Comment by sfink | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sfink | Hacker News Reader

Wait... someone at MPEG actually believed their own bullshit? That a massive campaign of extortion, intentionally complex legal maneuvering, and outright intimidation is actually beneficial to technological progress in some way? (Sure, it's beneficial to some of the companies involved in the licensing extortion scheme; I don't think anyone disagrees with that.)

Or is this guy just an incredibly skilled troll with 30 years of experience in pulling the wool over people's eyes? I don't think so, though. He really seems to think that imposing massive amounts of friction on a system somehow makes it work better.

Wow. Just wow.

I mean, I'm not unsympathetic to the argument that patents can promote advancements by funneling money to inventors, however weak it starts sounding when you look at actual events in certain spheres. But the claim seems to be that nobody is going to bother to research improvements in an interesting, impactful technical area because they'll no longer be able to (1) invent something, (2) hire an army of lawyers, then (3) profit. Er, okay. Let the people who will only work with that sort of path go do their ICOs instead.

When people first started discussing which codecs to use on the web a decade ago, the argument made for the MPEG-LA stuff was that a) we're better, b) we're reasonably priced, c) we're already everywhere in hardware, and d) you don't have to worry about the patents because we've got you covered. Ultimately, they won on that basis. However, when HEVC rolled around, that argument was destroyed by the multiple patent pools, and the consumer groups for the patents were pissed off enough to make competitive alternatives.

I suspect that he believes that the perpetual funding stream of ever-better patents is needed to fund the research for ever-better codecs (which, as you say, is disputable but not unreasonable). I also suspect that he would argue that some of the problems of the protection racket amounts to a necessary evil (a protection racket does give you a viable means to combat submarine patents). However, the AV1/HEVC situation undermines these arguments, and this is someone who realizes the gravy train is running out of rails and is desperate to keep it from derailing instead of bailing while he still can.

So how does this work out fee/patentwise in the OSS world? I know ffmpeg/libav can play HEVC/x265 streams (or at least mpv can). Can it not encode to HEVC? Or do the fees start to apply when you start distributing content? Or is it like mp3 where fees are only attached to hardware encoders/decoders (which gets all iffy because where do you draw the line between hardware sold for encoding/decoding that has software codecs on it vs general purpose OSes with the same codecs?)

And doesn't Firefox have some special deal with Cisco to use their x264 decoder on the web?

ffmpeg just ignores patent licensing - you're responsible for paying the appropriate licensing fees if you use it. The same applies to x264 and x265. Generally the pools won't go after ffmpeg itself but rather companies shipping it once they get big enough / have money. For example: https://github.com/mbebenita/Broadway/issues/124

HEVC is currently literally impossible to license. One of the pools hasn't decided on pricing yet. You basically have to set aside some cash and hope it's enough to back-pay once they announce the pricing. But even with the existing ones, you have to pay for encoders, decoders, and videos encoded in it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#P...

There's no special deal per se, Cisco released OpenH264 for everyone, and it can be used royalty-free as long as you only use the binaries (instead of the source): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenH264

I don't think we need better codecs, video resolution increases slower than hardware and networking speeds. So, complete stagnation is viable.

>> So, complete stagnation is viable.

If you consider compression from an information theory point of view, for any given measure of "quality" there is theoretically a limit to compression. It's not clear where the limit is, or how close we are to it, but because it does exist stagnation is inevitable eventually.

As it gets harder to make gains it will become less of a business proposition and more of a research/academic thing.

Resolution isn't the only part to consider, the amount of detail you can store in that resolution can differ widely. With the push towards enhanced colour spaces, higher framerates, etc. there's plenty of need for better compression technology.

Besides, for a company like Netflix or Youtube, shaving 5% off the file size without a drop in quality can literally mean millions of dollars saved per year.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times:

Fuck the Fraunhofer Institute.

There have been a lot of mistakes in the growth of the internet, but mpeg... Trying to own an entire space isn’t about making the world a better place. It’s about being in control. Me me me.

Given how big video is now, and the interplay between available bandwidth and video quality, one wonders if certain bumps in the road would have been smoothed out if Netflix or YouTube had ramped up a few years earlier.

I think it was interesting when they released the mp3 patents, every organization was broadcasting "mp3 is dead" when really the headlines should have been "mp3 encoding/decoding is now totally free."

I'm convinced many big players wanted people to think mp3 was going away to push newer, patent encumbered formats.

I still remember being appalled by just how wrong that news cycle presented the information. Even a bunch of tech news sites repeated the same "mp3 is dead" headline.

Just for people who don't know, "they released" because the patents expired, not because they voluntarily gave them up.

This guy is the MPEG chairman.

Usually I'd expect someone in this position to toe the party line pretty hard, but he actually sounds reasonably level-headed to me. He even cautions the reader not to get their hopes up that anything will improve.

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