[ZeroGravitas]

There's nothing obscure about them.

His comment immediately after describes exactly what happened:

> Even before it has ceased to exists, the MPEG engine had run out of steam – technology- and business wise. The same obscure forces that have hijacked MPEG had kept it hostage to their interests impeding its technical development and keeping it locked to outmoded Intellectual Property licensing models delaying market adoption of MPEG standards. Industry has been strangled and consumers have been deprived of the benefits of new technologies. From facilitators of new opportunities and experiences, MPEG standards have morphed from into roadblocks.

Big companies abused the setup that he was responsible for. Gentlemen's agreements to work together for the benefit of all got gamed into patent landmines and it happened under his watch.

Even many of the big corps involved called out the bullshit, notably Steve Jobs refusing to release a new Quicktime till they fixed some of the most egregious parts of AAC licencing way back in 2002.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-shuns-mpeg-4-licensing-t...

[sanjit]

From ZiffDavis article: > QuickTime 6 media player and QuickTime Broadcaster, a free application that aims to simplify using MPEG-4 in live video feeds over the Net.

It was sweet to see “over the Net”…

[burnte]

I think video over Internet could be a huge business.

[maxst]

In 1998, the idea seemed so ridiculous, TheOnion mocked it:

https://theonion.com/new-5-000-multimedia-computer-system-do...

[dan353hehe]

At the time, the mocking was well deserved. I remember downloading trailers for moves over my dial-up connection. Took the entire night for 3 minutes of video. Can’t imagine paying $5k for that privilege.

Today though, the mocking doesn’t make sense and is confusing. I haven’t ever owned a TV.

[BuildTheRobots]

By 99 it wasn't that bad. I remember screaming along with V.92 56k modems. Futurama episodes were about 50mb encoded as RealVideo and took a mere two and a half hours to download o.0

(and it really was v.92; I still have the double-bong towards the end of the handshake emblazoned in my memory)

[amy_petrik]

Realmovies were the new hotness, evolution of video piracy was >vivoactive is the OG (stream only format, like 50x50 pixels, NO KEYFRAMES - no fast forward, rewind, or seeking), talking about 1995 here >realmovies - higher quality, seeking, around 1998 >DIVX (format, not the discs also at the same time) - mindblowing quality update, around 2000 >VCDs - concurrent with DIVX around 2000 >XVID - (DIVX backwards) arose as DIVX failed, 2001 >then wherever we are now, 9999 formats and VLC supports them all

[UltraSane]

I downloaded episodes of South Park using eMule over dial-up. It took days.

[jasonfarnon]

Well back then there was a huge difference in the Internet experience between people at universities and other places with T1s and other fast connections, and everyone else on dial-up. There was a lot of full-length video downloading at universities by 2000. But even on dial-up I seem to remember realplayer and other UDP dumps being pretty popular around this time.

[dspillett]

Picking 300MB as a ridiculous amount of data to download dates that nicely without needing to look at the article header.

Though using the codecs and hardware of that time I doubt the quality at even that size would be great. Compare an old 349MB (sized to fit two on a CD-R/-RW, likely 480p though smaller wasn't uncommon) cap of a Stargate episode picked up in the early/mid 20XXs to a similarly sized file compressed using h265 or even h264 on modern hardware.

[quickthrowman]

I recall Xvid rips of SD television content being just fine quality wise, even at the 350MB per episode that ‘the scene’ used. A modern encoding at 480P might have slightly better compression in dark areas, but SD television is kinda janky compared to HD.

H.265 or H.264 would absolutely crush Xvid for compressing HD content, both in size and quality.

[xp84]

I appreciate the usage of SG-1 as an example, as I definitely still have several seasons of SG-1 episodes of that size floating around old hard drives somewhere. XVID, of course.

[BizarroLand]

I wonder if the 6000 series from nvidia will finally be able to deliver on the prognostication of being able to make toast with a PC?

[Henchman21]

You can make a flambé with Nvidia’s new 12VHPWR connectors

[hnlmorg]

Haha that article is wild. Thanks for sharing

[m463]

Demonstrating the technology, Welborne stood proudly beside a prototype of the Presario 6000 as it displayed an eight-minute segment from a recent 3rd Rock From The Sun episode, downloaded from an NBC server in under 75 minutes.

lol

If you went to blockbuster, you could move 4.7 gb to your home in half the time (unless your family was involved in choosing the movie which would slow you down)

[jandrese]

I remember when YouTube first appeared and my thought was "This is a really nice service. It's going to be a shame in a couple of years when it runs out of VC money and shuts down."

I also remember when they went through and re-encoded all of the videos so they could play on the original model iPhone.

[lenerdenator]

It's a fad. I'm going long on Blockbuster.

[kmeisthax]

> and it happened under his watch.

More context for this: Chiariglione has been extremely vocal that FRAND patent royalties are entirely necessary for the development of video compression tools, and believes royalty-free standards outpacing the ones that cost money represents the end of innovation in video codecs.

To be clear, Chiariglione isn't opposed to royalty-free standards at all, he just wants them to be deliberately worse so that people who need better compression will pay independent researchers for it. His MPEG actually wound up trying to make such a standard: IVC. You've never heard of MPEG IVC because Samsung immediately claimed ownership over it and ISO patent policy does not allow MPEG to require notice of what specific patents to remove so long as the owner agrees to negotiate a license with a patent pool.

You might think at this point that Chiariglione is on the side of the patent owners, but he's actually not. In fact, it's specifically those patent owners that pushed him out of MPEG.

In the 90s, patent owners were making bank off MPEG-2 royalties, but having trouble monetizing anything newer. A patent pool never actually formed for H.263, and the one for MPEG-4 couldn't agree on a royalty free rate for Internet streaming[0]. H.264 practically is royalty free for online video, but that only happened because Google bought On2[1] and threatened to make YouTube exclusively serve VP8. The patent owners very much resent this state of affairs and successfully sabotaged efforts at MPEG to make dedicated royalty-free codecs.

The second and more pressing issue (to industry, not to us) is the fact that H.265 failed to form a single patent pool. There's actually three of them, thanks to skulduggery by Access Advance to force people to pay for the same patent license twice by promising a sweetheart licensing deal[2] to Samsung. I'm told H.266 is even more insane, mostly because Access Advance is forcing people to buy licenses in a package deal to cover up the fact that they own very little of H.266.

Chiariglione is only pro-patent-owner in the narrow sense that he believes research needs to be 'paid for'. His attempt to keep patent owners honest got him sidelined and marginalized in ISO, which is why he left. He's actually made his own standards organization, with blackjack and hookers^Wartificial intelligence. MPAI's patent policy actually requires companies agree to 'framework licenses' - i.e. promise to actually negotiate with MPAI's own patent pool specifically. No clue if they've actually shipped anything useful.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Internet video industry coalesced around Google and Xiph's AV1 proposal. They somehow manage to do without direct royalty payments for AV1, which to me indicates that this research didn't need to be 'paid for' after all. Though, the way Chiariglione talks about AV1, you'd think it's some kind of existential threat to video encoding...

[0] Practically speaking, this meant MPEG-4 ASP was predominantly used by pirates, as legit online video sites that worked in browsers were using Flash based players, and Flash only supported H.263 and VP6.

[1] The company that made VP3 (Theora) and VP6

[2] The idea is that Samsung and other firms are "net implementer" companies. They own some of H.265, but they need to license the rest of it from MPEG-LA. So Access Advance promised those companies a super-low rate on the patents they need if they all pulled out of MPEG-LA, and they make it up by overcharging everyone else, including making them pay extra if they'd already gotten licenses from MPEG-LA before the Access companies pulled out of it.