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Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

leonardo.chiariglione.org

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Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#51

Post by badsectoracula »

mike_hearn wrote: post #41
pornel wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IP law, especially defence against submarine patents, makes codec development expensive. In the early days of MPEG codec development was difficult, because most computers weren't capable of encoding video, and the field was in its infancy. However, by the end of '00s computers were fast enough for anybody to do video encoding R&D, and there was a ton of research to build upon. At that point MPEG's role changed from b…

IP law and the need for extremely smart people with a rare set of narrow skills. It's not like codec development magically happens for free if you ignore patents. The point is, if there had been no incentives to develop codecs, there would have been no MPEG. Other people would have stepped into the void and sometimes did, e.g. RealVideo, but without legal IP protection the codecs would just have been entirely undocum…

That sounds like the 90s argument against FLOSS: without the incentive for people to sell software, nobody would write it.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#52

Post by deadbabe »

mike_hearn wrote: post #4
wheybags wrote: post #2

As someone who hasn't had any exposure to the human stories behind mpeg before, it feels to me like it's been a force for evil since long before 2020. Patents on h264, h265, and even mp3 have been holding the industry back for decades. Imagine what we might have if their iron grip on codecs was broken.

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.

Why not just use AI?

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#53

Post by ghm2199 »

mike_hearn wrote: post #4
wheybags wrote: post #2

As someone who hasn't had any exposure to the human stories behind mpeg before, it feels to me like it's been a force for evil since long before 2020. Patents on h264, h265, and even mp3 have been holding the industry back for decades. Imagine what we might have if their iron grip on codecs was broken.

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.

For the uninitiated, could you describe why codec development is slow and expensive?

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#54

Post by bsindicatr3 »

mike_hearn wrote: post #4
wheybags wrote: post #2

As someone who hasn't had any exposure to the human stories behind mpeg before, it feels to me like it's been a force for evil since long before 2020. Patents on h264, h265, and even mp3 have been holding the industry back for decades. Imagine what we might have if their iron grip on codecs was broken.

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:

https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-in-1994-the-company-wh...

Similarly, the awful history of digital content restriction technology in-general (DRM, etc.). I’m not against companies trying to protect assets, but data assets historically over all time are inherently prone to “use”, whether that use is intentional or unintentional by the one that provided the data. The problem has always been about the means of dissemination, not that the data itself needed to be encoded with a lock that anyone with the key or means to get/make one could unlock nor that it should need to call home, basically preventing the user from actually legitimately being able to use the data.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#55

Post by tux3 »

unlord wrote: post #45
thinkingQueen wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you really saying that patents are preventing people from writing the next great video codec? If it were that simple, it would’ve already happened. We’re not talking about a software project that you can just hack together, compile, and see if it works. We’re talking about rigorous performance and complexity evaluations, subjective testing, and massive coordination with hardware manufacturers—from chips to displa…

> People don’t develop video codecs for fun like they do with software. And the reason is that it’s almost impossible to do without support from the industry. As someone who lead an open source team (of majority volunteers) for nearly a decade at Mozilla, I can tell you that people do work on video codecs for fun, see https://github.com/xiph/daala Working with fine people from Xiph.Org and the IETF (and later AOM) on…

Daala had some really good ideas, I only understand the coding tools at the level of a curious codec enthusiast, far from an expert, but it was really fascinating to follow its progress

Actually, are Xiph people still involved in AVM? It seems like it's being developed a little bit differently than AV1. I might have lost track a bit.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#56

Post by [deleted] »

mike_hearn wrote: post #46
rwmj wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who would write a web server? Who would write Curl? Who would write a whole operating system to compete with Microsoft when that would take thousands of engineers being paid $100,000s per year? People don't understand that these companies have huge R&D budgets! (The answer is that most of the work would be done by companies who have an interest in video distribution - eg. Google - but don't profit directly by selling…

Google funding free stuff is not a real social mechanism. It's not something you can point to and say that's how society should work in general. Our industry has come to take Google's enormous corporate generosity for granted, but there was zero need for it to be as helpful to open computing as it has been. It would have been just as successful with YouTube if Chrome was entirely closed source and they paid for video…

[deleted]

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#57

Post by tomrod »

mike_hearn wrote: post #4
wheybags wrote: post #2

As someone who hasn't had any exposure to the human stories behind mpeg before, it feels to me like it's been a force for evil since long before 2020. Patents on h264, h265, and even mp3 have been holding the industry back for decades. Imagine what we might have if their iron grip on codecs was broken.

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 have been available a long time, surely, as we could install them in Linux distributions in 2005 or earlier?

(I know nothing about the legal side of all this, just remembering the time period of Ubuntu circa 2005-2008).

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#58

Post by zappb »

tomrod wrote: post #57
mike_hearn wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have been available a long time, surely, as we could install them in Linux distributions in 2005 or earlier? (I know nothing about the legal side of all this, just remembering the time period of Ubuntu circa 2005-2008).

Free codecs without patent issues were limited to things like Vorbis which never got wide support. There were FOSS codecs for patented algorithms, but those had legal issues in places that enforce software patents.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#59

Post by scotty79 »

> The same obscure forces that have hijacked MPEG had kept it hostage to their interests impeding its technical development and keeping it locked to outmoded Intellectual Property licensing models delaying market adoption of MPEG standards. Industry has been strangled and consumers have been deprived of the benefits of new technologies.

Copyright is cancer. The faster AI industry is going to run it into the ground, the better.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#60

Post by ZeroGravitas »

cornholio wrote: post #44
pornel wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IP law, especially defence against submarine patents, makes codec development expensive. In the early days of MPEG codec development was difficult, because most computers weren't capable of encoding video, and the field was in its infancy. However, by the end of '00s computers were fast enough for anybody to do video encoding R&D, and there was a ton of research to build upon. At that point MPEG's role changed from b…

That's unnecessarily harsh. Patent pools exist to promote collaboration in a world with aggressive IP legislation, they are an answer to a specific environment and they incentivize participants to share their IP at a reasonable price to third parties. The incentive being that you will be left out of the pool, the other members will work around your patents while not licensing their own patents to you, so your own IP…

They actually messed up the basic concept of a patent pool, and that is the key to their failure.

They didn't get people to agree on terms up front, they made the final codec with interlocking patents embedded from hundreds of parties and made no attempt to avoid random outsider's patents and then once it was done tried to come to a licence agreement when every minor patent holder had an effective veto on the resulting pool. That's how you end up with multiple pools plus people who own patents and aren't members of any of the pools. It's ridiculous.

My minor conspiracy theory is that if you did it right, then you'd basically end up with something close to open source codecs as that's the best overall outcome.

Everyone benefits from only putting in freely available ideas. So if you want to gouge people with your patents you need to mess this up and "accidentally" create a patent mess.

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