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MPEG: A crisis, the causes and a solution

blog.chiariglione.org

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

#141

Post by KozmoNau7 »

ksec wrote: post #138
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incremental improvements are happening in opusenc, current status (as of 1.2 and 1.3-beta) is that musical content is generally transparent at ~96kbps VBR, with a few needing ~128kbps and a tiny minority needing ~160kbps. The developers are slowly reducing the required bitrate for transparency, it wouldn't surprise me if they reach transparency at ~64kbps VBR in a year or two.

Oh god, let define a few thing. Generally Transparent = MP3 LAME @ ~ 128kbps. That is the good old standard. There has been PR and marketing materials, much like Video Codec making claiming they are 50% better then H.264 or AVC or whatever. AAC or MP3Pro even claim to be MP3 128kbps quality at 64Kbps. Of course which never happened even after years of fine tuning. Opus is the first and only codec in years, or decades…

>Generally Transparent = MP3 LAME @ ~ 128kbps. That is the good old standard.

Says who? And which version of LAME? That encoder has seen huge improvements over the years. We should not define audio transparency by an outdated and flawed format. We should define audio transparency by whether it is distinguishable from a lossless source or not.

But yes, a modern version of lame (3.98 or newer) will be transparent around V5 VBR, which is ~130kbps. BUT -- and this is a huge twerking 'but' -- the MP3 format suffers from pre-echo. There is nothing you can do about it. It is lessened at higher bitrates, but you can never completely get rid of it. There is also the problem of the SFB21 defect, which can severely bloat the allocated bitrate on content that is heavy in high frequencies: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=LAME_Y_switch

Newer formats such as AAC, Vorbis and Opus do not share these limitations. I don't know where you read that AAC is worse than MP3, because that is simply objectively false, as shown by every listening test you can care to dig up. Did you mistakenly use FAAC (probably the worst AAC encoder out there) or something?

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

#142

Post by jmvalin »

pizza234 wrote: post #130
CharlesW wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> …Vorbis and Opus have been outperforming the competition for a long time now. Sorry to be pedantic about one bit of an otherwise-fine post, but AAC is comparable to Opus at any given bitrate[1]. Plus, even the most esoteric flavor of AAC has the enormous advantage of 7+ years of ubiquity[2]. [1] See the multiple charts at http://opus-codec.org/comparison/ , for one presumably-unbiased source. [2] All versions of An…

> See the multiple charts at http://opus-codec.org/comparison/ , for one presumably-unbiased source. Further nitpick: the page is very misleading. Audio compression has different targets, a crucial one being music. The Opus official page has comparatively little test references for music, both of which are at 64/96kbps for AAC [1-4], which is significantly below the general audience listening standards (160+ kpbs). T…

There's a good reason all the listening tests have stopped at 96 kb/s. Above that, the quality of Opus, Vorbis and AAC is so close to transparency that it's pretty much impossible to get statistically significant results. Even the latest 96 kb/s test was really stretching things.

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

#143

Post by derf_ »

rayiner wrote: post #63
guelo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In many areas, engineers need to get paid to innovate. Dating back to at least the standardization of CD-ROM, that was mediated through the use of patents. Note that until recently, there was almost no open source development of media codecs. Today, there is an advertising and entertainment industry generating huge surpluses that can also bankroll engineers to develop codecs. I’m not convinced that this is a better m…

Hi. I have personally been developing open source media codecs for 20 years. I've had a lot of help from other open source developers.

I have been paid by Mozilla to do this in some capacity for a decade. The budget for our entire team (which is the largest it has ever been), is less than the cost for just Mozilla to license H.264, by a non-trivial margin.

Here are some of the things that team has done:

- Made a Theora (VP3) encoder easily superior (in quality/bit) to what Youtube was shipping in Flash at the time (VP6), and (favorably) comparable with H.264 baseline.

- Developed and standardized the Opus audio codec.

- Provided infrastructure and maintainence for Xiph's older codecs (Vorbis, Speex, FLAC, etc.).

- Provided some minor assistance to VP8 and VP9 development.

- Made a from-scratch video codec (Daala) competitive with HEVC while avoiding the patents (i.e., with one hand tied behind our backs).

- Made significant contributions to a video codec superior to HEVC (AV1).

Now, maybe you want to call all of that almost nothing, but this code is in every Apple and Android handset in existence, and every current desktop browser, and used by some of the largest websites in the world (Youtube, Wikipedia).

The major concern with open source development is the free rider problem: why should Media Company X spend resources on an open source codec when Google will build one for them?

But the value current patent holders are attempting to extract from an individual licensee is larger than the cost for them to develop the technology from scratch by themselves. That value isn't created by the technology. It's created by having a common standard. And we don't need patents to incentivize that.

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

#144

Post by Ace17 »

ryandrake wrote: post #56
guelo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's the lie of intellectual property in general: Without a way to own ideas and inventions, and control how others use them, nobody will invent or create new ideas.

The actual lie of "intellectual property" is that such a thing exists at all.

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

#145

Post by ttoinou »

ecesena wrote: post #41
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 ?

I think it's because the major cost is bandwidth, so everyone is incentivized to optimized on size primarily, maybe at the cost of being more cpu/memory intensive on enc/dec.

Of course ! I was just wondering about the real technical improvement... Talking about bitrate/(video quality) is forgetting about (computation complexity) that's all

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

#146

Post by ttoinou »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #20
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".

Better is increasing filesize/( (video quality)(computation cost) )

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

#147

Post by [deleted] »

mappu wrote: post #87
CharlesW wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> …Vorbis and Opus have been outperforming the competition for a long time now. Sorry to be pedantic about one bit of an otherwise-fine post, but AAC is comparable to Opus at any given bitrate[1]. Plus, even the most esoteric flavor of AAC has the enormous advantage of 7+ years of ubiquity[2]. [1] See the multiple charts at http://opus-codec.org/comparison/ , for one presumably-unbiased source. [2] All versions of An…

HE-AAC has the colossal downside that there is no free software encoder. FFmpeg/libav don't do HE. FDK/libaacplus are non-free. neroAacEnc always used to have the best quality, but that's shareware.

[deleted]

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

#148

Post by Kushan »

Retric wrote: post #125
jcranmer wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people first started discussing which codecs to use on the web a decade ago, the argument made for the MPEG-LA stuff was that a) we're better, b) we're reasonably priced, c) we're already everywhere in hardware, and d) you don't have to worry about the patents because we've got you covered. Ultimately, they won on that basis. However, when HEVC rolled around, that argument was destroyed by the multiple patent po…

I don't think we need better codecs, video resolution increases slower than hardware and networking speeds. So, complete stagnation is viable.

Resolution isn't the only part to consider, the amount of detail you can store in that resolution can differ widely. With the push towards enhanced colour spaces, higher framerates, etc. there's plenty of need for better compression technology.

Besides, for a company like Netflix or Youtube, shaving 5% off the file size without a drop in quality can literally mean millions of dollars saved per year.

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

#149

Post by tinus_hn »

clouddrover wrote: post #37
shmerl wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DASH is not royalty-free It is, the above is just a list that trolls are assembling to intimidate others. They have it on many thigns, including established royalty free codecs. If they sue someone with it and prove in court they actually own patents on DASH - then it will be another story. Until then - intimidation doesn't equal ownership. In this industry, such intimidating tactics (very protection racket and maf…

You can't just dismiss it and hope that it is. The MPEG LA has been successful with their other patent pools. They've got a good chance of being successful with this one as well. That's what happened to VC-1. Microsoft tried to release VC-1 on royalty-free terms but the MPEG LA formed a patent pool and then it was no longer royalty-free.

MPEG LA has been succesful similarly to why Netflix and the iTunes Store were succesful: make it easy and affordable to comply. On the other hand suing costumers who torrent movies was not succesful at all.
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