Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

leonardo.chiariglione.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 209 posts

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#91

Post by cnst »

thinkingQueen wrote: post #11
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.

Not sure why you are downvoted as you seem to be one of the few who knows even a little about codec development. And regarding ”royalty-free” codecs please read this https://ipeurope.org/blog/royalty-free-standards-are-not-fre...

> The catch is that while the AV1 developers offer their patents (assuming they have any) on a royalty-free basis, in return they require users of AV1 to agree to license their own patents royalty-free back to them.

Such a huge catch that the companies that offer you a royalty-free license, only do so on the condition that you're not gonna turn around and abuse your own patents against them!

How exactly is that a bad thing?

How is it different from the (unwritten) social contracts of all humans and even of animals? How is it different from the primal instincts?

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#92

Post by DragonStrength »

marcodiego wrote: post #83
maxloh wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any link to his comment?

> all the investments (collectively hundreds of millions USD) made by the industry for the new video codec will go up in smoke and AOM’s royalty free model will spread to other business segments as well. https://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solu... He is not a coder, not a researcher, he is only part of the worst game there is in this industry: a money maker from patents and "standards" you need to…

You missed the first part of that quote:

> At long last everybody realises that the old MPEG business model is now broke

And the entire post is about how dysfunctional MPEG is and how AOM rose to deal with it. It is tragic to waste so much time and money only to produce nothing. He's criticizing the MPEG group and their infighting. He's literally criticizing MPEG's licensing model and the leadership of the companies in MPEG. He's an MPEG member saying MPEG's business model is broken yet no one has a desire to fix it, so it will be beaten by a competitor. Would you not want to see your own organization reform rather than die?

Reminder AOM is a bunch of megacorps with profit motive too, which is why he thinks this ultimately leads to stalled innovation:

> My concerns are at a different level and have to do with the way industry at large will be able to access innovation. 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 companies to develop new video compression technologies, at very significant cost because of the sophistication of the field, knowing that their assets will be thankfully – and nothing more – accepted and used by AOM in their video codecs.

> Companies will slash their video compression technology investments, thousands of jobs will go and millions of USD of funding to universities will be cut. A successful “access technology at no cost” model will spread to other fields.

Money is the motivator. Figuring out how to reward investment in pushing the technology forward is his concern. It sounds like he is open to suggestions.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#93

Post by Reason077 »

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.

> "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."

Has AV1 solved this, to some extent? Although there are patent claims against it (patents for technologies that are fundamental to all the modern video codecs), it still seems better than the patent & licensing situation for h264 / h265.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#94

Post by mr_toad »

pjc50 wrote: post #84
ddtaylor wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some view these as so interconnected that they will say LLMs are "just" compression.

Which is an interesting view when applied to the IP. I think it's relatively uncontroversial that an MP4 file which "predicts" a Disney movie which it was "trained on" is a derived work. Suppose you have an LLM which was trained on a fairly small set of movies and you could produce any one on demand; would that be treated as a derived work? If you have a predictor/compressor LLM which was trained on all the movies in…

MP4s are compressed data, not a compression algorithm. An MP4 (or any compressed data) is not a “prediction”, it is the difference between what was predicted and what you’re trying to compress.

An LLM is (or can be used) as a compression algorithm, but it is not compressed data. It is possible to have an overfit algorithm exactly predict (or reproduce) an output, but it’s not possible for one to reproduce all the outputs due to the pigeonhole principle.

To reiterate - LLMs are not compressed data.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#95

Post by newsclues »

mike_hearn wrote: post #43
newsclues wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the sort of project that should be developed and released via open source from academia. Audio and video codecs, document formats like PDF, are all foundational to computing and modern life from government to business, so there is a great incentive to make it all open, and free.

Universities love patent licensing. I don't think academia is the solution you're looking for.

So do companies.

But education receives a lot of funding from the government.

I think academia should build open source technology (that people can commercialize on their own with the expertise).

Higher education doesn’t need to have massive endowments of real estate and patent portfolio to further educ… administration salaries and vanity building projects.

Academia can serve the world with technology and educated minds.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#96

Post by marcodiego »

DragonStrength wrote: post #92
marcodiego wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all the investments (collectively hundreds of millions USD) made by the industry for the new video codec will go up in smoke and AOM’s royalty free model will spread to other business segments as well. https://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solu... He is not a coder, not a researcher, he is only part of the worst game there is in this industry: a money maker from patents and "standards" you need to…

You missed the first part of that quote: > At long last everybody realises that the old MPEG business model is now broke And the entire post is about how dysfunctional MPEG is and how AOM rose to deal with it. It is tragic to waste so much time and money only to produce nothing. He's criticizing the MPEG group and their infighting. He's literally criticizing MPEG's licensing model and the leadership of the companies…

Fixing a business model that was always a force that slowed down development, implementation and adoption is not something that should be "fixed". MPEG dying is something to celebrate not whine about.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#97

Post by newsclues »

oblio wrote: post #33
newsclues wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the sort of project that should be developed and released via open source from academia. Audio and video codecs, document formats like PDF, are all foundational to computing and modern life from government to business, so there is a great incentive to make it all open, and free.

You're also describing technologies with universal use and potential for long term rent seeking. Basically MBA drool material.

Yeah, and if MBAs want to reap that reward, they need to fund the development exclusively without government funding.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#98

Post by phkahler »

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…

>> 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.

You can say that, but this discussion is in response to the guy who started MPEG and later shut it down. I don't think he'd say its harsh.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#99

Post by cnst »

marcodiego wrote: post #83
maxloh wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any link to his comment?

> all the investments (collectively hundreds of millions USD) made by the industry for the new video codec will go up in smoke and AOM’s royalty free model will spread to other business segments as well. https://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solu... He is not a coder, not a researcher, he is only part of the worst game there is in this industry: a money maker from patents and "standards" you need to…

His argument is blatantly invalid.

He first points out that a royalty-free format was actually better than the patent-pending alternative that he was responsible for pushing.

In the end, he concludes that the that the progress of video compression would stop if developers can't make money from patents, providing a comparison table on codec improvements that conveniently omits the aforementioned royalty-free code being better than the commercial alternatives pushed by his group.

Besides the above fallacy, the article is simply full of boasting about his own self-importance and religious connotations.

Re: Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG

#100

Post by master-lincoln »

yxhuvud wrote: post #48
mike_hearn wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universities love patent licensing. I don't think academia is the solution you're looking for.

The solution to that is to remove the ability to patent codecs.

I think we should go a step further and remove the ability to patent algorithms (software)
Post reply on HN