God blinds those He wants to lose. [LWN.net]

God blinds those He wants to lose.

Posted Jan 30, 2018 17:48 UTC (Tue) by moltonel (subscriber, #45207)
Parent article: Chiariglione: A crisis, the causes and a solution

> There will simply be no incentive for companies to develop new video compression technologies, at very significant cost because of the sophistication of the field
> Companies will slash their video compression technology investments, thousands of jobs will go and millions of USD of funding to universities will be cut.

Really ? How does he think that AOM managed to develop its AV1 format, which is alledegdly better than MPEG's best ? How did this happen without an incentive ? Or is he implying that this was a once-off, and that the incentives that gave AV1 to the world will suddenly disappear ?

> A successful “access technology at no cost” model will spread to other fields.

The video compression field is actually late to the "access at no cost" game.

> So don’t expect that in the future you will see the progress in video compression technology that we have seen in the past 30 years.

This is mainly true because compression ratio can't improve forever and we'll eventually reach a plateau, but that'd apply to an MPEG-only world as well.

On the other hand, I'm looking forward to seeing quicker improvements to compression technology : thanks to lessening presure from patents, as more companies invest in compression technology because they want to use it, not because they want to license it.

to post comments

God blinds those He wants to lose.

Posted Jan 30, 2018 18:13 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> On the other hand, I'm looking forward to seeing quicker improvements to compression technology : thanks to lessening presure from patents, as more companies invest in compression technology because they want to use it, not because they want to license it.

The next time a patent like this comes up to SCOTUS (or perhaps even the Federal Court), I strongly expect it to be gutted, eviscerated, and whacked with a pick-axe in the head.

So the whole model is going to fall apart anyway, because the patents will cease to exist. Hopefully also new patents will stop being born because the US Patent Office will get its fingers rapped and told "They're maths, stupid! Not patentable!"

Cheers,
Wol

God blinds those He wants to lose.

Posted Jan 30, 2018 21:35 UTC (Tue) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

What he do not realize is that most of the 'significant costs' are due to the patent mine field.

God blinds those He wants to lose.

Posted Jan 31, 2018 0:35 UTC (Wed) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link] (1 responses)

> How does he think that AOM managed to develop its AV1 format, which is alledegdly better than MPEG's best ? How did this happen without an incentive ?

To set the record straight, pretty much the only incentive large enough to get so many companies together and form AOM was that MPEG LA was steeply increasing its HEVC licensing fees. See https://youtu.be/lzPaldsmJbk?t=17s

There were some open codecs showing promise before that, but with the fragmentation and without so many companies backing them, it's very well possible that they wouldn't have achieved significant success in the end.

God blinds those He wants to lose.

Posted Feb 3, 2018 0:26 UTC (Sat) by JanC_ (subscriber, #34940) [Link]

One of them would likely have had success eventually, but maybe not as fast or as much.

God blinds those He wants to lose.

Posted Feb 2, 2018 8:38 UTC (Fri) by ttelford (subscriber, #44176) [Link] (1 responses)

> On the other hand, I'm looking forward to seeing quicker improvements to compression technology

I’m not convinced the development pace will change significantly.

Signals can only be compressed so much.

Netflix and Youtube isn’t going to keep re-encoding content in the year’s new shiny format.

Cheap, efficient chips (or modules within a SOC) take just as long to design whether the codec uses patents or not.

Supporting more codecs (and by extension more legacy codecs) means more die space - and higher cost.

God blinds those He wants to lose.

Posted Feb 2, 2018 19:56 UTC (Fri) by gioele (subscriber, #61675) [Link]

> Cheap, efficient chips (or modules within a SOC) take just as long to design whether the codec uses patents or not.

Often sub-optimal (sw/hw) code needs to be used to workaround patents that encumber part of a codec.

Searching for this sub-optimal workarounds takes time (= money) and implementing them may require more chip area (= +money).