20 ms·

Google wants to take on Dolby with new open media formats

496 points by mmastrac 4y ago

dmitrygr 4y ago
Month M + 0: Google to take on $INDUSTRY_STANDARD with $GOOGLE_THING standard Month M + 4: Google shows off $GOOGLE_THING and announces $PARTNER devices Month M + 9: $PARTNER releases first devices with $GOOGLE_THING support (also supports $INDUSTRY_STANDARD, of course) Month M + 18: Google disappointed with lack of adoption of $GOOGLE_THING announces first-party products with $GOOGLE_THING support Month M + 24: Google's internal team working on first-party $GOOGLE_THING products dissolved Month M + 36: $PARTNER announces future products will no longer support $GOOGLE_THING due to lack of demand Month M + 48: Google removes all mentions of $GOOGLE_THING from their websites, docs, etc.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mmastrac 4y ago
  I think Google's commitment to core technologies bucks this trend. Go has been long-lived and received lots of love. AV1/VP8/etc have been evolved and they've continued putting money into them.
  - bzxcvbn 4y ago
    AV1 wasn't created by Google. Neither was VP8, although they did release it to the public after acquiring the company that created it.
    - product0251 4y ago
  - taylodl 4y ago
    That's because Google uses Go internally. It's not consumer-facing technology.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
What's in it for Google? Less friction allows users to consume more which gives Google more data?
- sudosysgen 4y ago
  Integration on YouTube and Play Video for free.
- digdugdirk 4y ago
  Perhaps just a computationally inefficient process they see some potential in throwing AI at? Maybe it would be easier for them to tie in to their speech recognition/translation if they controlled the whole stack? Does anyone have any experience with Dolby and could shed some light?
- TuringNYC 4y ago
  Being able to sell TPU compute instances via algos fine-tuned to run cost-effectively on TPU instances?
- izacus 4y ago
  Dolby is earning money by jumping in the bed with streaming services and then asking every purchased device to pay them money for the privilege of decoding it. Making hardware devices like Android TV cheaper helps adoption of Googles platforms and services.
  - olyjohn 4y ago
    It's not about making their stuff cheaper. They just want to take the royalty money they pay and put it in their pockets. They're not going to pass the savings onto the customers. Nobody ever passes the savings on to customers. The royalty is probably a couple of cents at the most per device. It makes more sense for them to just pocket the millions in savings and show extra profit to their shareholders. It would be dumb to give up millions to drop the price a few cents, which won't even be noticed by consumers anyways.
    - 4y ago
CobrastanJorji 4y ago
I love it when a powerful corporation's self interest happens to align with the public's interests.
- Bombthecat 4y ago
  Do they? Imagine android tv disabling atmos because of licensing or netflix, then using the new format which needs a new receiver. I spent 2k on mine for atmos 4 ceiling speakers..
  - izacus 4y ago
    Why would they disable Atmos?
  - kyriakos 4y ago
    By the time that happens dolby would have the next iteration of atmos and you'll have to get a new receiver. This is the sad truth about modern consumer electronics, very short life span.
rektide 4y ago
It's super unclear to me why Dolby keeps being the ones to do basic things. What is underneath the marketting gloss? It feels like we are all paying a lot for high bit depth, paying a lot for multi-channel audio. I have never understood how or why it is that expensive proprietary codecs keep taking over. Maybe there is more value add somewhere, but it's very unclear, esepcially under the gloss of (usually deeply non technical) marketting fluff.
- 52-6F-62 4y ago
  They invented a lot of this stuff first, some of the preliminary work going back decades. It's not a secret. It predates digital audio. There's nothing stopping open source digital codecs from ruling, but they need people working for them. Personally, I'd rather pay dollars than data.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  Partly marketing and licensing deals with studios - they do market very heavily. But they did pretty much invent the whole surround sound thing as we know it today, as well as a host of other realtime audio processing technologies. They're kinda the luxury mattress company of theatrical audio - it's expensive, but once you get it installed it's really nice to have. When I did audio production in the film industry, Dolby stuff was a post production expense but not e very big one. Their license fees aren't staggeringly expensive, and the quality and reliability of the playback system was its own argument - if the Dolby 5.1 sounds right in one theater it's going to sound right in another, and that's a big deal because bad sound can really kill a movie, even if the audience can't articulate why (most people don't think too much about sound). Digidesign (the manufacturers of Pro Tools & later owners of Avid) are a far more aggressive company that has maintained a virtual lock on its market with a combination of very expensive hardware and moat-building strategies.
- izacus 4y ago
  Don't underestimate existing business relations and contracts. The format you're using is the format that your TV/soundbar/tablet support. There's only a few manufacturers of those and they have decades of business relationship with Dolby. Breaking those proprietary realtionships with open source has always been a losing battle - look at HEVC vs. VP9 vs. AV1 battles or AptX vs. AAC vs. Opus. Media industry is a surprisingly tight knit and very conservative club that doesn't adopt outsiders easily.
crazygringo 4y ago
This is amazing. It's truly bizarre that 5.1 surround sound, or HDR, or spatial audio, would be proprietary paid formats -- I mean, what if someone told you there was a license for stereo audio? And sure it's in Google's self-interest so that they can bring these technologies to YouTube without paying anyone else. But it benefits everybody, so this is really fantastic news for everyone if it's something that takes off.
- sosborn 4y ago
  Perhaps of interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_patent_394325 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_patent_394325
- Bombthecat 4y ago
  Dolby vision is patented. There is already a free version,hdr+ , which samsung supports. But no one is using it.
  - BonoboIO 4y ago
    What is exactly patented in Dolby Vision? There has to be some innovation to be patentable. HDR10 and HDR10+ exist.
    - jiggawatts 4y ago
      Dolby Vision is poorly documented but I did find a long PDF explaining how it works. It does provide significant value worthy of patent protection. The main thing they did was develop a nonlinear color space designed so that each “bit” of information provides equal value. This way no bits are wasted, making compression more efficient and have fewer artefacts. The color space is also set up so that the “lightness” channel is accurate and brightness can be rescaled without introducing color shifts. They also came up with a way of encoding the HDR brightness range efficiently so that about 12 bits worth of data fits into 10 bits. The format also allows a mode where there is an 8-bit SDR base stream with a 2-bit HDR extension stream. This allows the same file to be decoded as either HDR or SDR by devices with minimal overhead. Last but not least they work with device manufacturers to make optimal mapping tables that squeeze the enormous HDR range into whatever the device can physically show. This is hard because it has to be done in real time to compensate for maximum brightness limits for different sized patches and to compensate for brightness falloff due to overheating. Early model HDR TVs had to have FPGAs in them to do this fast enough!
ck2 4y ago
- crazygringo 4y ago
  The irony of GCemetary being dead is kind of amazing. Maybe keeping things going is a little harder than they thought ;)
  - ck2 4y ago
    When I see a website that stopped updating in 2020 I kinda get sad. We lost a lot of people.
    - crazygringo 4y ago
      Fortunately, in this case the creator listed on the About page appears to be very much alive :) https://twitter.com/naeemol/ https://twitter.com/naeemol/
anigbrowl 4y ago
As a consumer, I don't care. dolby makes money from licensing, but don't ask that much, they innovate constantly, and they do a lot of public education. This seems like one corporation flexing on another rather than great sense of mission; it's not like Google doesn't have IP of its own that it prefers to keep locked up. I suspect that this signals a strategic desire to move into the A/V production space, where customers have big demands for storage and computing resources.
- izacus 4y ago
  Competition is always good for a consumer, especially here where right now you simply don't have a choice but to pay the rent to Dolby on every TV audio device. C'mon, this is market capitalism 101
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    Luckily I'm not a capitalist and am not convinced my life will be improved by shaving costs down to nothing until there is only one supplier left standing. Fort that matter I'm not much of a consumer, I'm still using a 10 year old TV XD What's weird to me is how google is selling this as a win for the public, when the marginal costs added by Dolby are so low. Even in the audio production space, Dolby stuff is a little expensive for an individual (surround sound plugins costing hundreds of dollars) but it's not a big overhead for a recording studio. Their product is quality and consistency at industrial prices and imho they deliver on this. There isn't an underground of frustrated audio engineers dreaming of how theatrical sound could be so much better if it weren't for big D. Spatial audio rebels build quadrophonic sound systems for raves, but you didn't hear it from me.
  - rodgerd 4y ago
    How is one of the richest monopolistic companies in the world deciding to destroy a market segment "competition" that is "good for the consumer"?
    - BiometricAndy 4y ago
      So like Apple with their ATT? HN news user simping for Apple
foghorp 4y ago
What does Dolby actually do on a day to day basis? Do they have researchers working on new audio and video formats? Or is it now all just a self-perpetuating machine for generating licensing revenue, based on existing patents? Sorry for the ignorant question but I'm clueless about their ongoing contributions to the industry.
- izacus 4y ago
  Sue everyone violating their patents probably :P
- Mindwipe 4y ago
  Most of the industry uses HDR grading tools made by Dolby.
- Anechoic 4y ago
  Do they have researchers working on new audio and video formats? Short answer is yes. Search for "Dolby" under "Author Affiliation" in the AES paper search [0] and you can see the research they publish. (the papers themselves are unfortunately behind the AES paywall, but if usually authors will send you the paper if you ask nicely). [0] https://www.aes.org/publications/preprints/search.cfm https://www.aes.org/publications/preprints/search.cfm
- kllrnohj 4y ago
  Yes. Dolby Laboratories is what came up the PQ transfer function which is what's responsible for HDR10, HDR10+, and Dolby Vision, for example. Dolby Atmos is similarly an actually new way to handle spatial audio. They've also created things like ICtCp ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICtCp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICtCp ) So they do actually contribute some worthwhile stuff. And some of it is open standards (like PQ & ICtCp). They also absolutely troll licenses though. Dolby Vision being a perfect example, check out the "profiles" section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_Vision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_Vision and you'll see some truly dumb Dolby Vision profiles that exist obviously just to slap a Dolby Vision license & branding on an otherwise boring, generic video format. Dolby Vision 9 is a perfect example, it's not even HDR at all. It's literally the same stuff we've all been watching for a decade+, but with marketing wank shoved onto it.
duped 4y ago
There is already an open media format (edit: for object-based immersive audio), it's called SMPTE 2098. Granted it's basically the mutant stepchild of DTS and Dolby ATMOS, but it does exist. The real problem isn't the hardware manufacturers but the content producers. Dolby engages in blatant anticompetitive behavior that basically requires hardware manufacturers to support their codecs and make it impossible to innovate on the actual media formats in a way that might compete. For example: paying for content to be released in atmos or giving away the tools to author it for free.
- scarface74 4y ago
  So it’s anticompetitive to give away tools for free or paying content owners to use it? Would you say the same about a search engine company that gives its browser away for free and pays its competitor in mobile a reported $18 billion a year to be the default search engine for its platform? I would much rather tie my horse to Dolby than a company that has the attention span of a toddler.
  - mattnewton 4y ago
    > So it’s anticompetitive to give away tools for free or paying content owners to use it? If the intent is to drive others out of the market, it could be right?
    - scarface74 4y ago
      So what is the intent of any company that gives away software or any startup that operates at loss funded by VC money? Or if the same company gave its mobile operating system away for free to undercut a rival and then as soon as it became ubiquitous, started making much of it closed source and forcing companies to bundle its closed source software?
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - mattnewton 4y ago
ilamont 4y ago
While I don't have sympathy for proprietary formats that come with an added use charge, alternative Google formats forced upon the world in the name of a “healthier, broader ecosystem” tend to create friction and unwanted overhead. Thinking of AMP and webP in particular. And uncertainty ... how long will such efforts last before Google loses interest or is forced to abandon them?
- izacus 4y ago
  AMP is not a format.
- bmicraft 4y ago
  Webp wasn't bad and back then there really weren't any alternatives that performed significantly better than jpeg
keepquestioning 4y ago
Surprised Dolby has survived for so long.
ugjka 4y ago
Whatever the pirates adopt will be the de facto codec
- 0x457 4y ago
  Ehh, that's not the case anymore. It used to play some roles because source material used some ancient inefficient codecs. WebRips are well, ripped as is. BDRip generally ripped as is as well.
  - account42 4y ago
    Ripping Blu-Rays as is makes little sense except for preservation as most of them have hardcoded black bars in the video stream instead of letting playback devices letterbox/pillarbox as needed. Apparently the standard only supports a few resolutions, not even including 24:10 and other common cinema aspect ratios. Also still plenty of Blu-Rays around using VC-1 which is garbage compared to current codecs. Perhaps all new ones have migrated to H.264 - at least all UHD ones I have seen have.
- kyriakos 4y ago
  And porn
  - dopa42365 4y ago
    Porn uses old and free formats for maximum compatibility. h264 and aac, works on every budget device from the last decade (and older). Even the highest quality 4k porn is just 20 mbit/s h264. These companies aren't youtube, they don't encode every video in 10 different formats for every use case. If pornhub statistics are to be believed, like 85% of visitors are mobile users. There's no point in optimizing anything for expensive big screen great audio home theater experience when your target audience is 5" low res screen 1% volume ashamed at night phone fappers. The very opposite of cutting edge technology (with the exception of tiny niches like VR).
- TacticalCoder 4y ago
  Honest question: what would currently be the most commonly audio format supported by pirates for pirated movies? I've got a home cinema projector but never paid much attention to the audio (just using my stereo: it's a good stereo but it's not 5.1 or anything).
justinclift 4y ago
Wonder how well this will compare to Ambisonics? That's supposed to be a "full sphere" surround sound format (developed ~50 years ago), but hasn't been picked up widely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambisonics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambisonics
- TD-Linux 4y ago
  It is, in fact, Ambisonics (among other features). Though you don't actually need any of the fancy new stuff being worked on to use Ambisonics - you can already use Opus with Ambisonics today in MP4.
  - justinclift 4y ago
    Interesting. Any idea if there are existing file converters for Atmos (etc) to Ambisonics? For example, lets say I have some-atmos-movie.mkv on my local computer, that I'd like to play back through my 7.1 speakers (attached to computer). In my head, I'm thinking: 1. Needs to be converted to Ambisonics format 2. Player software (eg vlc) needs to understand the resulting format, and send an appropriate bitstream to each output device Guessing it's not that simple?
    - TD-Linux 4y ago
      In general you can convert any speaker layout etc to Ambisonics. For Atmos specifically, no, because there is no software decoder available for it (you have to bitstream it to a receiver).
debacle 4y ago
I have an entire speaker setup that runs on the chromecast protocol(s?) They've been repeatedly bricked (features rolled back, support changed, can't set up complete groups, etc) by Google in the last few years, to the point where I don't even think I have them connected right now. I don't trust consumer products from Google at all.
pier25 4y ago
Anyone remembers the open format HDR10+ pushed by Fox, Panasonic, and Samsung? Me neither. The world at large has settled on Dolby Vision and Atmos and it will be very difficult to change this. Not only from the consumer end but specially in the pro audio/video end. Google would need first to offer plugins for DAWs, video software, etc, to work with these formats before there's enough content that manufacturers and streamers consider it.
- kllrnohj 4y ago
  Of course I remember HDR10+, along with HDR10 and HLG. All of which are quite common and broadly used. Hollywood movies primarily standardized on Dolby Vision, but the entire HDR ecosystem very much did not. Sony cameras for example primarily only shoot in HLG, even for their cinema cameras. Similarly games regularly opt for HDR10/HDR10+ for their HDR output instead of Dolby Vision. Why? Because it's cheaper, and dynamic metadata is largely pointless in an environment where the lighting content of the next dozen frames aren't known
  - pier25 4y ago
    > Hollywood movies primarily standardized on Dolby Vision No, pretty much the entire video/streaming industry did. Apple, Netflix, Disney, HBO, etc, either stream in DV or HDR10 (non plus). Physical Bluray is slowly dying (I own a bunch of those) so streaming is really where most of the HDR video content lives. > Similarly games regularly opt for HDR10/HDR10+ for their HDR output instead of Dolby Vision Fair point, but consumers keep complaining the PS5 doesn't have DV which is an indicator of what people want. DV is actually a big selling point for the Xbox Series X. On PC, I don't know. I've been playing HDR in consoles for years but support on Windows has been pretty bad until recently. My impression is HDR is so much more popular on consoles vs PC. Same with Atmos and surround.
    - izacus 4y ago
      That's funny, since PS5 doesn't support Atmos at all and on Windows you need to buy a paid plugin to make it work for anything that's not a Home Theatre system. (And even if you have a home theatre system, Windows games will still prefer outputting 5.1 / 7.1 PCM and mixing 3D effects by themselves). I'd also be interested to hear where those Dolby Vision complaints for PS5 are coming from, I haven't heard anyone really say that despite HDR being debated quite a lot :)
smm11 4y ago
Pono Player checking in.
sportstuff 4y ago
There is difference between hearing vs listening vs feeling. I hope more creative stuff comes out this. My first experience on 5.1 was Top Gun.. The next one to top that was in Audium with sound and vibrations from everywhere. Nothing to top the sound of silence.
solarkraft 4y ago
We are seeing a deeper and deeper split between Google (webm/VP9, webp, AV1, strongly pushing their formats) and Apple (HEVC, HEIC, Atmos, completely boycotting Google's formats), with Microsoft caught in the middle, supporting neither that well. Apple's stance is especially interesting because it's unclear to me what they gain by pushing license fee encumbered formats.
- theandrewbailey 4y ago
  I figured that it was because Apple is more heavily involved with Hollywood than Google is, from production to distribution, and Apple would rather side with standards formulated by trusted experts, professionals, and academics with long track records like MPEG than ones that seemingly came from nowhere.
  - ajross 4y ago
    > standards formulated by trusted experts, professionals, and academics with long track records like MPEG I genuinely can't tell if this is humor or not. If it is, bravo.
    - tpush 4y ago
      Perhaps formulate a point instead of pretending to be incredulous.
      - AvesMerit 4y ago
        You missed the pun
  - kmeisthax 4y ago
    Fortunately, MPEG got lobotomized by ISO a few years back[0]. So there's room for a new standards org (e.g. AOM) to overtake them. In fact, Apple joined AOM recently, so presumably they will be providing their own expertise to that organization too. [0] Specifically, Leonardo Chiariglione got fired and the MPEG working group cut up into a bunch of pieces.
gjsman-1000 4y ago
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Dolby Vision is actually a mess of a standard, with several different not-quite-compatible "profiles." Streaming video is Profile 5, UHD Blu-ray Discs are Profile 7[1], and iPhone Dolby Vision is Profile 8. Profile 7 cannot be converted into Profile 5 [completely incompatible and different algorithms!], devices that implement Profile 5 can't necessarily play Profile 7, but Profile 7 can with difficulty be theoretically converted into Profile 8 which is basically stripped-down Profile 7 with quirks[2]. Basically, Dolby Vision is fragmented within itself. Fun stuff. [1] And within Profile 7, there is the difference between the MEL (Minimum Enhancement Layer) which just adds HDR data, versus the FEL (Full Enhancement Layer) which actually adapts a 10-bit core video stream into a 12-bit one for FEL compatible players. Not all Profile 7 implementations can handle FEL, but can handle MEL. So even the profiles themselves have fragmentation. FEL and MEL are, within Profile 7, actually HEVC video streams that are 1920x1080 that the player reads simultaneously with the 4K content. So a FEL/MEL player is actually processing 2 HEVC streams simultaneously, so it's not a huge surprise why it isn't used for streaming DV. [2] Profile 8 comes in 3 different versions, Profiles 8.1 through 8.4. 8.3 is not used. Profile 8.1 is backwards compatible with an HDR10 stream, Profile 8.2 a SDR stream, and Profile 8.4 an HLG stream. Big surprise that iPhone uses 8.4 because HLG can be seamlessly converted into SDR or some other HDR formats when necessary. https://professionalsupport.dolby.com/s/article/What-is-Dolby-Vision-Profile?language=en_US https://professionalsupport.dolby.com/s/article/What-is-Dolb...
agilob 4y ago
Would be nice if they started from opensourcing chromecast
- cosmic7dice 4y ago
  Google: Dream on, dreamer...
foxbee 4y ago
'Google wants to take on...' My immediate reaction to reading these few words is - "another tool for the Google graveyard"
hollowturtle 4y ago
Any suggested readings about codecs/encodings/formats/algorithms used or whatnot? I’m afraid it’s the thing I lack most as a dev
fnordpiglet 4y ago
AKA we will crush your smaller company focused on high quality standards with our half assed support that lasts until you’re dead, maybe people will confuse this for “open”
mikeyouse 4y ago
The EU is randomly investigating the Alliance for Open Media on antitrust concerns -- https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-eu-antitrust-regulators-probing-tech-group-aoms-video-licensing-policy-2022-07-07/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-eu-antitrust-re... Can anyone understand how it's in anyone's best interest to investigate / potentially stop an open source standard / royalty-free format that has buy-in from tons of big orgs?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  > randomly The Commission has information that AOM and its members may be imposing licensing terms (mandatory royalty-free cross licensing) on innovators that were not a part of AOM at the time of the creation of the AV1 technical, but whose patents are deemed essential to (its) technical specifications Sounds worth looking into.
  - ksec 4y ago
    On HN, it is Rust, RISC-V and then AOM that can do no wrong. And then it is Facebook and Oracle that can do no right.
  - account42 4y ago
    Only if you believe that investigating software patents are in the public's best interest.
- rodgerd 4y ago
  > Can anyone understand how it's in anyone's best interest to investigate / potentially stop an open source standard / royalty-free format that has buy-in from tons of big orgs? Because "using my monopolistic profits in one area to destroy your business in another area" is textbook anticompetitive behaviour.
  - mikeyouse 4y ago
    I guess I get it but is anyone aside from the rent-seeking royalty holders worse off if open standards win out?
phyzix5761 4y ago
Given Google's history of killing projects I'm not jumping on this ship just yet.
RubberShoes 4y ago
(Someone who works in streaming) While I see both sides, I don't agree with this strategy. In fact, I think the public should be more aware of just how damaging Google/YouTube is to the streaming ecosystem and if you really stretch this argument, the planet. It is true - HEVC's original licensing structure was a nightmare, but it seems to have been resolved and we now have hardware decoders in nearly all modern consumer devices. This is also becoming true of Dolby's formats. maybe I am biased or not as informed as I could be but they did the R&D, worked with some of the brightest (pun intended) in the industry and created a production-to-distribution pipeline. Of course there are fees, but vendors are on board and content creators know how to work with these standards. Now here comes one of the largest companies in the world. HEVC? Nope - they don't want to pay anyone any fees so instead they're going to develop the VP9 codec. Should they use HLS or DASH? Nope, they are going to spin DASH off into our own proprietary HTTP deliverable and only deliver AVC HLS for compatibility reasons. Apple customers complain and after years they cave and support VP9 as a software decoder starting with iOS14. This means millions of users eat significant battery cycles just to watch anything, including HDR video. Then we get to Chrome. HEVC? Nope. Dolby? Nope. HLS? Nope. The most popular browser in the world doesn't support any of the broadcast standards. It's their way or fallback to SDR and the less efficient AVC codec. So now anyone else in the streaming industry trying to deliver the best streaming experience has to encode/transcode everything three times. AVC for compatibility (and spec) reasons, HEVC for set-top boxes and iOS, and VP9 for Google's ecosystem. If it wasn't for CMAF the world would also have to store all of this twice. In the end, to save YouTube licensing and bandwidth costs, the rest of the industry has to consume 2-3x more compute to generate video and hundreds of millions of devices now consume an order of magnitude more power to software decode VP9. If and when Project Caviar becomes reality, it'll be another fragmented HDR deliverable. Dolby isn't going away and Chrome won't support it, so the rest of the industry will have to add even more compute and storage to accommodate. In the name of 'open' and saving manufacturers a couple dollars, the rest of the industry is now fragmented and consumers are hurt the most. YouTube weirdly admitted this fragmentation is becoming a problem. They can't keep up with compute and had to create custom hardware to solve. Of course, these chips are not available to anyone else and gives them a competitive edge: https://www.protocol.com/enterprise/youtube-custom-chips-argos-asics https://www.protocol.com/enterprise/youtube-custom-chips-arg...
GreenPlastic 4y ago
The last thing I want to do is upgrade all my TVs and audio equipment for new standards
robertheadley 4y ago
Subtext: Google doesn't want to pay licensing fees.
- limeblack 4y ago
  Or wait for the patents to expire. H.264 won’t take to much longer to expire it’s around 12 years I believe and yet Google has released vp8.
_HMCB_ 4y ago
Through Google Fonts, they can track page views under the guise of beautiful fonts for your site. I wonder if they could do the same with these media formats.
- account42 4y ago
  Which is why you should self-host all the fonts you use, which is incidentally also what you need to do to be GDPR-compliant. Its not the fonts that are the problem here its the font CDN.
hot_gril 4y ago
I look at the current reality of VP8/9 with dissatisfaction. Google went all-in with it and made Meet/Hangouts use it. But encoding, decoding, or both end up being done on the CPU usually, since hardware support is way behind. Zoom and FaceTime just used H.264 (and 5?), and it's way more efficient as a result. I don't normally care a ton about efficiency, but it actually matters when your laptop's fans are overpowering the audio in a meeting and draining your battery to 0 within a short time span. Also, ironically, even Google Chat didn't seem to support webp images until recently. I appreciate the idea of open standards, but compatibility matters way more to the end user.
- acdha 4y ago
  The other thing I noticed was that Google had some very … optimistic … claims about quality which were hard to reproduce. Every time I tested VP8/9, it took more tweaking to get either quality or size competitive with H.264/5 (VP9 was often playing catch up with the previous generation) and paying twice as much for storage just didn’t make any sense when everything supported the MPEG standards and you couldn’t version-detect which things would technically run but drain your users’ batteries. It felt very Google-y: lots of attention to the cool CS problems, less so the boring ones like tool support and sensible defaults for non-experts.
chadlavi 4y ago
obligatory relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
DesiLurker 4y ago
yes Fuck Dolby.
daoist_shaman 4y ago
I’d like to think that “don’t be evil” applies here, but that might be wishful thinking. What are some of the risks of media formats being centralized by a mega corp like Google who works with nation states? Can we truly expect something free… or can we expect all of the content we create to be steganographically watermarked in surveillance states that appear to be fully cracking down on encryption?
cutler 4y ago
For all the evil Google may be guilty of they have done a lot of good work supporting open standards and releasing proprietary formats as open source. Let's not forget how Chrome liberated the web from Microsoft's won't-fix attitude whilst IE remained the dominant browser.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- account42 4y ago
  > For all the evil Google may be guilty of they have done a lot of good work supporting open standards and releasing proprietary formats as open source. Sure, there are defintitely things Google has done that have benefited the public. > Let's not forget how Chrome liberated the web from Microsoft's won't-fix attitude whilst IE remained the dominant browser. But I am unconvinced that Chrome is one of them. Firefox was doing fine displacing IE on its own and the main reason Chrome managed to pull ahead so fast was the huge marketing drive including ads on the home page of the worlds #1 website. Meanwhile, Chrome-driven extensions have made the web incredibly complicated to the extend that new browsers are almost impossible while its dominance holds back any real effort to put users into control of their web browsing experience since few websites care to support anything other than Chrome.
bredren 4y ago
Worth noting that Apple's vice president in charge of the AR/VR team, Mike Rockwell, is a former senior executive at Dolby Laboratories.
shmerl 4y ago
Good idea. Perpetual patents on audio and video are ridiculous. Shouldn't they all expire?
kache_ 4y ago
kill em, google :)
cosmic7dice 4y ago
W-We already have AV1 and Opus. Google backed AV1, and they already use both on YouTube. I mean, they could make a better open video codec, give me AV2 any day. But why not push the pre-existing standards as "premium offerings"? And btw [Opinion Incoming!] I believe Opus is as good as lossy audio formats will ever get. I'd love to be proven wrong...

496 points by mmastrac 4y ago

Month M + 0: Google to take on $INDUSTRY_STANDARD with $GOOGLE_THING standard Month M + 4: Google shows off $GOOGLE_THING and announces $PARTNER devices Month M + 9: $PARTNER releases first devices with $GOOGLE_THING support (also supports $INDUSTRY_STANDARD, of course) Month M + 18: Google disappointed with lack of adoption of $GOOGLE_THING announces first-party products with $GOOGLE_THING support Month M + 24: Google's internal team working on first-party $GOOGLE_THING products dissolved Month M + 36: $PARTNER announces future products will no longer support $GOOGLE_THING due to lack of demand Month M + 48: Google removes all mentions of $GOOGLE_THING from their websites, docs, etc.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mmastrac 4y ago
I think Google's commitment to core technologies bucks this trend. Go has been long-lived and received lots of love. AV1/VP8/etc have been evolved and they've continued putting money into them.
- bzxcvbn 4y ago
  AV1 wasn't created by Google. Neither was VP8, although they did release it to the public after acquiring the company that created it.
  - product0251 4y ago
- taylodl 4y ago
  That's because Google uses Go internally. It's not consumer-facing technology.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

What's in it for Google? Less friction allows users to consume more which gives Google more data?

sudosysgen 4y ago
Integration on YouTube and Play Video for free.
digdugdirk 4y ago
Perhaps just a computationally inefficient process they see some potential in throwing AI at? Maybe it would be easier for them to tie in to their speech recognition/translation if they controlled the whole stack? Does anyone have any experience with Dolby and could shed some light?
TuringNYC 4y ago
Being able to sell TPU compute instances via algos fine-tuned to run cost-effectively on TPU instances?
izacus 4y ago
Dolby is earning money by jumping in the bed with streaming services and then asking every purchased device to pay them money for the privilege of decoding it. Making hardware devices like Android TV cheaper helps adoption of Googles platforms and services.
- olyjohn 4y ago
  It's not about making their stuff cheaper. They just want to take the royalty money they pay and put it in their pockets. They're not going to pass the savings onto the customers. Nobody ever passes the savings on to customers. The royalty is probably a couple of cents at the most per device. It makes more sense for them to just pocket the millions in savings and show extra profit to their shareholders. It would be dumb to give up millions to drop the price a few cents, which won't even be noticed by consumers anyways.
  - 4y ago

CobrastanJorji 4y ago

I love it when a powerful corporation's self interest happens to align with the public's interests.

Bombthecat 4y ago
Do they? Imagine android tv disabling atmos because of licensing or netflix, then using the new format which needs a new receiver. I spent 2k on mine for atmos 4 ceiling speakers..
- izacus 4y ago
  Why would they disable Atmos?
- kyriakos 4y ago
  By the time that happens dolby would have the next iteration of atmos and you'll have to get a new receiver. This is the sad truth about modern consumer electronics, very short life span.

rektide 4y ago

It's super unclear to me why Dolby keeps being the ones to do basic things. What is underneath the marketting gloss? It feels like we are all paying a lot for high bit depth, paying a lot for multi-channel audio. I have never understood how or why it is that expensive proprietary codecs keep taking over. Maybe there is more value add somewhere, but it's very unclear, esepcially under the gloss of (usually deeply non technical) marketting fluff.

52-6F-62 4y ago
They invented a lot of this stuff first, some of the preliminary work going back decades. It's not a secret. It predates digital audio. There's nothing stopping open source digital codecs from ruling, but they need people working for them. Personally, I'd rather pay dollars than data.
anigbrowl 4y ago
Partly marketing and licensing deals with studios - they do market very heavily. But they did pretty much invent the whole surround sound thing as we know it today, as well as a host of other realtime audio processing technologies. They're kinda the luxury mattress company of theatrical audio - it's expensive, but once you get it installed it's really nice to have. When I did audio production in the film industry, Dolby stuff was a post production expense but not e very big one. Their license fees aren't staggeringly expensive, and the quality and reliability of the playback system was its own argument - if the Dolby 5.1 sounds right in one theater it's going to sound right in another, and that's a big deal because bad sound can really kill a movie, even if the audience can't articulate why (most people don't think too much about sound). Digidesign (the manufacturers of Pro Tools & later owners of Avid) are a far more aggressive company that has maintained a virtual lock on its market with a combination of very expensive hardware and moat-building strategies.
izacus 4y ago
Don't underestimate existing business relations and contracts. The format you're using is the format that your TV/soundbar/tablet support. There's only a few manufacturers of those and they have decades of business relationship with Dolby. Breaking those proprietary realtionships with open source has always been a losing battle - look at HEVC vs. VP9 vs. AV1 battles or AptX vs. AAC vs. Opus. Media industry is a surprisingly tight knit and very conservative club that doesn't adopt outsiders easily.

crazygringo 4y ago

This is amazing. It's truly bizarre that 5.1 surround sound, or HDR, or spatial audio, would be proprietary paid formats -- I mean, what if someone told you there was a license for stereo audio? And sure it's in Google's self-interest so that they can bring these technologies to YouTube without paying anyone else. But it benefits everybody, so this is really fantastic news for everyone if it's something that takes off.

sosborn 4y ago
Perhaps of interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_patent_394325 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_patent_394325
Bombthecat 4y ago
Dolby vision is patented. There is already a free version,hdr+ , which samsung supports. But no one is using it.
- BonoboIO 4y ago
  What is exactly patented in Dolby Vision? There has to be some innovation to be patentable. HDR10 and HDR10+ exist.
  - jiggawatts 4y ago
    Dolby Vision is poorly documented but I did find a long PDF explaining how it works. It does provide significant value worthy of patent protection. The main thing they did was develop a nonlinear color space designed so that each “bit” of information provides equal value. This way no bits are wasted, making compression more efficient and have fewer artefacts. The color space is also set up so that the “lightness” channel is accurate and brightness can be rescaled without introducing color shifts. They also came up with a way of encoding the HDR brightness range efficiently so that about 12 bits worth of data fits into 10 bits. The format also allows a mode where there is an 8-bit SDR base stream with a 2-bit HDR extension stream. This allows the same file to be decoded as either HDR or SDR by devices with minimal overhead. Last but not least they work with device manufacturers to make optimal mapping tables that squeeze the enormous HDR range into whatever the device can physically show. This is hard because it has to be done in real time to compensate for maximum brightness limits for different sized patches and to compensate for brightness falloff due to overheating. Early model HDR TVs had to have FPGAs in them to do this fast enough!

ck2 4y ago

crazygringo 4y ago
The irony of GCemetary being dead is kind of amazing. Maybe keeping things going is a little harder than they thought ;)
- ck2 4y ago
  When I see a website that stopped updating in 2020 I kinda get sad. We lost a lot of people.
  - crazygringo 4y ago
    Fortunately, in this case the creator listed on the About page appears to be very much alive :) https://twitter.com/naeemol/ https://twitter.com/naeemol/

anigbrowl 4y ago

As a consumer, I don't care. dolby makes money from licensing, but don't ask that much, they innovate constantly, and they do a lot of public education. This seems like one corporation flexing on another rather than great sense of mission; it's not like Google doesn't have IP of its own that it prefers to keep locked up. I suspect that this signals a strategic desire to move into the A/V production space, where customers have big demands for storage and computing resources.

izacus 4y ago
Competition is always good for a consumer, especially here where right now you simply don't have a choice but to pay the rent to Dolby on every TV audio device. C'mon, this is market capitalism 101
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  Luckily I'm not a capitalist and am not convinced my life will be improved by shaving costs down to nothing until there is only one supplier left standing. Fort that matter I'm not much of a consumer, I'm still using a 10 year old TV XD What's weird to me is how google is selling this as a win for the public, when the marginal costs added by Dolby are so low. Even in the audio production space, Dolby stuff is a little expensive for an individual (surround sound plugins costing hundreds of dollars) but it's not a big overhead for a recording studio. Their product is quality and consistency at industrial prices and imho they deliver on this. There isn't an underground of frustrated audio engineers dreaming of how theatrical sound could be so much better if it weren't for big D. Spatial audio rebels build quadrophonic sound systems for raves, but you didn't hear it from me.
- rodgerd 4y ago
  How is one of the richest monopolistic companies in the world deciding to destroy a market segment "competition" that is "good for the consumer"?
  - BiometricAndy 4y ago
    So like Apple with their ATT? HN news user simping for Apple

foghorp 4y ago

What does Dolby actually do on a day to day basis? Do they have researchers working on new audio and video formats? Or is it now all just a self-perpetuating machine for generating licensing revenue, based on existing patents? Sorry for the ignorant question but I'm clueless about their ongoing contributions to the industry.

izacus 4y ago
Sue everyone violating their patents probably :P
Mindwipe 4y ago
Most of the industry uses HDR grading tools made by Dolby.
Anechoic 4y ago
Do they have researchers working on new audio and video formats? Short answer is yes. Search for "Dolby" under "Author Affiliation" in the AES paper search [0] and you can see the research they publish. (the papers themselves are unfortunately behind the AES paywall, but if usually authors will send you the paper if you ask nicely). [0] https://www.aes.org/publications/preprints/search.cfm https://www.aes.org/publications/preprints/search.cfm
kllrnohj 4y ago
Yes. Dolby Laboratories is what came up the PQ transfer function which is what's responsible for HDR10, HDR10+, and Dolby Vision, for example. Dolby Atmos is similarly an actually new way to handle spatial audio. They've also created things like ICtCp ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICtCp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICtCp ) So they do actually contribute some worthwhile stuff. And some of it is open standards (like PQ & ICtCp). They also absolutely troll licenses though. Dolby Vision being a perfect example, check out the "profiles" section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_Vision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_Vision and you'll see some truly dumb Dolby Vision profiles that exist obviously just to slap a Dolby Vision license & branding on an otherwise boring, generic video format. Dolby Vision 9 is a perfect example, it's not even HDR at all. It's literally the same stuff we've all been watching for a decade+, but with marketing wank shoved onto it.

duped 4y ago

There is already an open media format (edit: for object-based immersive audio), it's called SMPTE 2098. Granted it's basically the mutant stepchild of DTS and Dolby ATMOS, but it does exist. The real problem isn't the hardware manufacturers but the content producers. Dolby engages in blatant anticompetitive behavior that basically requires hardware manufacturers to support their codecs and make it impossible to innovate on the actual media formats in a way that might compete. For example: paying for content to be released in atmos or giving away the tools to author it for free.

scarface74 4y ago
So it’s anticompetitive to give away tools for free or paying content owners to use it? Would you say the same about a search engine company that gives its browser away for free and pays its competitor in mobile a reported $18 billion a year to be the default search engine for its platform? I would much rather tie my horse to Dolby than a company that has the attention span of a toddler.
- mattnewton 4y ago
  > So it’s anticompetitive to give away tools for free or paying content owners to use it? If the intent is to drive others out of the market, it could be right?
  - scarface74 4y ago
    So what is the intent of any company that gives away software or any startup that operates at loss funded by VC money? Or if the same company gave its mobile operating system away for free to undercut a rival and then as soon as it became ubiquitous, started making much of it closed source and forcing companies to bundle its closed source software?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - mattnewton 4y ago

ilamont 4y ago

While I don't have sympathy for proprietary formats that come with an added use charge, alternative Google formats forced upon the world in the name of a “healthier, broader ecosystem” tend to create friction and unwanted overhead. Thinking of AMP and webP in particular. And uncertainty ... how long will such efforts last before Google loses interest or is forced to abandon them?

izacus 4y ago
AMP is not a format.
bmicraft 4y ago
Webp wasn't bad and back then there really weren't any alternatives that performed significantly better than jpeg

keepquestioning 4y ago

Surprised Dolby has survived for so long.

ugjka 4y ago

Whatever the pirates adopt will be the de facto codec

0x457 4y ago
Ehh, that's not the case anymore. It used to play some roles because source material used some ancient inefficient codecs. WebRips are well, ripped as is. BDRip generally ripped as is as well.
- account42 4y ago
  Ripping Blu-Rays as is makes little sense except for preservation as most of them have hardcoded black bars in the video stream instead of letting playback devices letterbox/pillarbox as needed. Apparently the standard only supports a few resolutions, not even including 24:10 and other common cinema aspect ratios. Also still plenty of Blu-Rays around using VC-1 which is garbage compared to current codecs. Perhaps all new ones have migrated to H.264 - at least all UHD ones I have seen have.
kyriakos 4y ago
And porn
- dopa42365 4y ago
  Porn uses old and free formats for maximum compatibility. h264 and aac, works on every budget device from the last decade (and older). Even the highest quality 4k porn is just 20 mbit/s h264. These companies aren't youtube, they don't encode every video in 10 different formats for every use case. If pornhub statistics are to be believed, like 85% of visitors are mobile users. There's no point in optimizing anything for expensive big screen great audio home theater experience when your target audience is 5" low res screen 1% volume ashamed at night phone fappers. The very opposite of cutting edge technology (with the exception of tiny niches like VR).
TacticalCoder 4y ago
Honest question: what would currently be the most commonly audio format supported by pirates for pirated movies? I've got a home cinema projector but never paid much attention to the audio (just using my stereo: it's a good stereo but it's not 5.1 or anything).

justinclift 4y ago

Wonder how well this will compare to Ambisonics? That's supposed to be a "full sphere" surround sound format (developed ~50 years ago), but hasn't been picked up widely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambisonics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambisonics

TD-Linux 4y ago
It is, in fact, Ambisonics (among other features). Though you don't actually need any of the fancy new stuff being worked on to use Ambisonics - you can already use Opus with Ambisonics today in MP4.
- justinclift 4y ago
  Interesting. Any idea if there are existing file converters for Atmos (etc) to Ambisonics? For example, lets say I have some-atmos-movie.mkv on my local computer, that I'd like to play back through my 7.1 speakers (attached to computer). In my head, I'm thinking: 1. Needs to be converted to Ambisonics format 2. Player software (eg vlc) needs to understand the resulting format, and send an appropriate bitstream to each output device Guessing it's not that simple?
  - TD-Linux 4y ago
    In general you can convert any speaker layout etc to Ambisonics. For Atmos specifically, no, because there is no software decoder available for it (you have to bitstream it to a receiver).

debacle 4y ago

I have an entire speaker setup that runs on the chromecast protocol(s?) They've been repeatedly bricked (features rolled back, support changed, can't set up complete groups, etc) by Google in the last few years, to the point where I don't even think I have them connected right now. I don't trust consumer products from Google at all.

pier25 4y ago

Anyone remembers the open format HDR10+ pushed by Fox, Panasonic, and Samsung? Me neither. The world at large has settled on Dolby Vision and Atmos and it will be very difficult to change this. Not only from the consumer end but specially in the pro audio/video end. Google would need first to offer plugins for DAWs, video software, etc, to work with these formats before there's enough content that manufacturers and streamers consider it.

kllrnohj 4y ago
Of course I remember HDR10+, along with HDR10 and HLG. All of which are quite common and broadly used. Hollywood movies primarily standardized on Dolby Vision, but the entire HDR ecosystem very much did not. Sony cameras for example primarily only shoot in HLG, even for their cinema cameras. Similarly games regularly opt for HDR10/HDR10+ for their HDR output instead of Dolby Vision. Why? Because it's cheaper, and dynamic metadata is largely pointless in an environment where the lighting content of the next dozen frames aren't known
- pier25 4y ago
  > Hollywood movies primarily standardized on Dolby Vision No, pretty much the entire video/streaming industry did. Apple, Netflix, Disney, HBO, etc, either stream in DV or HDR10 (non plus). Physical Bluray is slowly dying (I own a bunch of those) so streaming is really where most of the HDR video content lives. > Similarly games regularly opt for HDR10/HDR10+ for their HDR output instead of Dolby Vision Fair point, but consumers keep complaining the PS5 doesn't have DV which is an indicator of what people want. DV is actually a big selling point for the Xbox Series X. On PC, I don't know. I've been playing HDR in consoles for years but support on Windows has been pretty bad until recently. My impression is HDR is so much more popular on consoles vs PC. Same with Atmos and surround.
  - izacus 4y ago
    That's funny, since PS5 doesn't support Atmos at all and on Windows you need to buy a paid plugin to make it work for anything that's not a Home Theatre system. (And even if you have a home theatre system, Windows games will still prefer outputting 5.1 / 7.1 PCM and mixing 3D effects by themselves). I'd also be interested to hear where those Dolby Vision complaints for PS5 are coming from, I haven't heard anyone really say that despite HDR being debated quite a lot :)

smm11 4y ago

Pono Player checking in.

sportstuff 4y ago

There is difference between hearing vs listening vs feeling. I hope more creative stuff comes out this. My first experience on 5.1 was Top Gun.. The next one to top that was in Audium with sound and vibrations from everywhere. Nothing to top the sound of silence.

solarkraft 4y ago

We are seeing a deeper and deeper split between Google (webm/VP9, webp, AV1, strongly pushing their formats) and Apple (HEVC, HEIC, Atmos, completely boycotting Google's formats), with Microsoft caught in the middle, supporting neither that well. Apple's stance is especially interesting because it's unclear to me what they gain by pushing license fee encumbered formats.

theandrewbailey 4y ago
I figured that it was because Apple is more heavily involved with Hollywood than Google is, from production to distribution, and Apple would rather side with standards formulated by trusted experts, professionals, and academics with long track records like MPEG than ones that seemingly came from nowhere.
- ajross 4y ago
  > standards formulated by trusted experts, professionals, and academics with long track records like MPEG I genuinely can't tell if this is humor or not. If it is, bravo.
  - tpush 4y ago
    Perhaps formulate a point instead of pretending to be incredulous.
    - AvesMerit 4y ago
      You missed the pun
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  Fortunately, MPEG got lobotomized by ISO a few years back[0]. So there's room for a new standards org (e.g. AOM) to overtake them. In fact, Apple joined AOM recently, so presumably they will be providing their own expertise to that organization too. [0] Specifically, Leonardo Chiariglione got fired and the MPEG working group cut up into a bunch of pieces.

gjsman-1000 4y ago

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Dolby Vision is actually a mess of a standard, with several different not-quite-compatible "profiles." Streaming video is Profile 5, UHD Blu-ray Discs are Profile 7[1], and iPhone Dolby Vision is Profile 8. Profile 7 cannot be converted into Profile 5 [completely incompatible and different algorithms!], devices that implement Profile 5 can't necessarily play Profile 7, but Profile 7 can with difficulty be theoretically converted into Profile 8 which is basically stripped-down Profile 7 with quirks[2]. Basically, Dolby Vision is fragmented within itself. Fun stuff. [1] And within Profile 7, there is the difference between the MEL (Minimum Enhancement Layer) which just adds HDR data, versus the FEL (Full Enhancement Layer) which actually adapts a 10-bit core video stream into a 12-bit one for FEL compatible players. Not all Profile 7 implementations can handle FEL, but can handle MEL. So even the profiles themselves have fragmentation. FEL and MEL are, within Profile 7, actually HEVC video streams that are 1920x1080 that the player reads simultaneously with the 4K content. So a FEL/MEL player is actually processing 2 HEVC streams simultaneously, so it's not a huge surprise why it isn't used for streaming DV. [2] Profile 8 comes in 3 different versions, Profiles 8.1 through 8.4. 8.3 is not used. Profile 8.1 is backwards compatible with an HDR10 stream, Profile 8.2 a SDR stream, and Profile 8.4 an HLG stream. Big surprise that iPhone uses 8.4 because HLG can be seamlessly converted into SDR or some other HDR formats when necessary. https://professionalsupport.dolby.com/s/article/What-is-Dolby-Vision-Profile?language=en_US https://professionalsupport.dolby.com/s/article/What-is-Dolb...

agilob 4y ago

Would be nice if they started from opensourcing chromecast

cosmic7dice 4y ago
Google: Dream on, dreamer...

foxbee 4y ago

'Google wants to take on...' My immediate reaction to reading these few words is - "another tool for the Google graveyard"

hollowturtle 4y ago

Any suggested readings about codecs/encodings/formats/algorithms used or whatnot? I’m afraid it’s the thing I lack most as a dev

fnordpiglet 4y ago

AKA we will crush your smaller company focused on high quality standards with our half assed support that lasts until you’re dead, maybe people will confuse this for “open”

mikeyouse 4y ago

The EU is randomly investigating the Alliance for Open Media on antitrust concerns -- https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-eu-antitrust-regulators-probing-tech-group-aoms-video-licensing-policy-2022-07-07/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-eu-antitrust-re... Can anyone understand how it's in anyone's best interest to investigate / potentially stop an open source standard / royalty-free format that has buy-in from tons of big orgs?

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
> randomly The Commission has information that AOM and its members may be imposing licensing terms (mandatory royalty-free cross licensing) on innovators that were not a part of AOM at the time of the creation of the AV1 technical, but whose patents are deemed essential to (its) technical specifications Sounds worth looking into.
- ksec 4y ago
  On HN, it is Rust, RISC-V and then AOM that can do no wrong. And then it is Facebook and Oracle that can do no right.
- account42 4y ago
  Only if you believe that investigating software patents are in the public's best interest.
rodgerd 4y ago
> Can anyone understand how it's in anyone's best interest to investigate / potentially stop an open source standard / royalty-free format that has buy-in from tons of big orgs? Because "using my monopolistic profits in one area to destroy your business in another area" is textbook anticompetitive behaviour.
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  I guess I get it but is anyone aside from the rent-seeking royalty holders worse off if open standards win out?

phyzix5761 4y ago

Given Google's history of killing projects I'm not jumping on this ship just yet.

RubberShoes 4y ago

(Someone who works in streaming) While I see both sides, I don't agree with this strategy. In fact, I think the public should be more aware of just how damaging Google/YouTube is to the streaming ecosystem and if you really stretch this argument, the planet. It is true - HEVC's original licensing structure was a nightmare, but it seems to have been resolved and we now have hardware decoders in nearly all modern consumer devices. This is also becoming true of Dolby's formats. maybe I am biased or not as informed as I could be but they did the R&D, worked with some of the brightest (pun intended) in the industry and created a production-to-distribution pipeline. Of course there are fees, but vendors are on board and content creators know how to work with these standards. Now here comes one of the largest companies in the world. HEVC? Nope - they don't want to pay anyone any fees so instead they're going to develop the VP9 codec. Should they use HLS or DASH? Nope, they are going to spin DASH off into our own proprietary HTTP deliverable and only deliver AVC HLS for compatibility reasons. Apple customers complain and after years they cave and support VP9 as a software decoder starting with iOS14. This means millions of users eat significant battery cycles just to watch anything, including HDR video. Then we get to Chrome. HEVC? Nope. Dolby? Nope. HLS? Nope. The most popular browser in the world doesn't support any of the broadcast standards. It's their way or fallback to SDR and the less efficient AVC codec. So now anyone else in the streaming industry trying to deliver the best streaming experience has to encode/transcode everything three times. AVC for compatibility (and spec) reasons, HEVC for set-top boxes and iOS, and VP9 for Google's ecosystem. If it wasn't for CMAF the world would also have to store all of this twice. In the end, to save YouTube licensing and bandwidth costs, the rest of the industry has to consume 2-3x more compute to generate video and hundreds of millions of devices now consume an order of magnitude more power to software decode VP9. If and when Project Caviar becomes reality, it'll be another fragmented HDR deliverable. Dolby isn't going away and Chrome won't support it, so the rest of the industry will have to add even more compute and storage to accommodate. In the name of 'open' and saving manufacturers a couple dollars, the rest of the industry is now fragmented and consumers are hurt the most. YouTube weirdly admitted this fragmentation is becoming a problem. They can't keep up with compute and had to create custom hardware to solve. Of course, these chips are not available to anyone else and gives them a competitive edge: https://www.protocol.com/enterprise/youtube-custom-chips-argos-asics https://www.protocol.com/enterprise/youtube-custom-chips-arg...

GreenPlastic 4y ago

The last thing I want to do is upgrade all my TVs and audio equipment for new standards

robertheadley 4y ago

Subtext: Google doesn't want to pay licensing fees.

limeblack 4y ago
Or wait for the patents to expire. H.264 won’t take to much longer to expire it’s around 12 years I believe and yet Google has released vp8.

_HMCB_ 4y ago

Through Google Fonts, they can track page views under the guise of beautiful fonts for your site. I wonder if they could do the same with these media formats.

account42 4y ago
Which is why you should self-host all the fonts you use, which is incidentally also what you need to do to be GDPR-compliant. Its not the fonts that are the problem here its the font CDN.

hot_gril 4y ago

I look at the current reality of VP8/9 with dissatisfaction. Google went all-in with it and made Meet/Hangouts use it. But encoding, decoding, or both end up being done on the CPU usually, since hardware support is way behind. Zoom and FaceTime just used H.264 (and 5?), and it's way more efficient as a result. I don't normally care a ton about efficiency, but it actually matters when your laptop's fans are overpowering the audio in a meeting and draining your battery to 0 within a short time span. Also, ironically, even Google Chat didn't seem to support webp images until recently. I appreciate the idea of open standards, but compatibility matters way more to the end user.

acdha 4y ago
The other thing I noticed was that Google had some very … optimistic … claims about quality which were hard to reproduce. Every time I tested VP8/9, it took more tweaking to get either quality or size competitive with H.264/5 (VP9 was often playing catch up with the previous generation) and paying twice as much for storage just didn’t make any sense when everything supported the MPEG standards and you couldn’t version-detect which things would technically run but drain your users’ batteries. It felt very Google-y: lots of attention to the cool CS problems, less so the boring ones like tool support and sensible defaults for non-experts.

chadlavi 4y ago

obligatory relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/

DesiLurker 4y ago

yes Fuck Dolby.

daoist_shaman 4y ago

I’d like to think that “don’t be evil” applies here, but that might be wishful thinking. What are some of the risks of media formats being centralized by a mega corp like Google who works with nation states? Can we truly expect something free… or can we expect all of the content we create to be steganographically watermarked in surveillance states that appear to be fully cracking down on encryption?

cutler 4y ago

For all the evil Google may be guilty of they have done a lot of good work supporting open standards and releasing proprietary formats as open source. Let's not forget how Chrome liberated the web from Microsoft's won't-fix attitude whilst IE remained the dominant browser.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
account42 4y ago
> For all the evil Google may be guilty of they have done a lot of good work supporting open standards and releasing proprietary formats as open source. Sure, there are defintitely things Google has done that have benefited the public. > Let's not forget how Chrome liberated the web from Microsoft's won't-fix attitude whilst IE remained the dominant browser. But I am unconvinced that Chrome is one of them. Firefox was doing fine displacing IE on its own and the main reason Chrome managed to pull ahead so fast was the huge marketing drive including ads on the home page of the worlds #1 website. Meanwhile, Chrome-driven extensions have made the web incredibly complicated to the extend that new browsers are almost impossible while its dominance holds back any real effort to put users into control of their web browsing experience since few websites care to support anything other than Chrome.

bredren 4y ago

Worth noting that Apple's vice president in charge of the AR/VR team, Mike Rockwell, is a former senior executive at Dolby Laboratories.

shmerl 4y ago

Good idea. Perpetual patents on audio and video are ridiculous. Shouldn't they all expire?

kache_ 4y ago

kill em, google :)

cosmic7dice 4y ago

W-We already have AV1 and Opus. Google backed AV1, and they already use both on YouTube. I mean, they could make a better open video codec, give me AV2 any day. But why not push the pre-existing standards as "premium offerings"? And btw [Opinion Incoming!] I believe Opus is as good as lossy audio formats will ever get. I'd love to be proven wrong...