151–160 of 209 posts
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.
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Free codecs without patent issues were limited to things like Vorbis which never got wide support. There were FOSS codecs for patented algorithms, but those had legal issues in places that enforce software patents.
AV1, VP9, and Opus are used on YouTube and Netflix right now. It's hard to get more mainstream than YouTube and Netflix.
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> 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.
The article does not give much beyond what you already read in the title. What obscure forces and how? Isn’t it an open standards non-profit organisation, then what could possible hinder it? Maybe because technologically closed standards became better and nonprofit project has no resources to compete with commercial standards? USB Alliance have been able to work things out, so maybe compression standards should be de…
From Leonardo, who founded MPEG, on the page linked: "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 adoption of MPEG standards. Industry has been st…
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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.
Why not just use AI?
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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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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...
Today though, the mocking doesn’t make sense and is confusing. I haven’t ever owned a TV.
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> 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.
But creation only counts for so much -- without support, Linux could still be a hobby project that "won't be big and professional like GNU"
I'm saying Linux didn't APPEAR out of thin air, or at least it's worth looking deeper into the reasons why. "Appearing" to the general public, i.e. making widely useful software, requires a large group of people over a sustained time period, like 10 years.
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i.e. Right NOW there are probably hundreds of projects like Linux that you haven't heard of, which don't necessarily align with funders
I would actually make the comparison to GNU -- GNU is a successful project, but there are various efforts underneath it that kind of languish.
Look at High Priority Free Software Projects - https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/
- Decentralization, federation, and self-hosting
- Free drivers, firmware, and hardware designs
- Real-time voice and video chat
- Internationalization of free software
- Security by and for free software
- Intelligent personal assistant
I'm saying that VIDEO CODECS might be structurally more similar to these projects, than they are to the Linux kernel.
i.e. making a freely-licensed kernel IS aligned with Red Hat, Intel, Google, but making an Intelligent Personal Assistant is probably not.
Somebody probably ALREADY created a good free intelligent personal assistant (or one that COULD BE as great as Linux), but you never heard of them. Because they don't have hundreds of companies and thousands of people aligned with them.
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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?
Sometimes there are hybrid coders that can use some of the resources on the chip and some shader code to handle new codecs or codec features after the fact, but you pay a power and performance penalty to use these.