171–180 of 186 posts
What other tech patents did we somewhat resent being patented that are now expired? I'm also thinking about the click wheel; I got one of my kids a knockoff iPod for Christmas last year. Can other e-commerce sites legally "one-click" to purchase like Amazon now?!?
A community-sourced website to track these would be amazing.
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> There's no such thing as a codec that looks good or bad in an absolute sense. There are plenty of examples of both awful codecs (software; encoders) and of digital audio/video standards (e.g. Vorbis and MPEG-4 ASP) suffering from material limitations. > If you gave DVD levels of bits-per-pixel to MPEG-4 ASP you could get something that looks nearly perfect. No. Not even if the source is encoded by XviD. Not all pro…
I should have added "general purpose". I know there are restrained encoders for specific situations. Can you list a few of your examples for video? And I don't understand the other example you did mention, isn't vorbis more than enough at high bitrate? 4:2:0 is just fine for video. It is not a heavy penalty. It's OK for you to be rough about this. More seriously, if it's good enough for bluray and UHD bluray then it'…
Poor encoder: FAAC/FAAC2, the first open-source encoder for AAC audio, produce terrible audio no matter how much bitrate you let it work with. The AAC standard itself facilitates crisp audio quality at low bitrates, as heard with e.g. Apple's Core Audio AAC encoder or Nero AAC.
Poor encoder: Xing, a popular MP3 encoder of the early 2000s, was similarly infamous for producing chirpy and slurry audio even at or above 192 kbps, while bona fide MP3 encoders like LAME do far better on less.
Poor encoder: NVENC, Nvidia's on-GPU hardware video encoder, produce very poor H.264 video even at 8-10 mbps, even on the current 8th and 9th generation (RTX 40/50 series). Good H.264 encoders like x264 is capable of producing excellent FullHD video at just 2-3 mbps.
Poor standard: Vorbis is a good example of a spec whose limits/mistakes make it impossible to preserve certain combinations of frequencies, resulting in brief passages where parts of the reproduced spectrum deflates, making some music sound as if it lost its breath, so to speak. When fed certain "triggering" audio content designed to expose problems in the spec, Xiph's reference Vorbis encoder will produce ringing sounds. Interestingly also the MP3 spec has similar limitations where certain frequency combinations (usually towards the lower and upper ends) will reproduce with quantized amplitude, even when encoded with LAME, though the outcome is nowhere near as pronounced as it can be with Vorbis.
Poor standard: MPEG-4 ASP, being limited to 4:2:0 chroma subsampling and PAL/NTSC resolutions. My beef with 4:2:0 is because of how harsh it is on low-resolution content. MPEG-4 ASP being limited to a maximum of 720x576, and the 4:2:0 chroma coverage being only a quarter of that, is the reason why DivX/XviD content is smudgy even with reproduction filters.
On FullHD content a 4:2:0 grid has almost three times higher resolution, which I agree works out on both still scenes and slow panning (the two scenarios where low chroma resolution makes itself most reminded).
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I should have added "general purpose". I know there are restrained encoders for specific situations. Can you list a few of your examples for video? And I don't understand the other example you did mention, isn't vorbis more than enough at high bitrate? 4:2:0 is just fine for video. It is not a heavy penalty. It's OK for you to be rough about this. More seriously, if it's good enough for bluray and UHD bluray then it'…
Yeah sure, a few example that spring to mind would be... Poor encoder: FAAC/FAAC2, the first open-source encoder for AAC audio, produce terrible audio no matter how much bitrate you let it work with. The AAC standard itself facilitates crisp audio quality at low bitrates, as heard with e.g. Apple's Core Audio AAC encoder or Nero AAC. Poor encoder: Xing, a popular MP3 encoder of the early 2000s, was similarly infamous…
> Vorbis is a good example of a spec whose limits/mistakes make it impossible to preserve certain combinations of frequencies, resulting in brief passages where parts of the reproduced spectrum deflates, making some music sound as if it lost its breath, so to speak.
So the people that talk about bitrates where it's transparent are basically delusional?
> Poor standard: MPEG-4 ASP, being limited to 4:2:0 chroma subsampling and PAL/NTSC resolutions.
That makes a lot of sense, I had no idea it was limited to those resolutions.
Thanks for the time explaining those.
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If I'm not mistaken they had a telecom infrastructure division at one point.
Siemens started as a communications company. The first invention was a type of telegraph. Siemens had a division called Siemens Communications Systems. They split that into Siemens Communications Systems (public networks) and Siemens Information Systems (PBX systems and such) in the mid 1980s. The company did a reorg in the late 1990s into four divisions. Those were rail, industrial, power generation, and information…
Most corporate companies have a (pointless?) 7-year cycle of "we need to diversificate" followed by a "we need to concentrate". That is/was also visible at at Siemens. As a result, the Siemens from now is quite different to the Siemens from 15 years ago.
Siemens holding one of the key patents in video codecs surprises me. I am not technically savvy, but I thought telecom infrastructure or direct media companies would hold the most important patents on this.
Siemens started as a telecom company.
By the time the company or it headquarter came to be known as "Siemens" it was already a "mixed bag" company --- we call it "Gemischtwarenladen". Quite early they made already made motors, generator ("dynamo maschine" 1868), insulated cables, locomotives (the worlds first electrical one was from them 1879), electric busses (1901). But also household appliances like stoves. Or automatic fuses and RCDs (Sentron) or industrial automation (Simatic).
Then it became an patent-poacher company, it was by decades no longer specialized in telecom. Yep, it still had PBX (private branch exchanges) and even the Gigaset mobile phones used to belong to Siemens. But that was dwarved by their other markets.
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Back in 2017 - https://patents.google.com/patent/US5960411A/en Although I don't see a lot of other sites using it. You'd think Shopify would?
I worked at Etsy when it expired and the execs got this question a lot. The TL;DR is that the expected outcome is that it massively increases the support burden (wait I didn't mean to click that; wait I actually need to send it to another address; wait I didn't realize shipping was a hundred dollars) without really enabling more sales. So it was a neat idea and worth trying when ecommerce was new, but now we know eno…
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I'm unfortunately really unimpressed with the Trackpoints coming out of Lenovo today. I have a brand new ThinkPad that suffers from drift everyday, so it's easy for me to see why other companies aren't including Trackpoints on their products.
I’d argue it’s a superior mouse even with the drift, even though I agree that the drift is annoying and am amazed they have not been able to fix it all these years.
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"DivX and XviD both encode to MPEG-4 ASP which has a lot of shortcomings that manifestly result in the infamous sludgy green-purple banding artefacts of the time, no matter how good the chosen encoder is." That's the fault of your decoder; I never had that problem playing DivX or XviD videos in VLC.
If anything it would be an issue with the encoder , but it's not. Both DivX and XviD are prime pieces of software but they live within unbridgeable limitations of the MPEG-4 ASP profile. This or that individual may not care about the outcome, and they may use various post-processing to smooth out the creases, but the limitations are all the same real and inherently visible.
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If anything it would be an issue with the encoder , but it's not. Both DivX and XviD are prime pieces of software but they live within unbridgeable limitations of the MPEG-4 ASP profile. This or that individual may not care about the outcome, and they may use various post-processing to smooth out the creases, but the limitations are all the same real and inherently visible.
It would be with the decoder, as the issue will happen in Windows Media Player but not VLC (which has its own implementation of XviD/DivX.)