71–80 of 209 posts
I remember this same guy complaining investments in the MPEG extortionist group would disappear because they couldn't fight against AV1.
He was part of a patent Mafia is is only lamenting he lost power.
Hypocrisy in its finest form.
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.
For the uninitiated, could you describe why codec development is slow and expensive?
Until the new codec comes to together all those small optimizations aren’t really worth much, so it’s a long term research project with potentially zero return on investement.
And yes, most of the small optimizations are patented, something that I’ve come to understand isnt’t viewed very favorably by most.
> 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, t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think if IP rights holders were mandated to pay property tax it would make the system much healthier.
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.
Enough codecs out there. Just no adoption.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Source? I’ve seen Vorbis used in a whole bunch of places.
Notably, Spotify only used Vorbis for a while (still does, but also includes AAC now, for Apple platforms I think).
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 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: htt…
The GIF page on wikipedia has an entire section for the patent troubles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Unisys_and_LZW_patent_enfo...
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.
I avoided a career in codecs after spending about a year in college learning about them. The patent minefield meant I couldn't meaningfully build incremental improvements on what existed, and the idea of dilligently dancing around existing patents and then releasing something which intentionally lacked state-of-the-art ideas wasn't compelling. Codec development is slow and expensive becuase you can't just release a n…
> My Christian Catholic education made and still makes me think that everybody should have a mission that extends beyond their personal interests. I remember this same guy complaining investments in the MPEG extortionist group would disappear because they couldn't fight against AV1. He was part of a patent Mafia is is only lamenting he lost power. Hypocrisy in its finest form.