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Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

leonardo.chiariglione.org

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Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#131

Post by darkwater »

scott_w wrote: post #109
notpushkin wrote: post #77

Earlier 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.

Pre-Spotify (and pre-iPod) there were plenty of cheap MP3 players that also supported Ogg Vorbis. I owned one, for example. Obviously MP3 was THE standard, but Vorbis reached a good adoption HW wise (basically because it was free as in beer to implement)

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#132

Post by rurban »

scotty79 wrote: post #59

> 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 adoption of MPEG standards. Industry has been strangled and consumers have been deprived of the benefits of new technologies. Copyright is cancer. The faster AI industry is going to run it into the ground, t…

Does he talk about Fraunhofer there? The guys, subsidized by German taxpayers, starting to charge license or patent fees.

Or is it MPEG LA? https://wiki.endsoftwarepatents.org/wiki/MPEG_LA

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#133

Post by tsimionescu »

sitkack wrote: post #106
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…

> 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.

That's great, but it's not what FLOSS activists hoped and fight for.

It's still almost impossible to have a digital life that doesn't involve significant use of proprietary software, and the vast majority of users do their computing almost exclusively through proprietary software. The fact that this proprietary software is a bit of glue on top of a bunch of FLOSS libraries possibly running on a FLOSS kernel that uses FLOSS libraries to talk to a FLOSS router doesn't really buy much actual freedom for the end users. They're still locked in to the proprietary software vendors just as much as they were in the 90s (perhaps paying with their private data instead of actual money).

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#134

Post by immibis »

tsimionescu wrote: post #68
badsectoracula wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like the 90s argument against FLOSS: without the incentive for people to sell software, nobody would write it.

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…

On my new phone I made sure to install F-Droid first thing, and it's surprising how many basic functions are covered by free software if you just bother to look.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#135

Post by immibis »

strogonoff wrote: post #62
badsectoracula wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like the 90s argument against FLOSS: without the incentive for people to sell software, nobody would write it.

Without IP protections that allow copyleft to exist arguably there would be no FOSS. When anything you publish can be leveraged and expropriated by Microsoft et al. without them being obligated to contribute back or even credit you, you are just an unpaid ghost engineer for big tech.

I thought your argument was that Microsoft wouldn't be able to exist in that world. Which is it?

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#136

Post by immibis »

master-lincoln wrote: post #100
yxhuvud wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution to that is to remove the ability to patent codecs.

I think we should go a step further and remove the ability to patent algorithms (software)

Some people even think we should remove intellectual property.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#137

Post by mike_hearn »

derf_ wrote: post #112
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.

> ...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 reache…

Mozilla is just Google from a financial perspective, it's not an independent org, so the financing point stands.

H.264 was something like >90% of all video a few years ago and wasn't it free for streaming if the end user wasn't paying? IIRC someone also paid the fees for an open source version. There were pretty good licensing terms available and all the big players have used it extensively.

Anyway, my point was only that expecting Google to develop every piece of tech in the world and give it all away for free isn't a general model for tech development, whereas IP rights and patent pools are. The free ride ends the moment Google decide they need more profit, feel threatened in some way or get broken up by the government.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#138

Post by afroboy »

Reason077 wrote: post #93
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.

> "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." Has AV1 solved this, to some extent? Although there are patent claims against it (patents for technologies that are fundamental to all the modern video codecs), it still seems better than the patent & licensing situation for h264 / h265.

The power of H264 and H265 comes from pirates, and since AV1 team don't work with pirates then it will always be inferior to H265.

Just check pirated releases of TV shows and movies.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#139

Post by cwizou »

chubot wrote: post #119
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…

> 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…

> You can't just say "Linux appeared out of thin air", because that's not what happened.

It kinda did though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux#Creation !

The corporate support you mentioned arrived years after that.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#140

Post by scott_w »

darkwater wrote: post #131
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.

Pre-Spotify (and pre-iPod) there were plenty of cheap MP3 players that also supported Ogg Vorbis. I owned one, for example. Obviously MP3 was THE standard, but Vorbis reached a good adoption HW wise (basically because it was free as in beer to implement)

I also owned one but I had to look for it. It certainly wasn’t “widely supported.”
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