31–40 of 63 posts
Disclaimer: I was founder of on2 Technologies, acquired by Google and the basis for av1.
There really Is quite a bit to this story, starting in the early 90s and leading up to the situation today.
Put another way: The video patent cartels have fragmented due to greed, and so the cartel enablers at ISO have lost their purpose. In addition, organizations are tired of paying bridge tolls. So we can finally have open standards for video that anyone can just use and implement. AV1 in particular seems to be on its way to replacing them: https://research.mozilla.org/av1-media-codecs/
True enough. But at least in the USA all the satellite companies, and their set top boxes, are being forced to switch to HEVC because their half of their physical frequency spectrum was stolen by telcos. So there'll be substantial amounts of people making hardware for quite a while. The web isn't everything yet.
Put another way: The video patent cartels have fragmented due to greed, and so the cartel enablers at ISO have lost their purpose. In addition, organizations are tired of paying bridge tolls. So we can finally have open standards for video that anyone can just use and implement. AV1 in particular seems to be on its way to replacing them: https://research.mozilla.org/av1-media-codecs/
I guess a problem is that most hardware, SoCs etc, still use MPEG.
As someone who mostly uses video in the context of online systems, MP4 (H.264) is the closest we have to a universally supported format on the user's end and it has been for years. However, it's complicated, patent encumbered and very inefficient by modern standards. And even MP4 isn't 100% universally supported.
Once encoding and decoding at reasonable speeds is possible -- we're not there yet, but there has been a lot of progress already -- I see no reason that AV1 shouldn't render H.264 and similar legacy formats obsolete quite quickly. The new format doesn't need to be perfect at first, just good enough to use with mid-range to high-end devices. Then the openness and improved compression/quality will make it an attractive alternative, with legacy formats reduced to being just a fallback for less capable devices. One generation of devices later, almost everyone can play it. Two generations later, you probably have hardware support, but at that point it's more about efficiency things like reducing battery drain on the viewer's side and hardware costs on the encoding side, because the format itself has already won.
Put another way: The video patent cartels have fragmented due to greed, and so the cartel enablers at ISO have lost their purpose. In addition, organizations are tired of paying bridge tolls. So we can finally have open standards for video that anyone can just use and implement. AV1 in particular seems to be on its way to replacing them: https://research.mozilla.org/av1-media-codecs/
I guess it wont mean that parents on video encoding won't exist, rather that now they wont be standardized. Not everyone can be sponsored by advertising monopoly, some might need their technology to bring revenue by itself. However yes, the pool broke by too greedy companies (IP based companies, not technology ones) and hevc is laughable. See it explained by mpeg chairman itself https://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis…
This post is so "inside baseball" that it's difficult to discern what his point or goal is?
Chariglione was the charismatic leader behind the MPEG standards, including those behind DVD (MPEG-2). The biggest challenge wasn’t technical but political: getting a bunch of companies to agree to pool their patents so licensing them could be streamlined. For next-generation video beyond H.264 (AVC) and H.265 (HEVC), that consensus has broken-down and his prediction seems to be that open-source standards like Allian…
>It should be no surprise that the HEVC standard has some use in broadcasting, but its use on the web is estimated to be at 12%. If one considers that broadcasting is a rich but declining market and video on the web is constantly rising, one understands that ISO standards will be gradually relegated to a more and more marginal market. True enough. But at least in the USA all the satellite companies, and their set top…
This is really a story of Open Source and shared intellectual property finally winning out over expensive, proprietary standards that tried to present themselves as something else. Disclaimer: I was founder of on2 Technologies, acquired by Google and the basis for av1. There really Is quite a bit to this story, starting in the early 90s and leading up to the situation today.
>It should be no surprise that the HEVC standard has some use in broadcasting, but its use on the web is estimated to be at 12%. If one considers that broadcasting is a rich but declining market and video on the web is constantly rising, one understands that ISO standards will be gradually relegated to a more and more marginal market. True enough. But at least in the USA all the satellite companies, and their set top…
What does a frequency have to do with a video format? And how do you define stolen?
A predatory business model based primarily on large companies exploiting legal technicalities to seek rent from innovators has been rendered obsolete because the large companies couldn't get their act together and the innovators did a better job anyway.
Efforts to co-ordinate those large companies in those exploits are probably now doomed, as are the organisations behind them.
The future almost certainly belongs to open standards and the community, though someone who has built their career around the old business model isn't happy about it.