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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

#21

Post by gsnedders »

trothamel wrote: post #9
gok wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure a company might want to fund development of a proprietary way to reduce their costs but why would they want to make that available to their competitors in a global standard for free?

Aren't the browser vendors the gatekeepers here? As long as there are browsers that are given away for free, the decoders would be have to be made also. And if the browsers refuse to add a decoder unless encoding is also patent-free, then we have free codecs.

> As long as there are browsers that are given away for free, the decoders would be have to be made also.

Or have major platforms (realistically, Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android) ship decoders at the platform level, and have them ubiquitous enough. This is, ultimately, how we got H.264 decoders commonplace in browsers.

That said, Firefox held out for a long time with H.264, and only once it was clear it was costing them users did they give in and add H.264 to the whitelisted platform codecs exposed.

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

#22

Post by revelation »

You can buy a $50 SBC today with 4k HEVC decode HW blocks, enabled out of the box. For me, that puts the technology deep into the established box, and last I checked, whoever is making the IP core for it neither the many manufacturers shipping it are the least bit concerned. This post sounds like scaremongering.

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

#23

Post by auxym »

djsumdog wrote: post #18
merb wrote: post #4

> Here are a few, out of close to 180 standards: MP3 for digital music (1992), MPEG-2 for digital television (1994), MPEG-4 Visual for video on internet (1998), MP4 file format for mobile handsets (2001), well mp3 was mostly frauenhofer, not mpeg (yes they created the standard, etc. but the most patentable work was done by the frauenhofer) also the date... on 1992 it was not (yet) called mp3. it's silly to actually n…

It was called MPEG2 Layer III, right? And the licensing around mp3 is why many Linux distributions didn't offer mp3 in the default install, without adding "non-free" repositories. We also saw open standards emerge, like Ogg Vorbis and FLAC (although neither were widely adopted by hardware vendors compared to Apple's AAC/ALAC)

According to wikipedia, the compression algorithm was originally called MUSICAM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Development

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

#24

Post by LeoPanthera »

auxym wrote: post #23
djsumdog wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was called MPEG2 Layer III, right? And the licensing around mp3 is why many Linux distributions didn't offer mp3 in the default install, without adding "non-free" repositories. We also saw open standards emerge, like Ogg Vorbis and FLAC (although neither were widely adopted by hardware vendors compared to Apple's AAC/ALAC)

According to wikipedia, the compression algorithm was originally called MUSICAM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Development

You are misreading it. MUSICAM is an older codec technically very similar to MP2, as used in digital radio in Europe.

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

#26

Post by shmerl »

The crisis is simple, MPEG rarely cared to make royalty free standards, except may be in the case of DASH. So this is now haunting MPEG tech in a big way, since free codecs are replacing patent encumbered ones for various technical and financial reasons. DASH counter example itself demonstrates it, since it's adopted by big users just fine.

> The situation can be described as tragic.

I'd call the situation liberating. Tragic for parasitic patent aggressors, but great for actual technology progress. Choose what you prefer.

> AOM will certainly give much needed stability to the video codec market but this will come at the cost of reduced if not entirely halted technical progress. There will simply be no incentive for a company to develop new video compression technologies knowing that it assets will be thankfully – and nothing more – accepted by AOM for use in its video codec.

That's false, because instead of patent trolling, proper company would be adding resources to the common pool, benefiting in result from it. I guess the author finds the concept of collaboration to be foreign, but it actually pushes progress much faster than patent driven pocket lining.

> Can something be done?

MPEG can fix it going forward, and push for royalty free / patent unencumbered technology only.

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

#27

Post by ohazi »

The idea that private companies were responsible for the majority of the innovation that led to these video compression standards is a complete fabrication.

The majority of the work was done by the grad students of the professors who are on the standards committee. Private companies then race to patent or buy up anything that's tangentially related during the draft period, so that they can sign on and receive royalties after standardization. Many of these companies are owned by or have board members who are standards committee members. The whole thing is a giant racket.

Licensees were getting tired of this, so they started to do the same thing, and now you have multiple patent pools, no clear guidance on which ones are legit, and even fewer people who are willing to play along.

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

#28

Post by didibus »

genericpseudo wrote: post #13
clouddrover wrote: post #2

> AOM will certainly give much needed stability to the video codec market but this will come at the cost of reduced if not entirely halted technical progress. There will simply be no incentive for a company to develop new video compression technologies I don't think is correct. The driver for innovation in video compression technologies will continue to be the practical problems of encoding and distributing video. Th…

This means that codec development makes no sense for anyone who doesn't own either a large distribution platform or a large playback platform. (Much of the research has been done by middleware companies attempting to tax the two; their business goes from royalties to work-for-hire, at best, which is way less attractive for them). This is fine – in a macroeconomic sense – but of course it sucks if you're one of the co…

Wouldn't academic research still persist? Or has that also moved to a can't patent or profit from it, no interest in furthering research mindset?

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

#29

Post by lawl »

gsnedders wrote: post #21
trothamel wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't the browser vendors the gatekeepers here? As long as there are browsers that are given away for free, the decoders would be have to be made also. And if the browsers refuse to add a decoder unless encoding is also patent-free, then we have free codecs.

> As long as there are browsers that are given away for free, the decoders would be have to be made also. Or have major platforms (realistically, Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android) ship decoders at the platform level, and have them ubiquitous enough. This is, ultimately, how we got H.264 decoders commonplace in browsers. That said, Firefox held out for a long time with H.264, and only once it was clear it was costing…

> That said, Firefox held out for a long time with H.264, and only once it was clear it was costing them users did they give in and add H.264 to the whitelisted platform codecs exposed.

But even then MPEG (LA) didn't really make any money out of that because IIRC they pulled a hack where Cisco is providing a decoder binary, which they distribute. But the license fee has a cap which cisco was already almost at anyways, so that didn't cost cisco much.

Then they have (had planned?) reproducible compilation. So the decoder is open source, but you're not allowed to ship a binary that hasn't been compiled by cisco, but you can always verify the binary cisco provides matches the source code, as the resulting binary will be exactly the same if your compile it yourself.

Cisco essentially sponsored an open-source royalty-free decoder here.

So yeah, they gave in, but MPEG got nothing from them.

Good. Fuck MPEG LA.

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

#30

Post by clouddrover »

shmerl wrote: post #26

The crisis is simple, MPEG rarely cared to make royalty free standards, except may be in the case of DASH. So this is now haunting MPEG tech in a big way, since free codecs are replacing patent encumbered ones for various technical and financial reasons. DASH counter example itself demonstrates it, since it's adopted by big users just fine. > The situation can be described as tragic. I'd call the situation liberating…

> MPEG rarely cared to make royalty free standards, except may be in the case of DASH

DASH is not royalty-free: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/DASH/Pages/Intro.aspx

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