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Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

leonardo.chiariglione.org

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Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#121

Post by Spooky23 »

thinkingQueen wrote: post #19
rwmj wrote: post #13

Earlier 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…

Are you really saying that patents are preventing people from writing the next great video codec? If it were that simple, it would’ve already happened. We’re not talking about a software project that you can just hack together, compile, and see if it works. We’re talking about rigorous performance and complexity evaluations, subjective testing, and massive coordination with hardware manufacturers—from chips to displa…

Patents, by design, give inventors claims to ideas, which gives them the money to drive progress at a pace that meets their business needs.

Look at data compression. Sperry/Univac controlled key patents and slowed down invention in the space for years. Was it in the interest of these companies or Unisys (their successor) to invest in compression development? Nope.

That’s by design. That moat of exclusivity makes it difficult to compensate people to come up with novel inventions in-scope or even adjacent to the patent. With codecs, the patents are very granular and make it difficult for anyone but the largest players with key financial interests to do much of anything.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#122

Post by scott_w »

notpushkin wrote: post #117
scott_w wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

So you’d say that a format that most consumers couldn’t use (because only a few devices could play it) is “widely supported?”

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#123

Post by astrange »

rowanG077 wrote: post #81
astrange wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Software patents aren't an issue in most of the world. Codecs however are used all over the world. No one is going to use a codec that is illegal to use in the US and EU.

EU would be one of the places that doesn't have software patents, which is why VLC is based there.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#124

Post by weinzierl »

mike_hearn wrote: post #4
wheybags wrote: post #2

As 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.

"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"

I don't know about video codecs but MP3 (also part of MPEG) came out of Fraunhofer and was paid by German tax money. It should not have been patented in the first place (and wasn't in Germany).

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#125

Post by sanjit »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #40

There's nothing obscure about them. His comment immediately after describes exactly what happened: > Even before it has ceased to exists, the MPEG engine had run out of steam – technology- and business wise. The same obscure forces that have hijacked MPEG had kept it hostage to their interests impeding its technical development and keeping it locked to outmoded Intellectual Property licensing models delaying market a…

From ZiffDavis article: > QuickTime 6 media player and QuickTime Broadcaster, a free application that aims to simplify using MPEG-4 in live video feeds over the Net.

It was sweet to see “over the Net”…

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#126

Post by rowanG077 »

astrange wrote: post #123
rowanG077 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software patents aren't an issue in most of the world. Codecs however are used all over the world. No one is going to use a codec that is illegal to use in the US and EU.

EU would be one of the places that doesn't have software patents, which is why VLC is based there.

It's not that simple. Software patents exists in the EU, the requirements are much more strict though. For example Netflix was ordered to cease their use of H265 in germany: https://www.nexttv.com/news/achtung-baby-netflix-loses-paten...

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#127

Post by tsimionescu »

_alternator_ wrote: post #102
tsimionescu wrote: post #68

Earlier 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…

The value of OSS is estimated at about $9 trillion dollars. That’s more valuable than any company on earth. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4693148

Sure. Almost all of it supported by companies who sell software, hardware, or ads.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#128

Post by rahimnathwani »

tdullien wrote: post #47
karel-3d wrote: post #15

I... don't understand how AI related to video codecs. Maybe because I don't understand either video codecs or AI on a deeper level.

Every predictor is a compressor, every compressor is a predictor. If you're interested in this, it's a good idea reading about the Hutter prize ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutter_Prize ) and going from there. In general, lossless compression works by predicting the next (letter/token/frame) and then encoding the difference from the prediction in the data stream succinctly. The better you predict, the less you nee…

Also check out this contest: https://www.mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html

Fabrice Bellard's nncp (mentioned in a different comment) leads.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#129

Post by gcr »

Goodbye MPEG group, and to be frank, good riddance I think. I'm glad that open codecs are now taking over on the frontier of SOTA encoding.

Maybe these sorts of handshake agreements and industry collaboration were necessary to get things rolling in 198x. If so, then I thank the MPEG group for starting that work. But by 2005 or so when DivX and XviD and h264 were heating up, it was time to move beyond that model towards open interoperability.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#130

Post by mike_hearn »

ghm2199 wrote: post #53
mike_hearn wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For the uninitiated, could you describe why codec development is slow and expensive?

They're hardware accelerated so it's not worth making a new codec until you have a big improvement over the prior baseline, because it takes a long time to manufacture and roll out devices that are better. Verifying an optimization is worth it requires testing against a big library of videos using standardized perception metrics, it requires ensuring there's an efficient way to decode it in both hardware and software, including efficient encoding. It's easy to improve one kind of input but regress another. Most of the low hanging fruit is taken already. Just the usual stuff that makes advancing the frontier hard.
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