One detail for context: when “closing” MPEG, he also deleted all of its all pages and materials and redirected them to the AI stuff.
Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG
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Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG
#112As 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 hardly a robust strategy.
I disagree. Video is such a large percentage of internet traffic and licensing fees are so high that it becomes possible for any number of companies to subsidize the development cost of a new codec on their own and still net a profit. Google certainly spends the most money, but they were hardly the only ones involved in AV1. At Mozilla we developed Daala from scratch and had reached performance competitive with H.265 when we stopped to contribute the technology to the AV1 process, and our team's entire budget was a fraction of what the annual licensing fees for H.264 would have been. Cisco developed Thor on their own with just a handful of people and contributed that, as well. Many other companies contributed technology on a royalty-free basis. Outside of AV1, you regularly see things like Samsung's EVC (or LC-EVC, or APV, or...), or the AVS series from the Chinese.... If the patent situation were more tenable, you would see a lot more of these.
The cost of developing the technology is not the limitation. I would argue the cost to get all parties to agree on a common standard and the cost to deploy it widely enough for people to rely on it is much higher, but people manage that on a royalty-free basis for many other standards.
Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
You missed the first part of that quote: > At long last everybody realises that the old MPEG business model is now broke And the entire post is about how dysfunctional MPEG is and how AOM rose to deal with it. It is tragic to waste so much time and money only to produce nothing. He's criticizing the MPEG group and their infighting. He's literally criticizing MPEG's licensing model and the leadership of the companies…
Fixing a business model that was always a force that slowed down development, implementation and adoption is not something that should be "fixed". MPEG dying is something to celebrate not whine about.
Could you please point to the whining? He says MPEG is broken, but AOM will stagnate. You’re mad at the messenger.
Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG
#114As 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.
At least for MP3, our collective nightmare is over. MP3 is completely patent-unencumbered and can be used freely.
Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
IP law and the need for extremely smart people with a rare set of narrow skills. It's not like codec development magically happens for free if you ignore patents. The point is, if there had been no incentives to develop codecs, there would have been no MPEG. Other people would have stepped into the void and sometimes did, e.g. RealVideo, but without legal IP protection the codecs would just have been entirely undocum…
You continue to make the same unsubstantiated claims about codecs being hard and expensive. These same tropes were said about every other field, and even if true, we have tens of thousands of folks that would like to participate, but are locked out due to broken IP law. The firewall of patents exist precisely because digital video is a way to shakedown the route media would have to travel to get to the end user. Code…
Codecs not harder than compilers? Sounds like an unsubstantiated claim!
Modern video codecs are harder than compilers. You have to have good ASIC development expertise to do them right, for example, which you don't need for compilers. It's totally feasible for a single company to develop a leading edge compiler whereas you don't see that in video codecs, historically they've been collaborations.
Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is still the argument for software copyright. And I think it's still a pretty persuasive argument, despite the success of FLOSS. To this day, there is very little successful consumer software. Outside of browsers, Ubuntu, Libre Office, and GIMP are more or less it, at least outside certain niches. And even they are a pretty tiny compared to Windows/MacOS/iOS/Android, Office/Google Docs, or Photoshop. The browser…
> don't think FLOSS has had the kind of effect that many activists were going for The entire internet, end to end, runs on FLOSS.
If you ignore the proprietary routers, the proprietary search engines, the proprietary browsers that people use out-of-the-box (Edge, Safari and even Chrome), and the fact that Linux is a clone of a proprietary OS.
Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
> which never got wide support Source? I’ve seen Vorbis used in a whole bunch of places. Notably, Spotify only used Vorbis for a while (still does, but also includes AAC now, for Apple platforms I think).
Pre-Spotify, MP3 players would usually only ship with MP3 support (thus the name), so people would only rip to MP3. Ask any millennial and most of them will never have heard of Ogg.
Of course, but this is not what I’d call “never got wide support”.
Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I avoided a career in codecs after spending about a year in college learning about them. The patent minefield meant I couldn't meaningfully build incremental improvements on what existed, and the idea of dilligently dancing around existing patents and then releasing something which intentionally lacked state-of-the-art ideas wasn't compelling. Codec development is slow and expensive becuase you can't just release a n…
Software patents aren't an issue in much of the world; the reason I thought there wasn't much of a career in codec development was that it was obvious that it needed to move down into custom ASICs to be power-efficient, at which point you can no longer develop new ones until people replace all their hardware.
By the time software is robust enough to make it worth while to be placed into hardware, it's pretty damn efficient. For something like ASICs, you could at least upgrade the firmware with new code, but what about Apple's chips that do the decoding? Can they be upgraded, or does that mean needing to wait for the M++ chip?
Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Who would write a web server? Who would write Curl? Who would write a whole operating system to compete with Microsoft when that would take thousands of engineers being paid $100,000s per year? People don't understand that these companies have huge R&D budgets! (The answer is that most of the work would be done by companies who have an interest in video distribution - eg. Google - but don't profit directly by selling…
> Who would write a whole operating system to compete with Microsoft when that would take thousands of engineers being paid $100,000s per year?
You might be misunderstanding that almost all of Linux development is funded by the same kind of companies that fund MPEG development.
It's not "engineers in their basement", and never was
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members
e.g. Red Hat, Intel, Oracle, Google, and now MICROSOFT itself (the competitive landscape changed)
This has LONG been the case, e.g. an article from 2008:
https://www.informationweek.com/it-sectors/linux-contributor...
2017 Linux Foundation Report: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/press-release/linux-fo...
Roughly 15,600 developers from more than 1,400 companies have contributed to the Linux kernel since the adoption of Git made detailed tracking possible
The Top 10 organizations sponsoring Linux kernel development since the last report include Intel, Red Hat, Linaro, IBM, Samsung, SUSE, Google, AMD, Renesas and Mellanox
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curl does seem to be an outlier, but you still need to answer the question: "Who would develop video codecs?" You can't just say "Linux appeared out of thin air", because that's not what happened.
Linux has funding because it serves the interests of a large group of companies that themselves have a source of revenue.
(And to be clear, I do not think that is a bad thing! I prefer it when companies write open source software. But it does skew the design of what open source software is available.)
Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who would write a web server? Who would write Curl? Who would write a whole operating system to compete with Microsoft when that would take thousands of engineers being paid $100,000s per year? People don't understand that these companies have huge R&D budgets! (The answer is that most of the work would be done by companies who have an interest in video distribution - eg. Google - but don't profit directly by selling…
> Who would write a whole operating system to compete with Microsoft when that would take thousands of engineers being paid $100,000s per year? You might be misunderstanding that almost all of Linux development is funded by the same kind of companies that fund MPEG development. It's not "engineers in their basement", and never was https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members e.g. Red Hat, Intel, Oracle, Google, and…
I've used and developed for Linux since 1994 (long before major commercial interests), and I work for Red Hat so it's unlikely I misunderstand how Linux was and is developed.