Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG • Hacker News Board

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#201

Post by mschuster91 » Fri, Aug 08, 2025, 9:44 AM UTC

rs186 wrote: post #169

mschuster91 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It seems that you have a massive misunderstanding of how this works. University research labs, usually with a team of no more than 10 people (at most 20), are good at producing early, proof-of-concept work, but not incredibly complex projects like creating an actual codec. They are not known for producing polished, mature commerical products that can be immediately used in the real world. They don't have the resource…

> They don't have the resources or the incentive to do so.

Of course they have. Guess how MP3 was developed - an offshoot of the German Fraunhofer Institute and FAU Nürnberg-Erlangen, amongst others.

The fact that no one seems to even be able to imagine how funding anything from the government could even work (despite that era being just a few decades ago) is shocking.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#202

Post by scott_w » Fri, Aug 08, 2025, 11:54 AM UTC

notpushkin wrote: post #196

scott_w wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

I never said anything about piracy. Plenty of teenagers knew how to rip CDs onto their MP3 players, or had a friend who could do it for them.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#203

Post by riedel » Fri, Aug 08, 2025, 9:50 PM UTC

bokchoi wrote: post #182

riedel wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MPEG-7 includes a binary XML standard [0] which is quite useful IMHO in comparison to others (I think it is used in DVB Meta data streams). But beyond patents it is even hard to find open documentation of BIM. I think the group was technically quite competent in comparison with other standard groups, but the business models around it really turn me off. [0] https://mpeg.chiariglione.org/standards/mpeg-7/reference-sof…

Interesting. I've used EXI in a past project but I hadn't heard of BiM.

More than 10 years ago. I was looking into using binary XML on really ressource constraint embedded devices (actually I started to dive into the whole rabbit hole of grammar based compression on hedges in my PhD). I tried to like EXI, but realized that it wasn't really designed for embedded applications. I ended up implementing binary representations very much inspired by BiM.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#204

Post by Merrill » Fri, Aug 08, 2025, 11:17 PM UTC

MPEG's patent policy was not its own. The Moving Picture Experts Group was Working Group 11 of Sub Committee 2 of ISO-IEC Joint Technical Committee 1. Other Working Groups in SC2 were the Joint Photographic Experts Group, the Joint Bi-Level Image Group, and the Multimedia/Hypermedia Experts Group. Therefore, the patent policy was the ISO-IEC policy for including patented technology in their standards.

MPEG was also joint with the video conferencing standards group within the CCITT (now International Telecommunications Union), which generally required FRAND declarations from patent holders.

My recollection is that MPEG-LA was set up as a clearing house so that implementers could go to one licensing organization, rather than negotiating with each patent owner individually.

All the patents for MPEG 1 and MPEG 2 must be expired by now.

Besides patent gridlock, there is a fundamental economic problem with developing new video coding algorithms. It's very difficult to develop an algorithm that will halve the bit rate for the same quality, to get it implemented in hardware products an software, and to introduce it broadly in the existing video services infrastructure. Plus, doubling the compression is likely to more than double the processing required. On the other hand, within a couple of years the network engineers will double the bit rate for the same cost, and the storage engineers will double the storage for the same cost. They, like processing, follow their own Moore's Law.

So reducing the cost by improving codecs is more expensive and takes more effort and time than just waiting for the processor, storage and networking cost reductions. At least that's been true over the 3 decades since MPEG 2.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#205

Post by quickthrowman » Sat, Aug 09, 2025, 1:59 PM UTC

dspillett wrote: post #163

maxst wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 1998, the idea seemed so ridiculous, TheOnion mocked it: https://theonion.com/new-5-000-multimedia-computer-system-do...

Picking 300MB as a ridiculous amount of data to download dates that nicely without needing to look at the article header. Though using the codecs and hardware of that time I doubt the quality at even that size would be great. Compare an old 349MB (sized to fit two on a CD-R/-RW, likely 480p though smaller wasn't uncommon) cap of a Stargate episode picked up in the early/mid 20XXs to a similarly sized file compressed…

I recall Xvid rips of SD television content being just fine quality wise, even at the 350MB per episode that ‘the scene’ used. A modern encoding at 480P might have slightly better compression in dark areas, but SD television is kinda janky compared to HD.

H.265 or H.264 would absolutely crush Xvid for compressing HD content, both in size and quality.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#206

Post by cwizou » Sat, Aug 09, 2025, 6:25 PM UTC

chubot wrote: post #159

cwizou wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You could say "Linux was CREATED out of thin air", and I wouldn't argue with you. 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 gr…

My point was, a lot of the early corporate support were smallish companies built specifically around Linux. RedHat is the perfect example of that, it started as a university project to make a distro.

It took a while (and a lot of pain) to get a lot of driver vendors to come fully into the project, yet Linux was already gaining a bunch of traction at that time (say last half of 90s).

I'll give you that Intel was always more or less a good actor though! But Google didn't exist when Linux already mattered. And when Google was created, they definitely benefited a lot from it, basing much of their infra on it.

Marketing needs (and laywer approval) can bring support faster than most things. Opus for audio is a good example of that too.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#207

Post by mafuy » Mon, Aug 11, 2025, 11:36 AM UTC

mike_hearn wrote: post #176

mafuy wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect, to say that codecs are more difficult to get right than optimizing compilers is absurd. The only reason I can think of why you would say this is that nowadays we have good compiler infrastructure that works with many hardware architectures and it has become easy to create or modify compilers. But that's only due to the fact that it was so insanely complicated that it had to be redone from scratc…

> There is no way that a single company could develop a state of the art compiler without using an existing one. Intel had a good independent compiler and gave up because open source had become superior. Not only can they do it but some companies have done it several times. Look at Oracle: there's HotSpot's C2 compiler, and the Graal compiler. Both state of the art, both developed by one company. Not unique. Microsof…

I've searched for some performance comparisons between Graal and equivalent GCC programs and it seems like Graal is not quite at the same level - unsurprisingly, it is probably more concerned with avoiding boxing than optimal use of SIMD. And as much as I love Roslyn, which is/was a Microsoft thing: it has the same issue. It only recently got serious about competing with C, and that's years after it was open sourced.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#208

Post by cxr » Mon, Aug 11, 2025, 12:33 PM UTC

mike_hearn wrote: post #200

cxr wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts>

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#209

Post by mike_hearn » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 9:39 AM UTC

mafuy wrote: post #207

mike_hearn wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no way that a single company could develop a state of the art compiler without using an existing one. Intel had a good independent compiler and gave up because open source had become superior. Not only can they do it but some companies have done it several times. Look at Oracle: there's HotSpot's C2 compiler, and the Graal compiler. Both state of the art, both developed by one company. Not unique. Microsof…

I've searched for some performance comparisons between Graal and equivalent GCC programs and it seems like Graal is not quite at the same level - unsurprisingly, it is probably more concerned with avoiding boxing than optimal use of SIMD. And as much as I love Roslyn, which is/was a Microsoft thing: it has the same issue. It only recently got serious about competing with C, and that's years after it was open sourced.

Well, Graal is designed to compile Java and dynamic scripting languages, not C. Its flexibility means it can also compile C (=LLVM bitcode), but that's more of a tech demo than something they invest into.

I don't quite get your point though. Mine was only that it's common for single companies to develop multiple independent state of the art compilers, whereas after the 1990s video codecs tend to be collaborations between many companies. That's a piece of evidence that codecs are harder. But this is all quite subjective and I don't really care. Maybe compilers are actually harder and the trend to collaboration in video is just a cultural quirk of that subfield - doesn't really matter. The starting point of the thread was a belief that if MPEG didn't exist video codecs would have all been 100% free right from day one and I just don't see any evidence for that. The competition to MPEG in the 90s was mostly Sorensen and RealVideo if my fading memories aren't too garbled. Although the last version of Sorensen Spark was apparently a tweaked version of H.263 according to Wikipedia.