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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

#31

Post by chrisseaton »

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…

Right - it's patently false. If there was no incentive to develop new video compression, then why would anyone pay someone else to develop new video compression (buying licenses) either?

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

#32

Post by shmerl »

clouddrover wrote: post #30
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

> DASH is not royalty-free

It is, the above is just a list that trolls are assembling to intimidate others. They have it on many thigns, including established royalty free codecs. If they sue someone with it and prove in court they actually own patents on DASH - then it will be another story. Until then - intimidation doesn't equal ownership.

In this industry, such intimidating tactics (very protection racket and mafia like) are commonplace. Check the story how Qualcomm and some others tried to intimidate Opus project.

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

#33

Post by clouddrover »

lawl wrote: post #29
gsnedders wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> IIRC they pulled a hack where Cisco is providing a decoder binary

OpenH264 is only used for WebRTC and, importantly, there's no AAC support (which doesn't matter for WebRTC because you can just use Opus). Firefox uses the OS platform's H.264 decoder for video element playback.

> which cisco was already almost at anyways, so that didn't cost cisco much

It apparently cost Cisco quite a lot more in licensing fees but they considered it worth it for the sake of integration with their video conferencing hardware. See the comments to this blog post from Monty Montgomery for some discussion on it:

https://xiphmont.dreamwidth.org/61694.html

https://xiphmont.dreamwidth.org/61694.html?thread=439550#cmt...

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

#36

Post by mbebenita »

binarymax wrote: post #34

Does anyone know what happened to Daala? It seemed like it was going great but has been quiet for several years now. https://xiph.org/daala/

Mozilla is an AOM member. A lot of the technology in Daala has been integrated into AV1, along with Cisco's Thor.

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

#37

Post by clouddrover »

shmerl wrote: post #32
clouddrover wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

> DASH is not royalty-free It is, the above is just a list that trolls are assembling to intimidate others. They have it on many thigns, including established royalty free codecs. If they sue someone with it and prove in court they actually own patents on DASH - then it will be another story. Until then - intimidation doesn't equal ownership. In this industry, such intimidating tactics (very protection racket and maf…

You can't just dismiss it and hope that it is. The MPEG LA has been successful with their other patent pools. They've got a good chance of being successful with this one as well.

That's what happened to VC-1. Microsoft tried to release VC-1 on royalty-free terms but the MPEG LA formed a patent pool and then it was no longer royalty-free.

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

#38

Post by [deleted] »

clouddrover wrote: post #33
lawl wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> IIRC they pulled a hack where Cisco is providing a decoder binary OpenH264 is only used for WebRTC and, importantly, there's no AAC support (which doesn't matter for WebRTC because you can just use Opus). Firefox uses the OS platform's H.264 decoder for video element playback. > which cisco was already almost at anyways, so that didn't cost cisco much It apparently cost Cisco quite a lot more in licensing fees but…

[deleted]

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

#39

Post by gsnedders »

clouddrover wrote: post #33
lawl wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> IIRC they pulled a hack where Cisco is providing a decoder binary OpenH264 is only used for WebRTC and, importantly, there's no AAC support (which doesn't matter for WebRTC because you can just use Opus). Firefox uses the OS platform's H.264 decoder for video element playback. > which cisco was already almost at anyways, so that didn't cost cisco much It apparently cost Cisco quite a lot more in licensing fees but…

> OpenH264 is only used for WebRTC and, importantly, there's no AAC support (which doesn't matter for WebRTC because you can just use Opus). Firefox uses the OS platform's H.264 decoder for video element playback.

And Firefox supporting H.264 through the platform decoder came a while before OpenH264 happened.

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

#40

Post by shmerl »

clouddrover wrote: post #37
shmerl wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DASH is not royalty-free It is, the above is just a list that trolls are assembling to intimidate others. They have it on many thigns, including established royalty free codecs. If they sue someone with it and prove in court they actually own patents on DASH - then it will be another story. Until then - intimidation doesn't equal ownership. In this industry, such intimidating tactics (very protection racket and maf…

You can't just dismiss it and hope that it is. The MPEG LA has been successful with their other patent pools. They've got a good chance of being successful with this one as well. That's what happened to VC-1. Microsoft tried to release VC-1 on royalty-free terms but the MPEG LA formed a patent pool and then it was no longer royalty-free.

> You can't just dismiss it and hope that it is.

Probably not. The better way is to do a review and have ready rebuttals of fake patent claims. I didn't exactly look into how it was done for DASH, but its big users like YouTube and Netflix should have done it.

> The MPEG LA has been successful with their other patent pools.

And completely unsuccessful with many others. There was the same type of list put out by MPEG-LA trolls for VPx, and I remember there was research published that debunked it all. So there is zero trust in anything that MPEG-LA say, but surely having concrete defense is a good thing.

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