innovation in video compression technologies will continue to be the practical problems of encoding and distributing video. Th…

> AOM will certainly give much needed stability to the video codec market but this will come at the cost of reduced if not entirely halted technical progress. There will simply be no incentive for a company to develop new video compression technologies.

And nothing of value was lost.

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

#17

Post by wmf » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 12:14 AM UTC

ttoinou wrote: post #12

Standard MPEG-1 MPEG-2 MPEG-4 Visual MPEG-4 AVC MPEG-H HEVC Bitrate vs previous 25% less 25% less 30% less 60% less The table at the end is hiding one factor : the computation cost of each new codecs. Have we really found new better ways to compress videos, or is it just Moore's law in action ?

Yes, the computation per pixel has increased ~2x per codec generation so codecs are taking advantage of (a fraction of) the gains provided by Moore's Law.

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

#18

Post by djsumdog » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 12:21 AM UTC

merb wrote: post #4

> Here are a few, out of close to 180 standards: MP3 for digital music (1992), MPEG-2 for digital television (1994), MPEG-4 Visual for video on internet (1998), MP4 file format for mobile handsets (2001), well mp3 was mostly frauenhofer, not mpeg (yes they created the standard, etc. but the most patentable work was done by the frauenhofer) also the date... on 1992 it was not (yet) called mp3. it's silly to actually n…

It was called MPEG2 Layer III, right? And the licensing around mp3 is why many Linux distributions didn't offer mp3 in the default install, without adding "non-free" repositories.

We also saw open standards emerge, like Ogg Vorbis and FLAC (although neither were widely adopted by hardware vendors compared to Apple's AAC/ALAC)

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

#19

Post by leeoniya » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 12:22 AM UTC

> Companies will slash their investments in video compression technologies. Thousands of jobs will go and millions of USD of funding to universities will be cut.

that's quite a lot of FUD. hosting providers have very aligned incentives to invest in better - and not necessarily proprietary - compression technologies, as do ISPs who have to carry the packets.

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

#20

Post by matthewmacleod » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 12:29 AM UTC

ttoinou wrote: post #12

Standard MPEG-1 MPEG-2 MPEG-4 Visual MPEG-4 AVC MPEG-H HEVC Bitrate vs previous 25% less 25% less 30% less 60% less The table at the end is hiding one factor : the computation cost of each new codecs. Have we really found new better ways to compress videos, or is it just Moore's law in action ?

It depends what you mean by "better".

More advanced video codecs have higher visual quality at lower bitrates, but are more computationally expensive. All of these video codecs use the same underlying ideas of 2d transforms, intra- and inter-frame compression, motion compensation, entropy coding etc., but using more complex techniques to preserve video quality.

I wouldn't say it's a simple as "Moore's law in action".