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The idea that private companies were responsible for the majority of the innovation that led to these video compression standards is a complete fabrication. Th

by ohazi 9y ago

The idea that private companies were responsible for the majority of the innovation that led to these video compression standards is a complete fabrication. The majority of the work was done by the grad students of the professors who are on the standards committee. Private companies then race to patent or buy up anything that's tangentially related during the draft period, so that they can sign on and receive royalties after standardization. Many of these companies are owned by or have board members who are standards committee members. The whole thing is a giant racket. Licensees were getting tired of this, so they started to do the same thing, and now you have multiple patent pools, no clear guidance on which ones are legit, and even fewer people who are willing to play along.

ecesena 9y ago
And so what do you think is the solution? Do you think that "Only by becoming a Technical Committee can MPEG [...] stay competitive in the market." is true, or what could be a valuable alternative?
- jchw 9y ago
  It seems like there's an answer: the market actually wants free standards because they're realizing it's more beneficial to them than any other outcome. So money and effort is being pumped into developing free video encoding standards. It seems there is an incentive for the foreseeable future to continue to improve video codecs simply because it saves on bandwidth and disk space costs, and improves user experience. Though obviously, everything's too good to be true. Just like MPEG seems to be hitting the end, some day the AOM will hit the end, too. The world changes. Something else will emerge and impact the business model. It may be worse, or maybe it'll be a return to norms. Could just be another one of those things that cycles every so often. With audio codecs, it doesn't look like we ever really needed much in the way of commercial entities, since Vorbis and Opus have been outperforming the competition for a long time now.
  - CharlesW 9y ago
    > …Vorbis and Opus have been outperforming the competition for a long time now. Sorry to be pedantic about one bit of an otherwise-fine post, but AAC is comparable to Opus at any given bitrate[1]. Plus, even the most esoteric flavor of AAC has the enormous advantage of 7+ years of ubiquity[2]. [1] See the multiple charts at http://opus-codec.org/comparison/ http://opus-codec.org/comparison/, for one presumably-unbiased source. [2] All versions of Android support HE-AACv2 playback, iOS introduced support for HE-AACv2 playback in iOS 4 (released 2010), macOS introduced support for HE-AACv2 playback with iTunes 9.2 (released 2010), Adobe Flash Player introduced support for HE-AACv2 in 2007, All versions of Windows Phone support HE-AACv2 playback, all open source players support HE-AACv2 playback via FAAD2
    - jchw 9y ago
      OK, fair enough: HE-AAC had been out-performing the leading open source audio codec for a while. Easy to forget primarily because even after many platforms supported HE-AAC, it wasn't necessarily common across all media. I really saw it explode on the internet around the time DASH streaming became more common, since adding new audio formats was much less expensive. That being said, I still think Opus is better now, since it is more versatile. I've yet to see anyone use HE-AAC in a real-time context, unless they're using it under a different name.
    - hajile 9y ago
      That comparison appears to says that the difference in quality between opus and he-aac is the same as the difference between he-aac and vorbis. Opus is definitely better, but we have basically hit the wall in audio compression (we'll need a serious breakthrough to go much farther). There also isn't as much interest in audio codec research because even very large raw audio files pale in comparison to fully compressed video.
      - KozmoNau7 9y ago
        Incremental improvements are happening in opusenc, current status (as of 1.2 and 1.3-beta) is that musical content is generally transparent at ~96kbps VBR, with a few needing ~128kbps and a tiny minority needing ~160kbps. The developers are slowly reducing the required bitrate for transparency, it wouldn't surprise me if they reach transparency at ~64kbps VBR in a year or two.
- oceanghost 9y ago
  The alternative is... honest business practices.
  - Feniks 9y ago
    That's an oxymoron.
    - RobertRoberts 9y ago
      No it's not. Business is a non-moralistic action. People can be immoral doing business, but business itself cannot. Also, I happen to know a few very moral and ethical business owners who would rather lose money than screw someone over or do a shady business deal. (and have done this)
    - andybak 9y ago
      Unless that comment is a mea culpa then one must conclude you must have had no life experience as anything other than an employee?
- HNSucksAss 9y ago
  The solution is OUTLAWING SOFTWARE PATENTS. Any other “patent reform” is a sham.
kuschku 9y ago
A major part of the research — e.g.the entire audio part of the MPEG standards — was done at research institutes such as the Fraunhofer institutes, which finance themselves from patent licenses. So your comment is also missing a major part ofthe picture.
- ohazi 9y ago
  The professors and their friends on the committee are self-dealing when allocating the committee's research funds. Grad students at the Fraunhofer partner universities still do the bulk of the work. I don't see how I've missed anything.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    Fraunhofer can't pay its researchers anymore if their patent income goes away? Research then is only done with government funds or in corporations, where the corporations definitely won't license their research (e.g. selfdriving tech) to competitors. In places where the research is done like you said, all your points are true, but IMO institutions such as the Fraunhofer institutes are worth keeping.
    - ohazi 9y ago
      I agree that they're worth keeping, but patent income isn't the only way to fund this research. It's just been one of the easier ways to fund it up to now. Also note that I never claimed that the patent income wasn't being put to good use by funding research. I was arguing that many of the patents themselves were bullshit, and that many of the companies that own them had acquired them from universities on slightly-too-friendly terms because of the MPEG cartel.
      - kuschku 9y ago
        There isn't really another way to fund Fraunhofer institutes — they're supposed to turn theoretical research into something that can be directly applied ny corporations, so they have to have an incentive to create something like that. With funding through patent fees, exactly this happens. The alternatives are government funded research, or companies like Google doing it all internally, but then Google will keep some of it as trade secrets, which is also undesirable. I don't think there's an alternative if your goal is go keep all research publicly available and in a way that any company can easily license it.

by ohazi 9y ago

ecesena 9y ago

And so what do you think is the solution? Do you think that "Only by becoming a Technical Committee can MPEG [...] stay competitive in the market." is true, or what could be a valuable alternative?

jchw 9y ago
It seems like there's an answer: the market actually wants free standards because they're realizing it's more beneficial to them than any other outcome. So money and effort is being pumped into developing free video encoding standards. It seems there is an incentive for the foreseeable future to continue to improve video codecs simply because it saves on bandwidth and disk space costs, and improves user experience. Though obviously, everything's too good to be true. Just like MPEG seems to be hitting the end, some day the AOM will hit the end, too. The world changes. Something else will emerge and impact the business model. It may be worse, or maybe it'll be a return to norms. Could just be another one of those things that cycles every so often. With audio codecs, it doesn't look like we ever really needed much in the way of commercial entities, since Vorbis and Opus have been outperforming the competition for a long time now.
- CharlesW 9y ago
  > …Vorbis and Opus have been outperforming the competition for a long time now. Sorry to be pedantic about one bit of an otherwise-fine post, but AAC is comparable to Opus at any given bitrate[1]. Plus, even the most esoteric flavor of AAC has the enormous advantage of 7+ years of ubiquity[2]. [1] See the multiple charts at http://opus-codec.org/comparison/ http://opus-codec.org/comparison/, for one presumably-unbiased source. [2] All versions of Android support HE-AACv2 playback, iOS introduced support for HE-AACv2 playback in iOS 4 (released 2010), macOS introduced support for HE-AACv2 playback with iTunes 9.2 (released 2010), Adobe Flash Player introduced support for HE-AACv2 in 2007, All versions of Windows Phone support HE-AACv2 playback, all open source players support HE-AACv2 playback via FAAD2
  - jchw 9y ago
    OK, fair enough: HE-AAC had been out-performing the leading open source audio codec for a while. Easy to forget primarily because even after many platforms supported HE-AAC, it wasn't necessarily common across all media. I really saw it explode on the internet around the time DASH streaming became more common, since adding new audio formats was much less expensive. That being said, I still think Opus is better now, since it is more versatile. I've yet to see anyone use HE-AAC in a real-time context, unless they're using it under a different name.
  - hajile 9y ago
    That comparison appears to says that the difference in quality between opus and he-aac is the same as the difference between he-aac and vorbis. Opus is definitely better, but we have basically hit the wall in audio compression (we'll need a serious breakthrough to go much farther). There also isn't as much interest in audio codec research because even very large raw audio files pale in comparison to fully compressed video.
    - KozmoNau7 9y ago
      Incremental improvements are happening in opusenc, current status (as of 1.2 and 1.3-beta) is that musical content is generally transparent at ~96kbps VBR, with a few needing ~128kbps and a tiny minority needing ~160kbps. The developers are slowly reducing the required bitrate for transparency, it wouldn't surprise me if they reach transparency at ~64kbps VBR in a year or two.
oceanghost 9y ago
The alternative is... honest business practices.
- Feniks 9y ago
  That's an oxymoron.
  - RobertRoberts 9y ago
    No it's not. Business is a non-moralistic action. People can be immoral doing business, but business itself cannot. Also, I happen to know a few very moral and ethical business owners who would rather lose money than screw someone over or do a shady business deal. (and have done this)
  - andybak 9y ago
    Unless that comment is a mea culpa then one must conclude you must have had no life experience as anything other than an employee?
HNSucksAss 9y ago
The solution is OUTLAWING SOFTWARE PATENTS. Any other “patent reform” is a sham.

kuschku 9y ago

A major part of the research — e.g.the entire audio part of the MPEG standards — was done at research institutes such as the Fraunhofer institutes, which finance themselves from patent licenses. So your comment is also missing a major part ofthe picture.

ohazi 9y ago
The professors and their friends on the committee are self-dealing when allocating the committee's research funds. Grad students at the Fraunhofer partner universities still do the bulk of the work. I don't see how I've missed anything.
- kuschku 9y ago
  Fraunhofer can't pay its researchers anymore if their patent income goes away? Research then is only done with government funds or in corporations, where the corporations definitely won't license their research (e.g. selfdriving tech) to competitors. In places where the research is done like you said, all your points are true, but IMO institutions such as the Fraunhofer institutes are worth keeping.
  - ohazi 9y ago
    I agree that they're worth keeping, but patent income isn't the only way to fund this research. It's just been one of the easier ways to fund it up to now. Also note that I never claimed that the patent income wasn't being put to good use by funding research. I was arguing that many of the patents themselves were bullshit, and that many of the companies that own them had acquired them from universities on slightly-too-friendly terms because of the MPEG cartel.
    - kuschku 9y ago
      There isn't really another way to fund Fraunhofer institutes — they're supposed to turn theoretical research into something that can be directly applied ny corporations, so they have to have an incentive to create something like that. With funding through patent fees, exactly this happens. The alternatives are government funded research, or companies like Google doing it all internally, but then Google will keep some of it as trade secrets, which is also undesirable. I don't think there's an alternative if your goal is go keep all research publicly available and in a way that any company can easily license it.