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Possibly, nothing. Codec development is slow and expensive. Free codecs only came along at all because Google decided to subsidize development but that became p

Possibly, nothing. Codec development is slow and expensive. Free codecs only came along at all because Google decided to subsidize development but that became possible only 15 years or so after MPEG was born, and it's hardly a robust strategy. Plus free codecs were often built by acquiring companies that had previously been using IP licensing as a business model rather than from-scratch development.

wheybags 1y ago
It's not just about new codecs. There's also people making products that would use codecs just deciding not to because of the patent hassle.
newsclues 1y ago
This is the sort of project that should be developed and released via open source from academia. Audio and video codecs, document formats like PDF, are all foundational to computing and modern life from government to business, so there is a great incentive to make it all open, and free.
- oblio 1y ago
  You're also describing technologies with universal use and potential for long term rent seeking. Basically MBA drool material.
  - newsclues 1y ago
    Yeah, and if MBAs want to reap that reward, they need to fund the development exclusively without government funding.
- mike_hearn 1y ago
  Universities love patent licensing. I don't think academia is the solution you're looking for.
  - yxhuvud 1y ago
    The solution to that is to remove the ability to patent codecs.
    - master-lincoln 1y ago
      I think we should go a step further and remove the ability to patent algorithms (software)
      - immibis 1y ago
        Some people even think we should remove intellectual property.
  - newsclues 1y ago
    So do companies. But education receives a lot of funding from the government. I think academia should build open source technology (that people can commercialize on their own with the expertise). Higher education doesn’t need to have massive endowments of real estate and patent portfolio to further educ… administration salaries and vanity building projects. Academia can serve the world with technology and educated minds.
- nullc 1y ago
  Incentives in academia as things are is ... uh. Not so awesome. My expectation from experience when implementing something from a DSP paper is that the result will be unreproducable without contacting the authors for some undisclosed table of magic constants. After obtaining it, the results may match but only for the test images they reported results on. Results on anything else will be much worse. Also it's normal for techniques from the literature to have computational/memory bandwidth costs two orders of magnitude greater than justified for even their (usually exaggerated) stated levels of performance. And then their comparison points are almost always inevitably implemented so naively as to make the comparison useless. It's always difficult because improvements in this domain (like many other engineering domains) are significantly about tradeoffs ... and tradeoffs are difficult to weigh in a pure research environment without the context of concrete applications. They're also difficult to weigh with implementation cleverness having such a big impact particularly since industry heavily drains academia of naturally skilled software engineers. And as other comments have pointed out, academia is in some sense among the worst of the patent abusers. They'll often develop technology just far enough to lay patent mines around the field, but not far enough to produce something useful out of it. The risk that you spend the significant effort to turn a concept into something usable only to have some patent holder show up with a decade old patent to shake you down is a big incentive against investment.
thinkingQueen 1y ago
Not sure why you are downvoted as you seem to be one of the few who knows even a little about codec development. And regarding ”royalty-free” codecs please read this https://ipeurope.org/blog/royalty-free-standards-are-not-free-of-costs-av1-as-a-case-study/ https://ipeurope.org/blog/royalty-free-standards-are-not-fre...
- bjoli 1y ago
  At least two of the members of ipeurope are companies you could use as ann argument why we shouldn't have patents at all.
- blendergeek 1y ago
  > And regarding ”royalty-free” codecs please read this https://ipeurope.org/blog/royalty-free-standards-are-not-fre https://ipeurope.org/blog/royalty-free-standards-are-not-fre... Unsurprisingly companies that are losing money because their rent-seeking on media codecs is now over will spread FUD [0] about royalty free codecs. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear%2C_uncertainty_and_doubt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear%2C_uncertainty_and_doubt
- chrismorgan 1y ago
  That article is a scare piece designed to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt, to prop up an industry that has already collapsed because everyone else hated them, and make out that they’re the good guys and you should go back to how things were.
- cnst 1y ago
  > The catch is that while the AV1 developers offer their patents (assuming they have any) on a royalty-free basis, in return they require users of AV1 to agree to license their own patents royalty-free back to them. Such a huge catch that the companies that offer you a royalty-free license, only do so on the condition that you're not gonna turn around and abuse your own patents against them! How exactly is that a bad thing? How is it different from the (unwritten) social contracts of all humans and even of animals? How is it different from the primal instincts?
pornel 1y ago
IP law, especially defence against submarine patents, makes codec development expensive. In the early days of MPEG codec development was difficult, because most computers weren't capable of encoding video, and the field was in its infancy. However, by the end of '00s computers were fast enough for anybody to do video encoding R&D, and there was a ton of research to build upon. At that point MPEG's role changed from being a pioneer in the field to being an incumbent with a patent minefield, stopping others from moving the field forward.
- mike_hearn 1y ago
  IP law and the need for extremely smart people with a rare set of narrow skills. It's not like codec development magically happens for free if you ignore patents. The point is, if there had been no incentives to develop codecs, there would have been no MPEG. Other people would have stepped into the void and sometimes did, e.g. RealVideo, but without legal IP protection the codecs would just have been entirely undocumented and heavily obfuscated, relying on tamper-proofed ASICs much faster.
  - badsectoracula 1y ago
    That sounds like the 90s argument against FLOSS: without the incentive for people to sell software, nobody would write it.
    - strogonoff 1y ago
      Without IP protections that allow copyleft to exist arguably there would be no FOSS. When anything you publish can be leveraged and expropriated by Microsoft et al. without them being obligated to contribute back or even credit you, you are just an unpaid ghost engineer for big tech.
      - immibis 1y ago
        I thought your argument was that Microsoft wouldn't be able to exist in that world. Which is it?
Taek 1y ago
I avoided a career in codecs after spending about a year in college learning about them. The patent minefield meant I couldn't meaningfully build incremental improvements on what existed, and the idea of dilligently dancing around existing patents and then releasing something which intentionally lacked state-of-the-art ideas wasn't compelling. Codec development is slow and expensive becuase you can't just release a new codec, you have to dance around patents.
- mike_hearn 1y ago
  Well, a career in codec development means you'd have done it as a job, and so you'd have been angling for a job at the kind of places that enter into the patent pools and contribute to the standards.
  - voakbasda 1y ago
    I don’t know about you, but I became a software engineer to write code for myself and my own interests, not to get a job where all of my labor will be vacuumed up and exploited to maximize anonymous shareholder value.
    - scottLobster 1y ago
      That's all great and noble, but at the end of the day it's about who has the resources. If you can get the necessary resources yourself and have complete control over their allocation, congratulations you won the jackpot of life. Plenty of people, some of whom are smarter and better than you, tried to do the same and failed due to reasons beyond their control. Try to remain a good person and not waste the opportunity if you ever get to that stage. For the remaining 99.99% of us, we have to negotiate for resources as best we can. That typically means maximizing shareholder value in exchange for a cut of the profits. Not all your labor needs to be vacuumed up, I make enough to support my family, live a relatively safe and comfortable life with some minor luxuries and likely a secure retirement. Better deal than most people get today.
      - 1y ago
deadbabe 1y ago
Why not just use AI?
- account42 1y ago
  Why not ask about blockchains?
ghm2199 1y ago
For the uninitiated, could you describe why codec development is slow and expensive?
- thinkingQueen 1y ago
  It’s a bit like developing an F1 car. Or a cutting edge airplane. Lots of small optimizations that have to work together. Sometimes big new ideas emerge but those are rare. Until the new codec comes to together all those small optimizations aren’t really worth much, so it’s a long term research project with potentially zero return on investement. And yes, most of the small optimizations are patented, something that I’ve come to understand isnt’t viewed very favorably by most.
  - phkahler 1y ago
    >> And yes, most of the small optimizations are patented, something that I’ve come to understand isn’t viewed very favorably by most. Codecs are like infrastructure not products. From cameras to servers to iPhones, they all have to use the same codecs to interoperate. If someone comes along with a small optimization it's hard enough to deploy that across the industry. If it's patented you've got another obstacle: nobody wants to pay the incremental cost for a small improvement (it's not even incremental cost once you've got free codecs, it's a complete hassle).
- mike_hearn 1y ago
  They're hardware accelerated so it's not worth making a new codec until you have a big improvement over the prior baseline, because it takes a long time to manufacture and roll out devices that are better. Verifying an optimization is worth it requires testing against a big library of videos using standardized perception metrics, it requires ensuring there's an efficient way to decode it in both hardware and software, including efficient encoding. It's easy to improve one kind of input but regress another. Most of the low hanging fruit is taken already. Just the usual stuff that makes advancing the frontier hard.
bsindicatr3 1y ago
> Free codecs only came along … and it's hardly a robust strategy Maybe you don’t remember the way that the gif format (there was no jpeg, png, or webp initially) had problems with licensing, and then years later having scares about it potentially becoming illegal to use gifs. Here’s a mention of some of the problems with Unisys, though I didn’t find info about these scares on Wikipedia’s GIF or Compuserve pages: https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-in-1994-the-company-who-had-a-patent-on-GIFs-tried-to-charge-a-fee-for-using-GIFs-The-PNG-was-invented-as-an-alternative-and-the-company-backed-down https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-in-1994-the-company-wh... Similarly, the awful history of digital content restriction technology in-general (DRM, etc.). I’m not against companies trying to protect assets, but data assets historically over all time are inherently prone to “use”, whether that use is intentional or unintentional by the one that provided the data. The problem has always been about the means of dissemination, not that the data itself needed to be encoded with a lock that anyone with the key or means to get/make one could unlock nor that it should need to call home, basically preventing the user from actually legitimately being able to use the data.
- adzm 1y ago
  > I didn’t find info about these scares on Wikipedia’s GIF or Compuserve pages The GIF page on wikipedia has an entire section for the patent troubles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Unisys_and_LZW_patent_enforcement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Unisys_and_LZW_patent_enfo...
- mike_hearn 1y ago
  The "non robust strategy" refers to relying on goodnatured monopolies to fund free technologies, not a format being free. When it works its nice, but I am indeed old enough to remember the GIF patent wars, which means I'm also old enough to remember when the big rich monopoly in town was Microsoft (and before them, IBM). Neither Microsoft nor Apple were like Google and the tech they produced was much more closed than MPEG. The idea that MPEG took away some Stallmanist idyll is just ahistorical.
tomrod 1y ago
Free codecs have been available a long time, surely, as we could install them in Linux distributions in 2005 or earlier? (I know nothing about the legal side of all this, just remembering the time period of Ubuntu circa 2005-2008).
- zappb 1y ago
  Free codecs without patent issues were limited to things like Vorbis which never got wide support. There were FOSS codecs for patented algorithms, but those had legal issues in places that enforce software patents.
  - breve 1y ago
    AV1, VP9, and Opus are used on YouTube and Netflix right now. It's hard to get more mainstream than YouTube and Netflix.
    - account42 1y ago
      Now, not in 2005.
  - notpushkin 1y ago
    > which never got wide support Source? I’ve seen Vorbis used in a whole bunch of places. Notably, Spotify only used Vorbis for a while (still does, but also includes AAC now, for Apple platforms I think).
    - scott_w 1y ago
      Pre-Spotify, MP3 players would usually only ship with MP3 support (thus the name), so people would only rip to MP3. Ask any millennial and most of them will never have heard of Ogg.
      - notpushkin 1y ago
        Of course, but this is not what I’d call “never got wide support”.
lightedman 1y ago
"Free codecs only came along at all because Google decided to subsidize development" No, just no. We've had free community codec packs for years before Google even existed. Anyone remember CCCP?
- notpushkin 1y ago
  Yes. Those won’t help you if you use them for commercial use and patent holders find out about it.
- leguminous 1y ago
  CCCP was just a collection of existing codecs, they didn't develop their own. Most of the codecs in CCCP were patented. Using it without licenses was technically patent infringement in most places. It's just that nobody ever cared to enforce it on individual end users.
- tristor 1y ago
  As one of the people that helped start CCCP and was involved extensively through almost its entire lifespan, I think you misunderstand what it means to be "free" in this case. CCCP was "free as in beer" but not "free as in speech", /many/ of the codecs in CCCP were patent encumbered, but were included because there were open-source implementations of them by authors that didn't care about those patents, and many of the licensing arrangements didn't effectively apply to end-users (either due to language or care to prosecute). CCCP also almost exclusively included /decoders/, but /encoders/ are much more likely to be targeted by licensing authorities. We started CCCP because at the time, anime fansubs were predominantly traded on P2P filesharing services like Kazaa, Gnutella, eDonkey, Direct Connect, and later Bittorrent. The most popular codec pack at the time was K-Lite / Kazaa Codec Pack which was a complete and utter mess, and specifically for fansubbing, it was hard to get subtitles to work properly unless they were hard embedded. Soft-subbing allowed for improvements, and there were a lot of improvements to subtitling in the fansubbing community over the years, one of the biggest came when the Matroska (MKV) container format came about, that allowed arbitrarily different formats/encodings to share a single media container, and the community shifted almost entirely to ASS formatted subtitles, but because an MKV could contain many different encodings, any given MKV file may play correctly or not on any given system. CCCP was intended to provide an authoritative, canonical, single-source way to play fansubbed anime correctly on Windows, and we achieved that objective. But let's be clear, nobody involved was under any illusions that the MPEG-LA or any other license holders of for instance h264 were fans of our community or what we're doing. Anime fansubbing at all came out of piracy of foreign-language media into the English market via the Internet and P2P filesharing. None of us gave a shit, and the use of Soviet imagery in the CCCP was exactly a nod to the somewhat communist ideal that knowledge and access to media should be free, and that patent encumbering codecs and patenting software isn't just stupid, it's morally wrong. I still strongly feel software patents are evil. Nonetheless, at no point was CCCP through it's life fully legal/licenses appropriately for usage, and effectively nobody cared, not even the licensing authorities, because the existence of these things made their licenses for encoders more valuable for companies producing media, as it was easier for actual people to consume.
cxr 1y ago
> Free codecs only came along at all because Google decided to subsidize development but that became possible only 15 years or so after MPEG was born The release of VP3 as open source predates Google's later acquisition of On2 (2010) by nearly a decade.
- mike_hearn 1y ago
  In practice nobody outside a handful of developers and executives at rich tech firms seems to care about video codec licensing - open codecs were barely used anywhere until they matched the quality of the MPEG standards. They still aren't that widely used. H.264 is supposedly 90%+ of all digital video even now (well, as of a few years ago at least according to Google).
  - cxr 1y ago
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts>
zoeysmithe 1y ago
This is impossible to know. Not that long ago something like Linux would have sounded like a madman's dream to someone with your perspective. It turns out great innovations happen outside the capitalist for-profit context and denying that is very questionable. If anything, those kinds of setups often hinder innovation. How much better would linux be if it was mired in endless licensing agreements, per monthly rates, had a board full of fortune 500 types, and billed each user a patent fee? Or any form of profit incentive 'business logic'? If that stuff worked better, linux would have failed entirely, instead near everyone interfaces with a linux machine probably hundreds if not thousands of times a day in some form. Maybe millions if we consider how complex just accessing internet services is and the many servers, routers, mirrors, proxies, etc one encounters in just a trivial app refresh. If not linux, then the open mach/bsd derivatives ios uses. Then looking even previous to the ascent of linux, we had all manner of free/open stuff informally in the 70s and 80s. Shareware, open culture, etc that led to today where this entire medium only exists because of open standards and open source and volunteering. Software patents are net loss for society. For profit systems are less efficient than open non-profit systems. No 'middle-man' system is better than a system that goes out of its way to eliminate the middle-man rent-seeker.
derf_ 1y ago
> ...it's hardly a robust strategy. I disagree. Video is such a large percentage of internet traffic and licensing fees are so high that it becomes possible for any number of companies to subsidize the development cost of a new codec on their own and still net a profit. Google certainly spends the most money, but they were hardly the only ones involved in AV1. At Mozilla we developed Daala from scratch and had reached performance competitive with H.265 when we stopped to contribute the technology to the AV1 process, and our team's entire budget was a fraction of what the annual licensing fees for H.264 would have been. Cisco developed Thor on their own with just a handful of people and contributed that, as well. Many other companies contributed technology on a royalty-free basis. Outside of AV1, you regularly see things like Samsung's EVC (or LC-EVC, or APV, or...), or the AVS series from the Chinese.... If the patent situation were more tenable, you would see a lot more of these. The cost of developing the technology is not the limitation. I would argue the cost to get all parties to agree on a common standard and the cost to deploy it widely enough for people to rely on it is much higher, but people manage that on a royalty-free basis for many other standards.
- mike_hearn 1y ago
  Mozilla is just Google from a financial perspective, it's not an independent org, so the financing point stands. H.264 was something like >90% of all video a few years ago and wasn't it free for streaming if the end user wasn't paying? IIRC someone also paid the fees for an open source version. There were pretty good licensing terms available and all the big players have used it extensively. Anyway, my point was only that expecting Google to develop every piece of tech in the world and give it all away for free isn't a general model for tech development, whereas IP rights and patent pools are. The free ride ends the moment Google decide they need more profit, feel threatened in some way or get broken up by the government.
  - ZeroGravitas 1y ago
    Part of the reason h.264 was such a big percentage of video was that they messed up the licencing of the follow up so badly which was supposed to supplant it. Not that the licencing of h.264 wasn't a mess too. You suggest it was free for web use but they originally only promised not to charge for free streaming up until 2015 and reserved the right to do so once it was embedded in the web. Pressure from Google/Xiph/etc's WebM project forced them to promise not to enforce it after that point either. https://www.wired.com/2010/08/mpeg-la-extends-web-video-licensing-moratorium-until-the-end-of-time/ https://www.wired.com/2010/08/mpeg-la-extends-web-video-lice... Cisco paid for a binary version of a decoder that could be downloaded by Firefox as a plugin. They could only do so because of a loophole around a cap in fees that they were already hitting so it wouldn't cost them more to supply to every Firefox user.
weinzierl 1y ago
"Free codecs only came along at all because Google decided to subsidize development but that became possible only 15 years or so after MPEG was born, and it's hardly a robust strategy" I don't know about video codecs but MP3 (also part of MPEG) came out of Fraunhofer and was paid by German tax money. It should not have been patented in the first place (and wasn't in Germany).

wheybags 1y ago

It's not just about new codecs. There's also people making products that would use codecs just deciding not to because of the patent hassle.

newsclues 1y ago

This is the sort of project that should be developed and released via open source from academia. Audio and video codecs, document formats like PDF, are all foundational to computing and modern life from government to business, so there is a great incentive to make it all open, and free.

oblio 1y ago
You're also describing technologies with universal use and potential for long term rent seeking. Basically MBA drool material.
- newsclues 1y ago
  Yeah, and if MBAs want to reap that reward, they need to fund the development exclusively without government funding.
mike_hearn 1y ago
Universities love patent licensing. I don't think academia is the solution you're looking for.
- yxhuvud 1y ago
  The solution to that is to remove the ability to patent codecs.
  - master-lincoln 1y ago
    I think we should go a step further and remove the ability to patent algorithms (software)
    - immibis 1y ago
      Some people even think we should remove intellectual property.
- newsclues 1y ago
  So do companies. But education receives a lot of funding from the government. I think academia should build open source technology (that people can commercialize on their own with the expertise). Higher education doesn’t need to have massive endowments of real estate and patent portfolio to further educ… administration salaries and vanity building projects. Academia can serve the world with technology and educated minds.
nullc 1y ago
Incentives in academia as things are is ... uh. Not so awesome. My expectation from experience when implementing something from a DSP paper is that the result will be unreproducable without contacting the authors for some undisclosed table of magic constants. After obtaining it, the results may match but only for the test images they reported results on. Results on anything else will be much worse. Also it's normal for techniques from the literature to have computational/memory bandwidth costs two orders of magnitude greater than justified for even their (usually exaggerated) stated levels of performance. And then their comparison points are almost always inevitably implemented so naively as to make the comparison useless. It's always difficult because improvements in this domain (like many other engineering domains) are significantly about tradeoffs ... and tradeoffs are difficult to weigh in a pure research environment without the context of concrete applications. They're also difficult to weigh with implementation cleverness having such a big impact particularly since industry heavily drains academia of naturally skilled software engineers. And as other comments have pointed out, academia is in some sense among the worst of the patent abusers. They'll often develop technology just far enough to lay patent mines around the field, but not far enough to produce something useful out of it. The risk that you spend the significant effort to turn a concept into something usable only to have some patent holder show up with a decade old patent to shake you down is a big incentive against investment.

thinkingQueen 1y ago

Not sure why you are downvoted as you seem to be one of the few who knows even a little about codec development. And regarding ”royalty-free” codecs please read this https://ipeurope.org/blog/royalty-free-standards-are-not-free-of-costs-av1-as-a-case-study/ https://ipeurope.org/blog/royalty-free-standards-are-not-fre...

bjoli 1y ago
At least two of the members of ipeurope are companies you could use as ann argument why we shouldn't have patents at all.
blendergeek 1y ago
> And regarding ”royalty-free” codecs please read this https://ipeurope.org/blog/royalty-free-standards-are-not-fre https://ipeurope.org/blog/royalty-free-standards-are-not-fre... Unsurprisingly companies that are losing money because their rent-seeking on media codecs is now over will spread FUD [0] about royalty free codecs. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear%2C_uncertainty_and_doubt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear%2C_uncertainty_and_doubt
chrismorgan 1y ago
That article is a scare piece designed to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt, to prop up an industry that has already collapsed because everyone else hated them, and make out that they’re the good guys and you should go back to how things were.
cnst 1y ago
> The catch is that while the AV1 developers offer their patents (assuming they have any) on a royalty-free basis, in return they require users of AV1 to agree to license their own patents royalty-free back to them. Such a huge catch that the companies that offer you a royalty-free license, only do so on the condition that you're not gonna turn around and abuse your own patents against them! How exactly is that a bad thing? How is it different from the (unwritten) social contracts of all humans and even of animals? How is it different from the primal instincts?

pornel 1y ago

IP law, especially defence against submarine patents, makes codec development expensive. In the early days of MPEG codec development was difficult, because most computers weren't capable of encoding video, and the field was in its infancy. However, by the end of '00s computers were fast enough for anybody to do video encoding R&D, and there was a ton of research to build upon. At that point MPEG's role changed from being a pioneer in the field to being an incumbent with a patent minefield, stopping others from moving the field forward.

mike_hearn 1y ago
IP law and the need for extremely smart people with a rare set of narrow skills. It's not like codec development magically happens for free if you ignore patents. The point is, if there had been no incentives to develop codecs, there would have been no MPEG. Other people would have stepped into the void and sometimes did, e.g. RealVideo, but without legal IP protection the codecs would just have been entirely undocumented and heavily obfuscated, relying on tamper-proofed ASICs much faster.
- badsectoracula 1y ago
  That sounds like the 90s argument against FLOSS: without the incentive for people to sell software, nobody would write it.
  - strogonoff 1y ago
    Without IP protections that allow copyleft to exist arguably there would be no FOSS. When anything you publish can be leveraged and expropriated by Microsoft et al. without them being obligated to contribute back or even credit you, you are just an unpaid ghost engineer for big tech.
    - immibis 1y ago
      I thought your argument was that Microsoft wouldn't be able to exist in that world. Which is it?

Taek 1y ago

I avoided a career in codecs after spending about a year in college learning about them. The patent minefield meant I couldn't meaningfully build incremental improvements on what existed, and the idea of dilligently dancing around existing patents and then releasing something which intentionally lacked state-of-the-art ideas wasn't compelling. Codec development is slow and expensive becuase you can't just release a new codec, you have to dance around patents.

mike_hearn 1y ago
Well, a career in codec development means you'd have done it as a job, and so you'd have been angling for a job at the kind of places that enter into the patent pools and contribute to the standards.
- voakbasda 1y ago
  I don’t know about you, but I became a software engineer to write code for myself and my own interests, not to get a job where all of my labor will be vacuumed up and exploited to maximize anonymous shareholder value.
  - scottLobster 1y ago
    That's all great and noble, but at the end of the day it's about who has the resources. If you can get the necessary resources yourself and have complete control over their allocation, congratulations you won the jackpot of life. Plenty of people, some of whom are smarter and better than you, tried to do the same and failed due to reasons beyond their control. Try to remain a good person and not waste the opportunity if you ever get to that stage. For the remaining 99.99% of us, we have to negotiate for resources as best we can. That typically means maximizing shareholder value in exchange for a cut of the profits. Not all your labor needs to be vacuumed up, I make enough to support my family, live a relatively safe and comfortable life with some minor luxuries and likely a secure retirement. Better deal than most people get today.
    - 1y ago

deadbabe 1y ago

Why not just use AI?

account42 1y ago
Why not ask about blockchains?

ghm2199 1y ago

For the uninitiated, could you describe why codec development is slow and expensive?

thinkingQueen 1y ago
It’s a bit like developing an F1 car. Or a cutting edge airplane. Lots of small optimizations that have to work together. Sometimes big new ideas emerge but those are rare. Until the new codec comes to together all those small optimizations aren’t really worth much, so it’s a long term research project with potentially zero return on investement. And yes, most of the small optimizations are patented, something that I’ve come to understand isnt’t viewed very favorably by most.
- phkahler 1y ago
  >> And yes, most of the small optimizations are patented, something that I’ve come to understand isn’t viewed very favorably by most. Codecs are like infrastructure not products. From cameras to servers to iPhones, they all have to use the same codecs to interoperate. If someone comes along with a small optimization it's hard enough to deploy that across the industry. If it's patented you've got another obstacle: nobody wants to pay the incremental cost for a small improvement (it's not even incremental cost once you've got free codecs, it's a complete hassle).
mike_hearn 1y ago
They're hardware accelerated so it's not worth making a new codec until you have a big improvement over the prior baseline, because it takes a long time to manufacture and roll out devices that are better. Verifying an optimization is worth it requires testing against a big library of videos using standardized perception metrics, it requires ensuring there's an efficient way to decode it in both hardware and software, including efficient encoding. It's easy to improve one kind of input but regress another. Most of the low hanging fruit is taken already. Just the usual stuff that makes advancing the frontier hard.

bsindicatr3 1y ago

> Free codecs only came along … and it's hardly a robust strategy Maybe you don’t remember the way that the gif format (there was no jpeg, png, or webp initially) had problems with licensing, and then years later having scares about it potentially becoming illegal to use gifs. Here’s a mention of some of the problems with Unisys, though I didn’t find info about these scares on Wikipedia’s GIF or Compuserve pages: https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-in-1994-the-company-who-had-a-patent-on-GIFs-tried-to-charge-a-fee-for-using-GIFs-The-PNG-was-invented-as-an-alternative-and-the-company-backed-down https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-in-1994-the-company-wh... Similarly, the awful history of digital content restriction technology in-general (DRM, etc.). I’m not against companies trying to protect assets, but data assets historically over all time are inherently prone to “use”, whether that use is intentional or unintentional by the one that provided the data. The problem has always been about the means of dissemination, not that the data itself needed to be encoded with a lock that anyone with the key or means to get/make one could unlock nor that it should need to call home, basically preventing the user from actually legitimately being able to use the data.

adzm 1y ago
> I didn’t find info about these scares on Wikipedia’s GIF or Compuserve pages The GIF page on wikipedia has an entire section for the patent troubles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Unisys_and_LZW_patent_enforcement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Unisys_and_LZW_patent_enfo...
mike_hearn 1y ago
The "non robust strategy" refers to relying on goodnatured monopolies to fund free technologies, not a format being free. When it works its nice, but I am indeed old enough to remember the GIF patent wars, which means I'm also old enough to remember when the big rich monopoly in town was Microsoft (and before them, IBM). Neither Microsoft nor Apple were like Google and the tech they produced was much more closed than MPEG. The idea that MPEG took away some Stallmanist idyll is just ahistorical.

tomrod 1y ago

Free codecs have been available a long time, surely, as we could install them in Linux distributions in 2005 or earlier? (I know nothing about the legal side of all this, just remembering the time period of Ubuntu circa 2005-2008).

zappb 1y ago
Free codecs without patent issues were limited to things like Vorbis which never got wide support. There were FOSS codecs for patented algorithms, but those had legal issues in places that enforce software patents.
- breve 1y ago
  AV1, VP9, and Opus are used on YouTube and Netflix right now. It's hard to get more mainstream than YouTube and Netflix.
  - account42 1y ago
    Now, not in 2005.
- notpushkin 1y ago
  > which never got wide support Source? I’ve seen Vorbis used in a whole bunch of places. Notably, Spotify only used Vorbis for a while (still does, but also includes AAC now, for Apple platforms I think).
  - scott_w 1y ago
    Pre-Spotify, MP3 players would usually only ship with MP3 support (thus the name), so people would only rip to MP3. Ask any millennial and most of them will never have heard of Ogg.
    - notpushkin 1y ago
      Of course, but this is not what I’d call “never got wide support”.

lightedman 1y ago

"Free codecs only came along at all because Google decided to subsidize development" No, just no. We've had free community codec packs for years before Google even existed. Anyone remember CCCP?

notpushkin 1y ago
Yes. Those won’t help you if you use them for commercial use and patent holders find out about it.
leguminous 1y ago
CCCP was just a collection of existing codecs, they didn't develop their own. Most of the codecs in CCCP were patented. Using it without licenses was technically patent infringement in most places. It's just that nobody ever cared to enforce it on individual end users.
tristor 1y ago
As one of the people that helped start CCCP and was involved extensively through almost its entire lifespan, I think you misunderstand what it means to be "free" in this case. CCCP was "free as in beer" but not "free as in speech", /many/ of the codecs in CCCP were patent encumbered, but were included because there were open-source implementations of them by authors that didn't care about those patents, and many of the licensing arrangements didn't effectively apply to end-users (either due to language or care to prosecute). CCCP also almost exclusively included /decoders/, but /encoders/ are much more likely to be targeted by licensing authorities. We started CCCP because at the time, anime fansubs were predominantly traded on P2P filesharing services like Kazaa, Gnutella, eDonkey, Direct Connect, and later Bittorrent. The most popular codec pack at the time was K-Lite / Kazaa Codec Pack which was a complete and utter mess, and specifically for fansubbing, it was hard to get subtitles to work properly unless they were hard embedded. Soft-subbing allowed for improvements, and there were a lot of improvements to subtitling in the fansubbing community over the years, one of the biggest came when the Matroska (MKV) container format came about, that allowed arbitrarily different formats/encodings to share a single media container, and the community shifted almost entirely to ASS formatted subtitles, but because an MKV could contain many different encodings, any given MKV file may play correctly or not on any given system. CCCP was intended to provide an authoritative, canonical, single-source way to play fansubbed anime correctly on Windows, and we achieved that objective. But let's be clear, nobody involved was under any illusions that the MPEG-LA or any other license holders of for instance h264 were fans of our community or what we're doing. Anime fansubbing at all came out of piracy of foreign-language media into the English market via the Internet and P2P filesharing. None of us gave a shit, and the use of Soviet imagery in the CCCP was exactly a nod to the somewhat communist ideal that knowledge and access to media should be free, and that patent encumbering codecs and patenting software isn't just stupid, it's morally wrong. I still strongly feel software patents are evil. Nonetheless, at no point was CCCP through it's life fully legal/licenses appropriately for usage, and effectively nobody cared, not even the licensing authorities, because the existence of these things made their licenses for encoders more valuable for companies producing media, as it was easier for actual people to consume.

cxr 1y ago

> Free codecs only came along at all because Google decided to subsidize development but that became possible only 15 years or so after MPEG was born The release of VP3 as open source predates Google's later acquisition of On2 (2010) by nearly a decade.

mike_hearn 1y ago
In practice nobody outside a handful of developers and executives at rich tech firms seems to care about video codec licensing - open codecs were barely used anywhere until they matched the quality of the MPEG standards. They still aren't that widely used. H.264 is supposedly 90%+ of all digital video even now (well, as of a few years ago at least according to Google).
- cxr 1y ago
  <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts>

zoeysmithe 1y ago

This is impossible to know. Not that long ago something like Linux would have sounded like a madman's dream to someone with your perspective. It turns out great innovations happen outside the capitalist for-profit context and denying that is very questionable. If anything, those kinds of setups often hinder innovation. How much better would linux be if it was mired in endless licensing agreements, per monthly rates, had a board full of fortune 500 types, and billed each user a patent fee? Or any form of profit incentive 'business logic'? If that stuff worked better, linux would have failed entirely, instead near everyone interfaces with a linux machine probably hundreds if not thousands of times a day in some form. Maybe millions if we consider how complex just accessing internet services is and the many servers, routers, mirrors, proxies, etc one encounters in just a trivial app refresh. If not linux, then the open mach/bsd derivatives ios uses. Then looking even previous to the ascent of linux, we had all manner of free/open stuff informally in the 70s and 80s. Shareware, open culture, etc that led to today where this entire medium only exists because of open standards and open source and volunteering. Software patents are net loss for society. For profit systems are less efficient than open non-profit systems. No 'middle-man' system is better than a system that goes out of its way to eliminate the middle-man rent-seeker.

derf_ 1y ago

> ...it's hardly a robust strategy. I disagree. Video is such a large percentage of internet traffic and licensing fees are so high that it becomes possible for any number of companies to subsidize the development cost of a new codec on their own and still net a profit. Google certainly spends the most money, but they were hardly the only ones involved in AV1. At Mozilla we developed Daala from scratch and had reached performance competitive with H.265 when we stopped to contribute the technology to the AV1 process, and our team's entire budget was a fraction of what the annual licensing fees for H.264 would have been. Cisco developed Thor on their own with just a handful of people and contributed that, as well. Many other companies contributed technology on a royalty-free basis. Outside of AV1, you regularly see things like Samsung's EVC (or LC-EVC, or APV, or...), or the AVS series from the Chinese.... If the patent situation were more tenable, you would see a lot more of these. The cost of developing the technology is not the limitation. I would argue the cost to get all parties to agree on a common standard and the cost to deploy it widely enough for people to rely on it is much higher, but people manage that on a royalty-free basis for many other standards.

mike_hearn 1y ago
Mozilla is just Google from a financial perspective, it's not an independent org, so the financing point stands. H.264 was something like >90% of all video a few years ago and wasn't it free for streaming if the end user wasn't paying? IIRC someone also paid the fees for an open source version. There were pretty good licensing terms available and all the big players have used it extensively. Anyway, my point was only that expecting Google to develop every piece of tech in the world and give it all away for free isn't a general model for tech development, whereas IP rights and patent pools are. The free ride ends the moment Google decide they need more profit, feel threatened in some way or get broken up by the government.
- ZeroGravitas 1y ago
  Part of the reason h.264 was such a big percentage of video was that they messed up the licencing of the follow up so badly which was supposed to supplant it. Not that the licencing of h.264 wasn't a mess too. You suggest it was free for web use but they originally only promised not to charge for free streaming up until 2015 and reserved the right to do so once it was embedded in the web. Pressure from Google/Xiph/etc's WebM project forced them to promise not to enforce it after that point either. https://www.wired.com/2010/08/mpeg-la-extends-web-video-licensing-moratorium-until-the-end-of-time/ https://www.wired.com/2010/08/mpeg-la-extends-web-video-lice... Cisco paid for a binary version of a decoder that could be downloaded by Firefox as a plugin. They could only do so because of a loophole around a cap in fees that they were already hitting so it wouldn't cost them more to supply to every Firefox user.

weinzierl 1y ago

"Free codecs only came along at all because Google decided to subsidize development but that became possible only 15 years or so after MPEG was born, and it's hardly a robust strategy" I don't know about video codecs but MP3 (also part of MPEG) came out of Fraunhofer and was paid by German tax money. It should not have been patented in the first place (and wasn't in Germany).