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...
Demonstrating the technology, Welborne stood proudly beside a prototype of the Presario 6000 as it displayed an eight-minute segment from a recent 3rd Rock From The Sun episode, downloaded from an NBC server in under 75 minutes.
lol
If you went to blockbuster, you could move 4.7 gb to your home in half the time (unless your family was involved in choosing the movie which would slow you down)
At the time, the mocking was well deserved. I remember downloading trailers for moves over my dial-up connection. Took the entire night for 3 minutes of video. Can’t imagine paying $5k for that privilege. Today though, the mocking doesn’t make sense and is confusing. I haven’t ever owned a TV.
By 99 it wasn't that bad. I remember screaming along with V.92 56k modems. Futurama episodes were about 50mb encoded as RealVideo and took a mere two and a half hours to download o.0 (and it really was v.92; I still have the double-bong towards the end of the handshake emblazoned in my memory)
Realmovies were the new hotness, evolution of video piracy was
>vivoactive is the OG (stream only format, like 50x50 pixels, NO KEYFRAMES - no fast forward, rewind, or seeking), talking about 1995 here
>realmovies - higher quality, seeking, around 1998
>DIVX (format, not the discs also at the same time) - mindblowing quality update, around 2000
>VCDs - concurrent with DIVX around 2000
>XVID - (DIVX backwards) arose as DIVX failed, 2001
>then wherever we are now, 9999 formats and VLC supports them all
I also owned one but I had to look for it. It certainly wasn’t “widely supported.”
Have a look at audio hardware from 10-15 ago (so long after the mp3 player wave ended in first world countries) but basically everything that plays mp3 plays ogg vorbis as well.
So you’d say that a format that most consumers couldn’t use (because only a few devices could play it) is “widely supported?”
There is a lot more audio codecs embedded in other things than there ever were personal music players, by orders of magnitude. Vorbis was ubiquitous in video games, for example. Personal music players had the issue that they had to have MP3 due to market forces, so offering Vorbis didn't save them any money. There were also some design decisions in Vorbis that made it a little more annoying to support on some very li…
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.
There is a lot more audio codecs embedded in other things than there ever were personal music players, by orders of magnitude. Vorbis was ubiquitous in video games, for example. Personal music players had the issue that they had to have MP3 due to market forces, so offering Vorbis didn't save them any money. There were also some design decisions in Vorbis that made it a little more annoying to support on some very li…
I couldn’t take my PlayStation to school.
Sure, but you can’t just say “Vorbis wasn’t widely used for music piracy, so it never gained wide support”.
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?
The encoder side can be upgraded, but typically decoding isn't flexible enough to add an entirely new codec to it.
Of course, you can design it to be as flexible as you want; but at one end of that you just have a regular CPU again.
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…
Part of the reason h.264 was such a big percentage of video was that they messed up the licencing of the follow up so badly which was supposed to supplant it. Not that the licencing of h.264 wasn't a mess too. You suggest it was free for web use but they originally only promised not to charge for free streaming up until 2015 and reserved the right to do so once it was embedded in the web. Pressure from Google/Xiph/et…
Yes, but what are we arguing about here really? I've never said monopolies are good or that MPEG having competition was bad, just that MPEG did a decent job of developing widely used standards at the time and the (still patented) web codecs came decades later, funded by monopoly profits. The alternative to MPEG's pooling and standards wasn't AV1 in 1990, it was RealVideo, Apple Video, Sorensen Spark and quite possibly single vendor lockin for all digital video, as happened with operating systems.
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 … and it's hardly a robust strategy Maybe you don’t remember the way that the gif format (there was no jpeg, png, or webp initially) had problems with licensing, and then years later having scares about it potentially becoming illegal to use gifs. Here’s a mention of some of the problems with Unisys, though I didn’t find info about these scares on Wikipedia’s GIF or Compuserve pages: htt…
The "non robust strategy" refers to relying on goodnatured monopolies to fund free technologies, not a format being free. When it works its nice, but I am indeed old enough to remember the GIF patent wars, which means I'm also old enough to remember when the big rich monopoly in town was Microsoft (and before them, IBM). Neither Microsoft nor Apple were like Google and the tech they produced was much more closed than MPEG. The idea that MPEG took away some Stallmanist idyll is just ahistorical.
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 but that became possible only 15 years or so after MPEG was born The release of VP3 as open source predates Google's later acquisition of On2 (2010) by nearly a decade.
In practice nobody outside a handful of developers and executives at rich tech firms seems to care about video codec licensing - open codecs were barely used anywhere until they matched the quality of the MPEG standards. They still aren't that widely used. H.264 is supposedly 90%+ of all digital video even now (well, as of a few years ago at least according to Google).