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Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

leonardo.chiariglione.org

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Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#141

Post by voakbasda »

mike_hearn wrote: post #42
Taek wrote: post #23

Earlier 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…

Well, a career in codec development means you'd have done it as a job, and so you'd have been angling for a job at the kind of places that enter into the patent pools and contribute to the standards.

I don’t know about you, but I became a software engineer to write code for myself and my own interests, not to get a job where all of my labor will be vacuumed up and exploited to maximize anonymous shareholder value.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#142

Post by bigstrat2003 »

badsectoracula wrote: post #51
mike_hearn wrote: post #41

Earlier 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…

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

That argument seems to have been proven basically correct, given that a ton of open source development happens only because companies with deep pockets pay for the developers' time. Which makes perfect sense - no matter how altruistic a person is, they have to pay rent and buy food just like everyone else, and a lot of people aren't going to have time/energy to develop software for free after they get home from their 9-5.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#143

Post by mschuster91 »

rs186 wrote: post #64
mschuster91 wrote: post #29

Earlier 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. How about governments? Radar, Laser, Microwaves - all offshoots of US military R&D. There's nothing stopping either the US or European governments from stepping up and funding academic progress again.

Yeah, counting on governments to develop codecs optimized for fast evolving applications for web and live streaming is a great idea. If we did that we would probably be stuck with low-bitrate 720p videos on YouTube.

> Yeah, counting on governments to develop codecs optimized for fast evolving applications for web and live streaming is a great idea.

Give universities the money, let them care about the details.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#144

Post by burnte »

sanjit wrote: post #125
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”…

I think video over Internet could be a huge business.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#145

Post by pornel »

mike_hearn wrote: post #115
sitkack wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

(I've worked on both codecs and compilers. You may be underestimating the difficulty of implementing sound optimizers).

Hardware vendors don't benefit from the patent pools. They usually get nothing from them, and are burdened by having to pass per-unit licensing costs on to their customers.

It's true that designing an ASIC-friendly codec needs special considerations, and benefits from close collaboration with hardware vendors, but it's not magic. The general constraints are well-known to codec designers (in open-source too). The commercial incentives for collaboration are already there — HW vendors will profit from selling the chipsets or licensing the HW design.

The patent situation is completely broken. The commercial codecs "invent" coding features of dubious utility, mostly unnecessary tweaks on old stuff, because everyone wants to have their patent in the pool. It ends up being a political game, because the engineering goal is to make the simplest most effective codec, but the financial incentive is to approve everyone's patented add-ons regardless of whether they're worth the complexity or not.

Meanwhile everything that isn't explicitly covered by a patent needs to be proven to be 20 years old, and this limits MPEG too. Otherwise nobody can prove that there won't be any submarine patent that could be used to set up a competing patent pool and extort MPEG's customers.

So our latest-and-greatest codecs are built on 20-year-old ideas, with or without some bells and whistles added. The ASICs often don't use the bells and whistles anyway, because the extra coding features may not even be suitable for ASICs, and usually have diminishing returns (like 3x slower encode for 1% better quality/filesize ratio).

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#146

Post by scottLobster »

voakbasda wrote: post #141
mike_hearn wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, a career in codec development means you'd have done it as a job, and so you'd have been angling for a job at the kind of places that enter into the patent pools and contribute to the standards.

I don’t know about you, but I became a software engineer to write code for myself and my own interests, not to get a job where all of my labor will be vacuumed up and exploited to maximize anonymous shareholder value.

That's all great and noble, but at the end of the day it's about who has the resources. If you can get the necessary resources yourself and have complete control over their allocation, congratulations you won the jackpot of life. Plenty of people, some of whom are smarter and better than you, tried to do the same and failed due to reasons beyond their control. Try to remain a good person and not waste the opportunity if you ever get to that stage.

For the remaining 99.99% of us, we have to negotiate for resources as best we can. That typically means maximizing shareholder value in exchange for a cut of the profits. Not all your labor needs to be vacuumed up, I make enough to support my family, live a relatively safe and comfortable life with some minor luxuries and likely a secure retirement. Better deal than most people get today.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#147

Post by maxst »

burnte wrote: post #144
sanjit wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”…

I think video over Internet could be a huge business.

In 1998, the idea seemed so ridiculous, TheOnion mocked it:

https://theonion.com/new-5-000-multimedia-computer-system-do...

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#148

Post by lenerdenator »

burnte wrote: post #144
sanjit wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”…

I think video over Internet could be a huge business.

It's a fad. I'm going long on Blockbuster.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#149

Post by thinkingQueen »

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…

You’re comparing apples to oranges.

Daala was never meant to be widely adopted in its original form — its complexity alone made that unlikely. There’s a reason why all widely deployed codecs end up using similar coding tools and partitioning schemes: they’re proven, practical, and compatible with real-world hardware.

As for H.265, it’s the result of countless engineering trade-offs. I’m sure if you cherry-picked all the most experimental ideas proposed during its development, you could create a codec that far outperforms H.265 on paper. But that kind of design would never be viable in a real-world product — it wouldn’t meet the constraints of hardware, licensing, or industry adoption.

Now the following is a more general comment, not directed at you.

There’s often a dismissive attitude toward the work done in the H.26x space. You can sometimes see this even in technical meetings when someone proposes a novel but impractical idea and gets frustrated when others don’t immediately embrace it. But there’s a good reason for the conservative approach: codecs aren’t just judged by their theoretical performance; they have to be implementable, efficient, and compatible with real-world constraints. They also have to somehow make financial sense and cannot be given a way without some form of compensation.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#150

Post by tristor »

lightedman wrote: post #65
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.

"Free codecs only came along at all because Google decided to subsidize development" No, just no. We've had free community codec packs for years before Google even existed. Anyone remember CCCP?

As one of the people that helped start CCCP and was involved extensively through almost its entire lifespan, I think you misunderstand what it means to be "free" in this case. CCCP was "free as in beer" but not "free as in speech", /many/ of the codecs in CCCP were patent encumbered, but were included because there were open-source implementations of them by authors that didn't care about those patents, and many of the licensing arrangements didn't effectively apply to end-users (either due to language or care to prosecute). CCCP also almost exclusively included /decoders/, but /encoders/ are much more likely to be targeted by licensing authorities.

We started CCCP because at the time, anime fansubs were predominantly traded on P2P filesharing services like Kazaa, Gnutella, eDonkey, Direct Connect, and later Bittorrent. The most popular codec pack at the time was K-Lite / Kazaa Codec Pack which was a complete and utter mess, and specifically for fansubbing, it was hard to get subtitles to work properly unless they were hard embedded. Soft-subbing allowed for improvements, and there were a lot of improvements to subtitling in the fansubbing community over the years, one of the biggest came when the Matroska (MKV) container format came about, that allowed arbitrarily different formats/encodings to share a single media container, and the community shifted almost entirely to ASS formatted subtitles, but because an MKV could contain many different encodings, any given MKV file may play correctly or not on any given system. CCCP was intended to provide an authoritative, canonical, single-source way to play fansubbed anime correctly on Windows, and we achieved that objective.

But let's be clear, nobody involved was under any illusions that the MPEG-LA or any other license holders of for instance h264 were fans of our community or what we're doing. Anime fansubbing at all came out of piracy of foreign-language media into the English market via the Internet and P2P filesharing. None of us gave a shit, and the use of Soviet imagery in the CCCP was exactly a nod to the somewhat communist ideal that knowledge and access to media should be free, and that patent encumbering codecs and patenting software isn't just stupid, it's morally wrong. I still strongly feel software patents are evil.

Nonetheless, at no point was CCCP through it's life fully legal/licenses appropriately for usage, and effectively nobody cared, not even the licensing authorities, because the existence of these things made their licenses for encoders more valuable for companies producing media, as it was easier for actual people to consume.

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