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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. JVET has a

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. JVET has an attendance of about 350 such engineers each meeting (four times a year). Not to mention the computer clusters to run all the coding sims, thousands and thousands of CPUs are needed per research team. People who are outside the video coding industry do not understand that it is an industry. It’s run by big companies with large R&D budgets. It’s like saying ”where would we be with AI if Google, OpenAI and Nvidia didn’t have an iron grip”. MPEG and especially JVET are doing just fine. The same companies and engineers who worked on AVC, HEVC and VVC are still there with many new ones especially from Asia. MPEG was reorganized because this Leonardo guy became an obstacle, and he’s been angry about ever since. Other than that I’d say business as usual in the video coding realm.

roenxi 1y ago
> It’s like saying ”where would we be with AI if Google, OpenAI and Nvidia didn’t have an iron grip”. We'd be where we are. All the codec-equivalent aspects of their work are unencumbered by patents and there are very high quality free models available in the market that are just given away. If the multimedia world had followed the Google example it'd be quite hard to complain about the codecs.
- thinkingQueen 1y ago
  That’s hardly true. Nvidia’s tech is covered by patents and licenses. Why else would it be worth 4.5 trillion dollars? The top AI companies use very restrictive licenses. I think it’s actually the other way around and AI industry will actually end up following the video coding industry when it comes to patents, royalties, licenses etc.
  - roenxi 1y ago
    Because they make and sell a lot of hardware. I'm sure they do have a lot of patents and licences, but if all that disappeared today it'd be years to decades before anyone could compete with them. Even just getting a foot in the door in TSMC's queue of customers would be hard. Their valuation can likely be justified based on their manufacturing position alone. There is literally no-one else who can do what they do, law or otherwise. If it is a matter of laws, China would just declare the law doesn't count to dodge around the US chip sanctions. Which, admittedly, might happen - but I don't see how that could result in much more freedom than we already have now. Having more Chinese people involved is generally good for prices, but that doesn't have much to do with market structure as much as they work hard and do things at scale. > The top AI companies use very restrictive licenses. These models are supported by the Apache 2.0 license ~ https://openai.com/open-models/ https://openai.com/open-models/ Are they lying to me? It is hard to get much more permissive than Apache 2.
    - mike_hearn 1y ago
      The top AI companies don't release their best models under any license. They're not even distributed at all. If you did steal the weights out from underneath Anthropic they would take you to court and probably win. Putting software you develop exclusively behind a network interface is a form of ultra-restrictive DRM. Yes, some places are currently trying to buy mindshare by releasing free models and that's fantastic, thank you, but they can only do that because investors believe the ROI from proprietary firewalled models will more than fund it. NVIDIA's advantage over AMD is largely in the drivers and CUDA i.e. their software. If it weren't for IP law or if NVIDIA had foolishly made their software fully open source, AMD could have just forked their PTX compiler and NVIDIAs advantage would never have been established. In turn that'd have meant they wouldn't have any special privileges at TSMC.
  - oblio 1y ago
    I imagine a chunk of it is also covered by trade secrets and NDAs.
rwmj 1y ago
Who would write a web server? Who would write Curl? Who would write a whole operating system to compete with Microsoft when that would take thousands of engineers being paid $100,000s per year? People don't understand that these companies have huge R&D budgets! (The answer is that most of the work would be done by companies who have an interest in video distribution - eg. Google - but don't profit directly by selling codecs. And universities for the more research side of things. Plus volunteers gluing it all together into the final system.)
- thinkingQueen 1y ago
  Are you really saying that patents are preventing people from writing the next great video codec? If it were that simple, it would’ve already happened. We’re not talking about a software project that you can just hack together, compile, and see if it works. We’re talking about rigorous performance and complexity evaluations, subjective testing, and massive coordination with hardware manufacturers—from chips to displays. People don’t develop video codecs for fun like they do with software. And the reason is that it’s almost impossible to do without support from the industry.
  - eqvinox 1y ago
    > Are you really saying that patents are preventing people from writing the next great video codec? If it were that simple, it would’ve already happened. You wouldn't know if it had already happened, since such a codec would have little chance of success, possibly not even publication. Your proposition is really unprovable in either direction due to the circular feedback on itself.
  - bayindirh 1y ago
    > People don’t develop video codecs for fun like they do with software. And the reason is that it’s almost impossible to do without support from the industry. Hmm, let me check my notes: - Quite OK Image format: https://qoiformat.org/ - Quite OK Audio format: https://qoaformat.org/ - LAME (ain't a MP3 Encoder): https://lame.sourceforge.io/ - Xiph family of codecs: https://xiph.org/ Some of these guys have standards bodies as supporters, but in all cases, bigger groups formed behind them, after they made considerable effort. QOI and QOA is written by a single guy just because he's bored. For example, FLAC is a worst of all worlds codec for industry to back. A streamable, seekable, hardware-implementable, error-resistant, lossless codec with 8 channels, 32 bit samples, and up to 640KHz sample rate, with no DRM support. Yet we have it, and it rules consumer lossless audio while giggling and waving at everyone. On the other hand, we have LAME. An encoder which also uses psycho-acoustic techniques to improve the resulting sound quality and almost everyone is using it, because the closed source encoders generally sound lamer than LAME in the same bit-rates. Remember, MP3 format doesn't have an reference encoder. If the decoder can read the file and it sounds the way you expect, then you have a valid encoder. There's no spec for that. > Are you really saying that patents are preventing people from writing the next great video codec? Yes, yes, and, yes. MPEG and similar groups openly threatened free and open codecs by opening "patent portfolio forming calls" to create portfolios to fight with these codecs, because they are terrified of being deprived of their monies. If patents and license fees are not a problem for these guys, can you tell me why all professional camera gear which can take videos only come with "personal, non-profit and non-professional" licenses on board, and you have pay blanket extort ^H^H^H^H^H licensing fees to these bodies to take a video you can monetize? For the license disclaimers in camera manuals, see [0]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42736254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42736254
mschuster91 1y 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.
- rs186 1y 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.
  - mschuster91 1y 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.
    - rs186 1y 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.
      - mschuster91 1y 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 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3
somethingsome 1y ago
Hey, I attend MPEG regularly (mostly lvc lately), there's a chance we’ve crossed paths!
wmf 1y ago
I'm not opposed to codecs having patents but Chiariglione set up a system where each codec has as many patent holders as possible and any one of those patent holders could hold the entire world hostage. They should have set up the patent pool and pricing before developing each codec and not allowed any techniques in the standard that aren't part of the pool.

roenxi 1y ago

> It’s like saying ”where would we be with AI if Google, OpenAI and Nvidia didn’t have an iron grip”. We'd be where we are. All the codec-equivalent aspects of their work are unencumbered by patents and there are very high quality free models available in the market that are just given away. If the multimedia world had followed the Google example it'd be quite hard to complain about the codecs.

thinkingQueen 1y ago
That’s hardly true. Nvidia’s tech is covered by patents and licenses. Why else would it be worth 4.5 trillion dollars? The top AI companies use very restrictive licenses. I think it’s actually the other way around and AI industry will actually end up following the video coding industry when it comes to patents, royalties, licenses etc.
- roenxi 1y ago
  Because they make and sell a lot of hardware. I'm sure they do have a lot of patents and licences, but if all that disappeared today it'd be years to decades before anyone could compete with them. Even just getting a foot in the door in TSMC's queue of customers would be hard. Their valuation can likely be justified based on their manufacturing position alone. There is literally no-one else who can do what they do, law or otherwise. If it is a matter of laws, China would just declare the law doesn't count to dodge around the US chip sanctions. Which, admittedly, might happen - but I don't see how that could result in much more freedom than we already have now. Having more Chinese people involved is generally good for prices, but that doesn't have much to do with market structure as much as they work hard and do things at scale. > The top AI companies use very restrictive licenses. These models are supported by the Apache 2.0 license ~ https://openai.com/open-models/ https://openai.com/open-models/ Are they lying to me? It is hard to get much more permissive than Apache 2.
  - mike_hearn 1y ago
    The top AI companies don't release their best models under any license. They're not even distributed at all. If you did steal the weights out from underneath Anthropic they would take you to court and probably win. Putting software you develop exclusively behind a network interface is a form of ultra-restrictive DRM. Yes, some places are currently trying to buy mindshare by releasing free models and that's fantastic, thank you, but they can only do that because investors believe the ROI from proprietary firewalled models will more than fund it. NVIDIA's advantage over AMD is largely in the drivers and CUDA i.e. their software. If it weren't for IP law or if NVIDIA had foolishly made their software fully open source, AMD could have just forked their PTX compiler and NVIDIAs advantage would never have been established. In turn that'd have meant they wouldn't have any special privileges at TSMC.
- oblio 1y ago
  I imagine a chunk of it is also covered by trade secrets and NDAs.

rwmj 1y ago

Who would write a web server? Who would write Curl? Who would write a whole operating system to compete with Microsoft when that would take thousands of engineers being paid $100,000s per year? People don't understand that these companies have huge R&D budgets! (The answer is that most of the work would be done by companies who have an interest in video distribution - eg. Google - but don't profit directly by selling codecs. And universities for the more research side of things. Plus volunteers gluing it all together into the final system.)

thinkingQueen 1y ago
Are you really saying that patents are preventing people from writing the next great video codec? If it were that simple, it would’ve already happened. We’re not talking about a software project that you can just hack together, compile, and see if it works. We’re talking about rigorous performance and complexity evaluations, subjective testing, and massive coordination with hardware manufacturers—from chips to displays. People don’t develop video codecs for fun like they do with software. And the reason is that it’s almost impossible to do without support from the industry.
- eqvinox 1y ago
  > Are you really saying that patents are preventing people from writing the next great video codec? If it were that simple, it would’ve already happened. You wouldn't know if it had already happened, since such a codec would have little chance of success, possibly not even publication. Your proposition is really unprovable in either direction due to the circular feedback on itself.
- bayindirh 1y ago
  > People don’t develop video codecs for fun like they do with software. And the reason is that it’s almost impossible to do without support from the industry. Hmm, let me check my notes: - Quite OK Image format: https://qoiformat.org/ - Quite OK Audio format: https://qoaformat.org/ - LAME (ain't a MP3 Encoder): https://lame.sourceforge.io/ - Xiph family of codecs: https://xiph.org/ Some of these guys have standards bodies as supporters, but in all cases, bigger groups formed behind them, after they made considerable effort. QOI and QOA is written by a single guy just because he's bored. For example, FLAC is a worst of all worlds codec for industry to back. A streamable, seekable, hardware-implementable, error-resistant, lossless codec with 8 channels, 32 bit samples, and up to 640KHz sample rate, with no DRM support. Yet we have it, and it rules consumer lossless audio while giggling and waving at everyone. On the other hand, we have LAME. An encoder which also uses psycho-acoustic techniques to improve the resulting sound quality and almost everyone is using it, because the closed source encoders generally sound lamer than LAME in the same bit-rates. Remember, MP3 format doesn't have an reference encoder. If the decoder can read the file and it sounds the way you expect, then you have a valid encoder. There's no spec for that. > Are you really saying that patents are preventing people from writing the next great video codec? Yes, yes, and, yes. MPEG and similar groups openly threatened free and open codecs by opening "patent portfolio forming calls" to create portfolios to fight with these codecs, because they are terrified of being deprived of their monies. If patents and license fees are not a problem for these guys, can you tell me why all professional camera gear which can take videos only come with "personal, non-profit and non-professional" licenses on board, and you have pay blanket extort ^H^H^H^H^H licensing fees to these bodies to take a video you can monetize? For the license disclaimers in camera manuals, see [0]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42736254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42736254

mschuster91 1y 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.

rs186 1y 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.
- mschuster91 1y 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.
  - rs186 1y 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.
    - mschuster91 1y 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 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3

somethingsome 1y ago

Hey, I attend MPEG regularly (mostly lvc lately), there's a chance we’ve crossed paths!

wmf 1y ago

I'm not opposed to codecs having patents but Chiariglione set up a system where each codec has as many patent holders as possible and any one of those patent holders could hold the entire world hostage. They should have set up the patent pool and pricing before developing each codec and not allowed any techniques in the standard that aren't part of the pool.