[mike_hearn]

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.

[Taek]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[DiggyJohnson]

Why are you arguing so hard against someone that simply stated “I was interested in pursuing this topic as a career when I was in college but then I learned more about the field and decided to pursue something else”?

[scottLobster]

Different posters, Taek made the post you're referring to, I'm responding to voakbasda.

Regardless, why are you white-knighting for him? He made a moral argument about career choice, and I responded to said argument as someone who took the other side. This is a discussion board, we discuss things.

[nullc]

More codec development work is done outside of patent-centric organizations by a significant margin. Just like any other domain technological/communication standard the most significant impetuous comes from the drive to make superior products.

Work inside patent driven development groups also suffers substantial complexity bloat because there is a huge incentive for each participant to get a patentable component into the standard in order to benefit from cross-licensing. Often these 'improvements' are insignificant or even a net loss (the cost of the bitstream to signal them on is greater than their improvement over any credible collection of material).

[astrange]

Software patents aren't an issue in much of the world; the reason I thought there wasn't much of a career in codec development was that it was obvious that it needed to move down into custom ASICs to be power-efficient, at which point you can no longer develop new ones until people replace all their hardware.

[rowanG077]

Software patents aren't an issue in most of the world. Codecs however are used all over the world. No one is going to use a codec that is illegal to use in the US and EU.

[astrange]

EU would be one of the places that doesn't have software patents, which is why VLC is based there.

[rowanG077]

It's not that simple. Software patents exists in the EU, the requirements are much more strict though. For example Netflix was ordered to cease their use of H265 in germany: https://www.nexttv.com/news/achtung-baby-netflix-loses-paten...

[dylan604]

By the time software is robust enough to make it worth while to be placed into hardware, it's pretty damn efficient. For something like ASICs, you could at least upgrade the firmware with new code, but what about Apple's chips that do the decoding? Can they be upgraded, or does that mean needing to wait for the M++ chip?

[TheTon]

Typically you wait for the new chip.

Sometimes there are hybrid coders that can use some of the resources on the chip and some shader code to handle new codecs or codec features after the fact, but you pay a power and performance penalty to use these.

[astrange]

The encoder side can be upgraded, but typically decoding isn't flexible enough to add an entirely new codec to it.

Of course, you can design it to be as flexible as you want; but at one end of that you just have a regular CPU again.

[pornel]

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.

[cornholio]

That's unnecessarily harsh. Patent pools exist to promote collaboration in a world with aggressive IP legislation, they are an answer to a specific environment and they incentivize participants to share their IP at a reasonable price to third parties. The incentive being that you will be left out of the pool, the other members will work around your patents while not licensing their own patents to you, so your own IP is now worthless since you can't work around theirs.

As long as IP law continues in the same form, the alternative to that is completely closed agreements among major companies that will push their own proprietary formats and aggressively enforce their patents.

The fair world where everyone is free to create a new thing, improve upon the frontier codecs, and get a fair reward for their efforts, is simply a fantasy without patent law reform. In the current geopolitical climate, it's very very unlikely for nations where these developments traditionally happened, such as US and western Europe, to weaken their IP laws.

[phkahler]

>> That's unnecessarily harsh. Patent pools exist to promote collaboration in a world with aggressive IP legislation, they are an answer to a specific environment and they incentivize participants to share their IP at a reasonable price to third parties.

You can say that, but this discussion is in response to the guy who started MPEG and later shut it down. I don't think he'd say its harsh.

[scotty79]

Patent pools exist to make infeasible system look not so infeasible so people won't recoginize how it's stifling innovation and abolish it.

[ZeroGravitas]

They actually messed up the basic concept of a patent pool, and that is the key to their failure.

They didn't get people to agree on terms up front, they made the final codec with interlocking patents embedded from hundreds of parties and made no attempt to avoid random outsider's patents and then once it was done tried to come to a licence agreement when every minor patent holder had an effective veto on the resulting pool. That's how you end up with multiple pools plus people who own patents and aren't members of any of the pools. It's ridiculous.

My minor conspiracy theory is that if you did it right, then you'd basically end up with something close to open source codecs as that's the best overall outcome.

Everyone benefits from only putting in freely available ideas. So if you want to gouge people with your patents you need to mess this up and "accidentally" create a patent mess.

[mike_hearn]

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.

[sitkack]

You continue to make the same unsubstantiated claims about codecs being hard and expensive. These same tropes were said about every other field, and even if true, we have tens of thousands of folks that would like to participate, but are locked out due to broken IP law.

The firewall of patents exist precisely because digital video is a way to shakedown the route media would have to travel to get to the end user.

Codecs are not, "harder than" compilers, yet the field of compilers was blown completely open by GCC. Capital didn't see the market opportunity because there wasn't the same possibility of being a gatekeeper for so much attention and money.

The patents aren't because it is difficult, the patents are there because they can extract money from the revenue streams.

[mike_hearn]

Codecs not harder than compilers? Sounds like an unsubstantiated claim!

Modern video codecs are harder than compilers. You have to have good ASIC development expertise to do them right, for example, which you don't need for compilers. It's totally feasible for a single company to develop a leading edge compiler whereas you don't see that in video codecs, historically they've been collaborations.

[pornel]

(I've worked on both codecs and compilers. You may be underestimating the difficulty of implementing sound optimizers).

Hardware vendors don't benefit from the patent pools. They usually get nothing from them, and are burdened by having to pass per-unit licensing costs on to their customers.

It's true that designing an ASIC-friendly codec needs special considerations, and benefits from close collaboration with hardware vendors, but it's not magic. The general constraints are well-known to codec designers (in open-source too). The commercial incentives for collaboration are already there — HW vendors will profit from selling the chipsets or licensing the HW design.

The patent situation is completely broken. The commercial codecs "invent" coding features of dubious utility, mostly unnecessary tweaks on old stuff, because everyone wants to have their patent in the pool. It ends up being a political game, because the engineering goal is to make the simplest most effective codec, but the financial incentive is to approve everyone's patented add-ons regardless of whether they're worth the complexity or not.

Meanwhile everything that isn't explicitly covered by a patent needs to be proven to be 20 years old, and this limits MPEG too. Otherwise nobody can prove that there won't be any submarine patent that could be used to set up a competing patent pool and extort MPEG's customers.

So our latest-and-greatest codecs are built on 20-year-old ideas, with or without some bells and whistles added. The ASICs often don't use the bells and whistles anyway, because the extra coding features may not even be suitable for ASICs, and usually have diminishing returns (like 3x slower encode for 1% better quality/filesize ratio).

[mafuy]

With all due respect, to say that codecs are more difficult to get right than optimizing compilers is absurd.

The only reason I can think of why you would say this is that nowadays we have good compiler infrastructure that works with many hardware architectures and it has become easy to create or modify compilers. But that's only due to the fact that it was so insanely complicated that it had to be redone from scratch to become generalizible, which led to LLVM and the subsequent direct and indirect benefits everywhere. That's the work of thousands of the smartest people over 30 years.

There is no way that a single company could develop a state of the art compiler without using an existing one. Intel had a good independent compiler and gave up because open source had become superior.

For what it's worth, look at the state of FPGA compilers. They are so difficult that every single one of them that exists is utter shit. I wish it were different.

[mike_hearn]

> There is no way that a single company could develop a state of the art compiler without using an existing one. Intel had a good independent compiler and gave up because open source had become superior.

Not only can they do it but some companies have done it several times. Look at Oracle: there's HotSpot's C2 compiler, and the Graal compiler. Both state of the art, both developed by one company.

Not unique. Microsoft and Apple have built many compilers alone over their lifespan.

This whole thing is insanely subjective, but that's why I'm making fun of the "unsubstantiated claim" bit. How exactly are you meant to objectively compare this?

[badsectoracula]

That sounds like the 90s argument against FLOSS: without the incentive for people to sell software, nobody would write it.

[zozbot234]

Software wasn't always covered by copyright, and people wrote it all the same. In fact they even sold it, just built-to-order as opposed to any kind of retail mass market. (Technically, there was no mass market for computers back then so that goes without saying.)

[bigstrat2003]

That argument seems to have been proven basically correct, given that a ton of open source development happens only because companies with deep pockets pay for the developers' time. Which makes perfect sense - no matter how altruistic a person is, they have to pay rent and buy food just like everyone else, and a lot of people aren't going to have time/energy to develop software for free after they get home from their 9-5.

[strogonoff]

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]

I thought your argument was that Microsoft wouldn't be able to exist in that world. Which is it?

[strogonoff]

Why would it not be able to exist?

[tsimionescu]

This is still the argument for software copyright. And I think it's still a pretty persuasive argument, despite the success of FLOSS. To this day, there is very little successful consumer software. Outside of browsers, Ubuntu, Libre Office, and GIMP are more or less it, at least outside certain niches. And even they are a pretty tiny compared to Windows/MacOS/iOS/Android, Office/Google Docs, or Photoshop.

The browsers are an interesting case. Neither Chrome nor Edge are really open source, despite Chromium being so, and they are both funded by advertising and marketing money from huge corporations. Safari is of course closed source. And Firefox is an increasingly tiny runner-up. So I don't know if I'd really count Chromium as a FLOSS success story.

Overall, I don't think FLOSS has had the kind of effect that many activists were going for. What has generally happened is that companies building software have realized that there is a lot of value to be found in treating FLOSS software as a kind of barter agreement between companies, where maybe Microsoft helps improve Linux for the benefit of all, but in turn it gets to use, say, Google's efforts on Chromium, and so on. The fact that other companies then get to mooch off of these big collaborations doesn't really matter compared to getting rid of the hassle of actually setting up explicit agreements with so many others.

[_alternator_]

The value of OSS is estimated at about $9 trillion dollars. That’s more valuable than any company on earth.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4693148

[tsimionescu]

Sure. Almost all of it supported by companies who sell software, hardware, or ads.

[sitkack]

> don't think FLOSS has had the kind of effect that many activists were going for

The entire internet, end to end, runs on FLOSS.

[tsimionescu]

That's great, but it's not what FLOSS activists hoped and fight for.

It's still almost impossible to have a digital life that doesn't involve significant use of proprietary software, and the vast majority of users do their computing almost exclusively through proprietary software. The fact that this proprietary software is a bit of glue on top of a bunch of FLOSS libraries possibly running on a FLOSS kernel that uses FLOSS libraries to talk to a FLOSS router doesn't really buy much actual freedom for the end users. They're still locked in to the proprietary software vendors just as much as they were in the 90s (perhaps paying with their private data instead of actual money).

[mike_hearn]

If you ignore the proprietary routers, the proprietary search engines, the proprietary browsers that people use out-of-the-box (Edge, Safari and even Chrome), and the fact that Linux is a clone of a proprietary OS.

[thwarted]

>> That sounds like the 90s argument against FLOSS

> This is still the argument for software copyright.

And open source licensing is based on and relies on copyright. Patents and copyright are different kinds of intellectual property protection and incentivize different things. Copyright in some sense encourages participation and collaboration because you retain ownership of your code. The way patents are used discourages participation and collaboration.

[immibis]

On my new phone I made sure to install F-Droid first thing, and it's surprising how many basic functions are covered by free software if you just bother to look.

[derf_]

> ...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.

[thinkingQueen]

You’re comparing apples to oranges.

Daala was never meant to be widely adopted in its original form — its complexity alone made that unlikely. There’s a reason why all widely deployed codecs end up using similar coding tools and partitioning schemes: they’re proven, practical, and compatible with real-world hardware.

As for H.265, it’s the result of countless engineering trade-offs. I’m sure if you cherry-picked all the most experimental ideas proposed during its development, you could create a codec that far outperforms H.265 on paper. But that kind of design would never be viable in a real-world product — it wouldn’t meet the constraints of hardware, licensing, or industry adoption.

Now the following is a more general comment, not directed at you.

There’s often a dismissive attitude toward the work done in the H.26x space. You can sometimes see this even in technical meetings when someone proposes a novel but impractical idea and gets frustrated when others don’t immediately embrace it. But there’s a good reason for the conservative approach: codecs aren’t just judged by their theoretical performance; they have to be implementable, efficient, and compatible with real-world constraints. They also have to somehow make financial sense and cannot be given a way without some form of compensation.

[mike_hearn]

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]

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-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.

[mike_hearn]

Yes, but what are we arguing about here really? I've never said monopolies are good or that MPEG having competition was bad, just that MPEG did a decent job of developing widely used standards at the time and the (still patented) web codecs came decades later, funded by monopoly profits. The alternative to MPEG's pooling and standards wasn't AV1 in 1990, it was RealVideo, Apple Video, Sorensen Spark and quite possibly single vendor lockin for all digital video, as happened with operating systems.

[bsindicatr3]

> 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-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]

> 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_enfo...

[mike_hearn]

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.

[wheybags]

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.

[weinzierl]

"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).

[cxr]

> 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]

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]

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts>

[tomrod]

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]

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]

AV1, VP9, and Opus are used on YouTube and Netflix right now.

It's hard to get more mainstream than YouTube and Netflix.

[account42]

Now, not in 2005.

[notpushkin]

> 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]

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.

[darkwater]

Pre-Spotify (and pre-iPod) there were plenty of cheap MP3 players that also supported Ogg Vorbis. I owned one, for example. Obviously MP3 was THE standard, but Vorbis reached a good adoption HW wise (basically because it was free as in beer to implement)

[scott_w]

I also owned one but I had to look for it. It certainly wasn’t “widely supported.”

[notpushkin]

Of course, but this is not what I’d call “never got wide support”.

[scott_w]

So you’d say that a format that most consumers couldn’t use (because only a few devices could play it) is “widely supported?”

[account42]

I had an MP3 player that did Vorbis.

[scott_w]

Responded here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44825777

[newsclues]

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.

[mike_hearn]

Universities love patent licensing. I don't think academia is the solution you're looking for.

[yxhuvud]

The solution to that is to remove the ability to patent codecs.

[master-lincoln]

I think we should go a step further and remove the ability to patent algorithms (software)

[immibis]

Some people even think we should remove intellectual property.

[newsclues]

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.

[oblio]

You're also describing technologies with universal use and potential for long term rent seeking.

Basically MBA drool material.

[newsclues]

Yeah, and if MBAs want to reap that reward, they need to fund the development exclusively without government funding.

[nullc]

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.

[ghm2199]

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

[thinkingQueen]

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]

>> 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]

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.

[zoeysmithe]

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.

[lightedman]

"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?

[leguminous]

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.

[notpushkin]

Yes. Those won’t help you if you use them for commercial use and patent holders find out about it.

[tristor]

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.

[thinkingQueen]

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-fre...

[chrismorgan]

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.

[bjoli]

At least two of the members of ipeurope are companies you could use as ann argument why we shouldn't have patents at all.

[cnst]

> 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?

[blendergeek]

> And regarding ”royalty-free” codecs please read this 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

[deadbabe]

Why not just use AI?

[account42]

Why not ask about blockchains?