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> looks at HDMI[a] But you’re absolutely correct. Something like H.264 which is used by practically everything shouldn’t cost money to just look at the standar

> looks at HDMI[a] But you’re absolutely correct. Something like H.264 which is used by practically everything shouldn’t cost money to just look at the standard. [a]: I think it’s like a US$10k “membership fee” just to have the privilege of looking at the standard

Sebb767 6y ago
> Something like H.264 which is used by practically everything shouldn’t cost money to just look at the standard. While I generally agree, it sounds a bit like "if you're successful, you're not allowed to earn money". It's a piece of work, still, and the creators should be allowed to earn money with it. I'd personally prefer if all standards are free, since especially with an obscure one you're SOL when it's locked behind a paywall; with H.264, you can probably find a way around. But its hard to combine that with intellectual property. Limiting the patent timeframe to five or ten years might be a good middle ground.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  That is a very valid argument. I think the big problem (for me at least) is that these patents are (essentially) on math, just “done on a computer”. Sure, it’s math that would be impractical to do by hand, but it’s still just math. That’s the rub for me.
  - newswasboring 6y ago
    You don't think mathematical ideas should be patentable?
- xoa 6y ago
  >While I generally agree, it sounds a bit like "if you're successful, you're not allowed to earn money". No, it's "if you're successful by NORMALLY ILLEGAL COLLUSION, than the ways in which you're allowed to earn money may be restricted." That's what "encumbered standards" are at the end of the day, explicitly established horizontal monopolies. Those mathematics patents covering H.264 wouldn't be worth remotely the same if there were a hundred different video formats going around of which only 1 or 2 used them. Or if everyone had just stuck with MPEG-2. Of course, the world would also overall be worse off in those cases too, with an even higher risk of vertical monopolies, wasted hardware/bandwidth, etc. So it makes sense to have a middle ground, to allow "standards" to grow the total pie non-linearly larger than it would have been otherwise. But at the same time that needs to be combined with much more stringent controls to avoid all the normal obvious risks of monopolies. Actors like Nokia and Qualcomm have been trying to have their cake and eat it too. They like the enormous monopoly lock-in value the standards give their patents, but then they also want to treat them like normal individual patents they can cut deals around. That's not how it should work. The reward for a Standards Essential Patent should be a reliable, fair fixed cut of a very, very big and dependable pie for the life of the patents/pool. Companies have the choice to go it alone if they'd like instead and not join the standard, which can then seek to work around them (or if that's impossible, disband and give up and at least not form any monopoly there). But if they have patents in a standard, they should face more restrictions due to the extra monopoly. It should be one or the other, not both.
- derf_ 6y ago
  The reward is that if you are successful, you get to interoperate with other people. That is the value that is unlocked, and it is a pretty huge value. The problem with patents and standards is that people are trying to charge for that value (the value of the network effects), and not the value of the technology. The big ideas of video compression are mostly more than 30 years old now, but the new patents are mostly on slight tweaks or additions (or things like header flags and other nonsense). No one would pay money for them except for the fact that they are part of the standard.
iso1631 6y ago
SDI is just so much better than HDMI though, single cable which you can make yourself, really cheaply, to be 36cm, or 3m97, or 28m14, or whatever. What does HDMI offer than SDI doesn't?
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  You’re not wrong, but the biggest thing is wider support. I’ve only seen SDI available on expensive camera gear (but I don’t look that hard), but HDMI is ubiquitous. It’s sad DisplayPort didn’t end up winning instead, but I guess TV manufacturers are members, so they’d put it in the TVs. DisplayPort still has a stupid “membership fee” but at least it’s royalty free.
  - selectodude 6y ago
    SDI doesn’t have the built in encryption so you’ll never see it on something that supports playback.
    - kaszanka 6y ago
      DRM really does ruin everything, eh?
- snops 6y ago
  The DDC interface, which is an I2C bus that allows for bidirectional communications to read EDID data, so you know what you are plugging into. Hot plug detection via the HPD line, so you can tell if you are plugged in or not. Embedded 5V power, very useful for conversion dongles, ethernet, probably more things I forget. HDMI has a lot of pins, which makes DIY cables difficult, however they are useful.
  - iso1631 6y ago
    You (your hardware) can tell if SDI is plugged in if the line is terminated with 75 ohms (SDI allows looping through to multiple drops) I can't think of any time I've ever used anything on a HDMI that uses power -- my HDMI to SDI converters (or vice versa) have separate power so it can't be very reliable and/or powerful I guess EDID data can be useful in the computing space for feeding back from the monitor.
cornstalks 6y ago
H.264 is publicly available for free from ITU's website: https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-H.264 https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-H.264 It's annoying because multiple standards bodies all publish the same spec, which is why H.264 is also called "MPEG-4 Part 10" because the spec is part of the MPEG-4 spec published in ISO/IEC 14496 (part 10 for AVC). The ISO specs aren't free (a couple hundred USD for the AVC spec), which is the most annoying part. You can get the H.263/H.264/H.265 specs for free form ITU, which covers a lot of the details you need for writing an encoder/decoder. Unfortunately sometimes you need the ISO specs for other things related to these codecs (e.g., ISO BMFF stuff). (edit: I'm a dork and originally misread the comment as saying it was $10k for the H.264 spec, when parent meant the HDMI spec; I removed parts of my comment that were related to that misreading).
- willglynn 6y ago
  ISO/IEC 14496-10 is actually one of the free standards: https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/ https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/ Presumably this is because H.264 is public. Your complaint is well founded, though: if you've built an AVC codec using public documents you may be frustrated to learn that ISO/IEC 14496-14 (describing the MP4 file format) and ISO/IEC 14496-15 (describing the AVC elementary stream and how to encode it as an MP4) are not public. It's also worth noting that ISO removes public standards. You may find references to public standards, like the link at https://ffmpeg.org/doxygen/2.7/webmdashenc_8c_source.html https://ffmpeg.org/doxygen/2.7/webmdashenc_8c_source.html – but neither the linked ISO/IEC 23009-1:2014 nor any other version of the MPEG-DASH standard is available to the public at this time. Pay up!
  - userbinator 6y ago
    You can of course find a lot of those paid standards in the usual places... ;-) IMHO the generally lax attitude towards IP is one of the reasons responsible for China's strong technological growth.

Sebb767 6y ago

> Something like H.264 which is used by practically everything shouldn’t cost money to just look at the standard. While I generally agree, it sounds a bit like "if you're successful, you're not allowed to earn money". It's a piece of work, still, and the creators should be allowed to earn money with it. I'd personally prefer if all standards are free, since especially with an obscure one you're SOL when it's locked behind a paywall; with H.264, you can probably find a way around. But its hard to combine that with intellectual property. Limiting the patent timeframe to five or ten years might be a good middle ground.

colejohnson66 6y ago
That is a very valid argument. I think the big problem (for me at least) is that these patents are (essentially) on math, just “done on a computer”. Sure, it’s math that would be impractical to do by hand, but it’s still just math. That’s the rub for me.
- newswasboring 6y ago
  You don't think mathematical ideas should be patentable?
xoa 6y ago
>While I generally agree, it sounds a bit like "if you're successful, you're not allowed to earn money". No, it's "if you're successful by NORMALLY ILLEGAL COLLUSION, than the ways in which you're allowed to earn money may be restricted." That's what "encumbered standards" are at the end of the day, explicitly established horizontal monopolies. Those mathematics patents covering H.264 wouldn't be worth remotely the same if there were a hundred different video formats going around of which only 1 or 2 used them. Or if everyone had just stuck with MPEG-2. Of course, the world would also overall be worse off in those cases too, with an even higher risk of vertical monopolies, wasted hardware/bandwidth, etc. So it makes sense to have a middle ground, to allow "standards" to grow the total pie non-linearly larger than it would have been otherwise. But at the same time that needs to be combined with much more stringent controls to avoid all the normal obvious risks of monopolies. Actors like Nokia and Qualcomm have been trying to have their cake and eat it too. They like the enormous monopoly lock-in value the standards give their patents, but then they also want to treat them like normal individual patents they can cut deals around. That's not how it should work. The reward for a Standards Essential Patent should be a reliable, fair fixed cut of a very, very big and dependable pie for the life of the patents/pool. Companies have the choice to go it alone if they'd like instead and not join the standard, which can then seek to work around them (or if that's impossible, disband and give up and at least not form any monopoly there). But if they have patents in a standard, they should face more restrictions due to the extra monopoly. It should be one or the other, not both.
derf_ 6y ago
The reward is that if you are successful, you get to interoperate with other people. That is the value that is unlocked, and it is a pretty huge value. The problem with patents and standards is that people are trying to charge for that value (the value of the network effects), and not the value of the technology. The big ideas of video compression are mostly more than 30 years old now, but the new patents are mostly on slight tweaks or additions (or things like header flags and other nonsense). No one would pay money for them except for the fact that they are part of the standard.

iso1631 6y ago

SDI is just so much better than HDMI though, single cable which you can make yourself, really cheaply, to be 36cm, or 3m97, or 28m14, or whatever. What does HDMI offer than SDI doesn't?

colejohnson66 6y ago
You’re not wrong, but the biggest thing is wider support. I’ve only seen SDI available on expensive camera gear (but I don’t look that hard), but HDMI is ubiquitous. It’s sad DisplayPort didn’t end up winning instead, but I guess TV manufacturers are members, so they’d put it in the TVs. DisplayPort still has a stupid “membership fee” but at least it’s royalty free.
- selectodude 6y ago
  SDI doesn’t have the built in encryption so you’ll never see it on something that supports playback.
  - kaszanka 6y ago
    DRM really does ruin everything, eh?
snops 6y ago
The DDC interface, which is an I2C bus that allows for bidirectional communications to read EDID data, so you know what you are plugging into. Hot plug detection via the HPD line, so you can tell if you are plugged in or not. Embedded 5V power, very useful for conversion dongles, ethernet, probably more things I forget. HDMI has a lot of pins, which makes DIY cables difficult, however they are useful.
- iso1631 6y ago
  You (your hardware) can tell if SDI is plugged in if the line is terminated with 75 ohms (SDI allows looping through to multiple drops) I can't think of any time I've ever used anything on a HDMI that uses power -- my HDMI to SDI converters (or vice versa) have separate power so it can't be very reliable and/or powerful I guess EDID data can be useful in the computing space for feeding back from the monitor.

cornstalks 6y ago

H.264 is publicly available for free from ITU's website: https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-H.264 https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-H.264 It's annoying because multiple standards bodies all publish the same spec, which is why H.264 is also called "MPEG-4 Part 10" because the spec is part of the MPEG-4 spec published in ISO/IEC 14496 (part 10 for AVC). The ISO specs aren't free (a couple hundred USD for the AVC spec), which is the most annoying part. You can get the H.263/H.264/H.265 specs for free form ITU, which covers a lot of the details you need for writing an encoder/decoder. Unfortunately sometimes you need the ISO specs for other things related to these codecs (e.g., ISO BMFF stuff). (edit: I'm a dork and originally misread the comment as saying it was $10k for the H.264 spec, when parent meant the HDMI spec; I removed parts of my comment that were related to that misreading).

willglynn 6y ago
ISO/IEC 14496-10 is actually one of the free standards: https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/ https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/ Presumably this is because H.264 is public. Your complaint is well founded, though: if you've built an AVC codec using public documents you may be frustrated to learn that ISO/IEC 14496-14 (describing the MP4 file format) and ISO/IEC 14496-15 (describing the AVC elementary stream and how to encode it as an MP4) are not public. It's also worth noting that ISO removes public standards. You may find references to public standards, like the link at https://ffmpeg.org/doxygen/2.7/webmdashenc_8c_source.html https://ffmpeg.org/doxygen/2.7/webmdashenc_8c_source.html – but neither the linked ISO/IEC 23009-1:2014 nor any other version of the MPEG-DASH standard is available to the public at this time. Pay up!
- userbinator 6y ago
  You can of course find a lot of those paid standards in the usual places... ;-) IMHO the generally lax attitude towards IP is one of the reasons responsible for China's strong technological growth.