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by mschuster91 319 days ago
> Who would develop those codecs? A good video coding engineer costs about 100-300k USD a year. The really good ones even more. You need a lot of them.

How about governments? Radar, Laser, Microwaves - all offshoots of US military R&D.

There's nothing stopping either the US or European governments from stepping up and funding academic progress again.
1 comments
rs186 319 days ago
Yeah, counting on governments to develop codecs optimized for fast evolving applications for web and live streaming is a great idea.

If we did that we would probably be stuck with low-bitrate 720p videos on YouTube.

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mschuster91 319 days ago
> Yeah, counting on governments to develop codecs optimized for fast evolving applications for web and live streaming is a great idea.

Give universities the money, let them care about the details.

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rs186 319 days ago
It seems that you have a massive misunderstanding of how this works.

University research labs, usually with a team of no more than 10 people (at most 20), are good at producing early, proof-of-concept work, but not incredibly complex projects like creating an actual codec. They are not known for producing polished, mature commerical products that can be immediately used in the real world. They don't have the resources or the incentive to do so.

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mschuster91 318 days ago
> They don't have the resources or the incentive to do so.

Of course they have. Guess how MP3 was developed - an offshoot of the German Fraunhofer Institute and FAU Nürnberg-Erlangen, amongst others.

The fact that no one seems to even be able to imagine how funding anything from the government could even work (despite that era being just a few decades ago) is shocking.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3

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