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Comment by cheema33 | Hacker News Reader

Video codec compression scams remained popular even in early 2000s. I worked for a very large public tech company. One of the top 10 in that era. And they fell hard for scammers from Las Vegas that promised revolutionary audio/video compression. We had to sign all sorts of NDA and couldn't look under the hood of what they delivered to us under penalty of breach of contract and all that stuff. I "accidentally" ended up looking under the hood and couldn't believe what I found. I reported the findings to my manager and told him to do what he wanted to with that information.

Long story short, the whole project got shut down and about 200 people working on project lost their jobs. Myself included. Luckily I quickly landed at a better place working on more meaningful things.

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> I reported the findings to my manager [...] the whole project got shut down and about 200 people working on project lost their jobs. Myself included.

Good for you for reporting the threat. But I'm a little surprised that they let the messenger get killed along with all the other innocents.

I knew someone who whistleblew to C-suite, about misrepresentations they realized, on something that was then an existential threat to one of the top companies in its market. A series of layoffs and (IIUC) some M&A later, most of the employees were gone, but that one middle-aged engineer who warned C-suite (averting an even worse fate for the company) escaped all the layoffs, and was still there.

I’m sure that that one line manager who reported the fraud to the CEO was well rewarded. How he learned what he did? We’ll never know. Too bad his team had to be let go.

> But I'm a little surprised that they let the messenger get killed along with all the other innocents.

There was bad blood between the managers. My immediate manager bypassed his immediate manager and went above a few levels. Top management lost all confidence in the team and decided to can the project. We were all treated as peasants and told to find other jobs inside or outside the company.

> I "accidentally" ended up looking under the hood and couldn't believe what I found. I reported the findings to my manager and told him to do what he wanted to with that information.

What did you find? Low bitrates? Smaller resolutions? Enquiring minds want to know.

Terrible weissman scores.

Presumably https://www.coreylynnfayman.com/the-pixelon-con/

It was just an MPEG wrapper.

It was not a very sophisticated scam. The vendor had rebadged an opensource software I was very very familiar with. The only changes they had made were to rename things and fudge the reported stats.

It was not all that dissimilar from what Nikola Motors did when they pushed a non-working Hydrogen truck down a hill and filmed it and said look, the truck is working great. They too were caught. And eventually got an Italian company to produce a truck and put their name on it. And then eventually went bankrupt. But not before the officers, including the founder made bank on the entire scam. CEO was convicted of fraud. But he paid/donated $1m to Trump and was swiftly pardoned.

Was the scam that the codec had the raw video in it, so the "files" could be made trivially small?

The one I looked at had a little video receiver in the box. You can draw your own conclusions from there.

My conclusion is “they were storing the video in the cloud”? (Tongue in cheek interpretation)

I mean, that would work. It's going to be the reason AI video compression works; people are okay with an AI model being 1GB but they wouldn't put up with libavcodec being 1GB.

It's a valid codec move to have 1GB in the codec but to be able to compress arbitrary video with it, or even just arbitrary video within a certain specialized domain. Having those requirements will affect all the cost/benefit decisions that get made when people decide whether to use it, but if it outperforms on other metrics it may be something that wins in some places.

I believe lumost is referring to the actual video being used for testing being embedded in the codec. That is not a valid move; it compresses just that one exact video arbitrarily small (honestly anything above zero bytes is just sandbagging, you can always map the empty file to your test video, for INFINITE COMPRESSIONS!!!1!) but nothing else.

>> people are okay with an AI model being 1GB but they wouldn't put up with libavcodec being 1GB.

If people are happy with the results of the libavcodec, you could rebrand it as "libavcodec-ai" and now you have a more effective codec that might be bigger, but is now palatable to users :-)

Between this and the other compression scams mentioned in the thread, is there any connection to the show Silicon Valley? I haven’t heard of this genre of scam before but it sounds a lot like the premise of pied piper!

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