As someone who hasn't had any exposure to the human stories behind mpeg before, it feels to me like it's been a force for evil since long before 2020. Patents on h264, h265, and even mp3 have been holding the industry back for decades. Imagine what we might have if their iron grip on codecs was broken.
The article does not give much beyond what you already read in the title. What obscure forces and how? Isn’t it an open standards non-profit organisation, then what could possible hinder it?
Maybe because technologically closed standards became better and nonprofit project has no resources to compete with commercial standards?
USB Alliance have been able to work things out, so maybe compression standards should be developed in similar way?
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.
> 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.
Copyright is cancer. The faster AI industry is going to run it into the ground, the better.
This makes zero sense, right? Even if this was applicable, why would it need a standard? There is no interoperability between game servers of different games
Goodbye MPEG group, and to be frank, good riddance I think. I'm glad that open codecs are now taking over on the frontier of SOTA encoding.
Maybe these sorts of handshake agreements and industry collaboration were necessary to get things rolling in 198x. If so, then I thank the MPEG group for starting that work. But by 2005 or so when DivX and XviD and h264 were heating up, it was time to move beyond that model towards open interoperability.
MPEG's patent policy was not its own. The Moving Picture Experts Group was Working Group 11 of Sub Committee 2 of ISO-IEC Joint Technical Committee 1. Other Working Groups in SC2 were the Joint Photographic Experts Group, the Joint Bi-Level Image Group, and the Multimedia/Hypermedia Experts Group. Therefore, the patent policy was the ISO-IEC policy for including patented technology in their standards.
MPEG was also joint with the video conferencing standards group within the CCITT (now International Telecommunications Union), which generally required FRAND declarations from patent holders.
My recollection is that MPEG-LA was set up as a clearing house so that implementers could go to one licensing organization, rather than negotiating with each patent owner individually.
All the patents for MPEG 1 and MPEG 2 must be expired by now.
Besides patent gridlock, there is a fundamental economic problem with developing new video coding algorithms. It's very difficult to develop an algorithm that will halve the bit rate for the same quality, to get it implemented in hardware products an software, and to introduce it broadly in the existing video services infrastructure. Plus, doubling the compression is likely to more than double the processing required. On the other hand, within a couple of years the network engineers will double the bit rate for the same cost, and the storage engineers will double the storage for the same cost. They, like processing, follow their own Moore's Law.
So reducing the cost by improving codecs is more expensive and takes more effort and time than just waiting for the processor, storage and networking cost reductions. At least that's been true over the 3 decades since MPEG 2.
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[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 33.2 ms ] threadHis 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...
Copyright is cancer. The faster AI industry is going to run it into the ground, the better.
I remember this same guy complaining investments in the MPEG extortionist group would disappear because they couldn't fight against AV1.
He was part of a patent Mafia is is only lamenting he lost power.
Hypocrisy in its finest form.
DCVC-RT (https://github.com/microsoft/DCVC) - A deep learning based video codec claims to deliver 21% more compression than h266.
One of the compelling edge AI usecases is to create deep learning based audio/video codecs on consumer hardwares.
One of the large/enterprise AI usecases is to create a coding model that generates deep learning based audio/video codecs for consumer hardwares.
This makes zero sense, right? Even if this was applicable, why would it need a standard? There is no interoperability between game servers of different games
Maybe these sorts of handshake agreements and industry collaboration were necessary to get things rolling in 198x. If so, then I thank the MPEG group for starting that work. But by 2005 or so when DivX and XviD and h264 were heating up, it was time to move beyond that model towards open interoperability.
And, boy howdy, they did.
MPEG was also joint with the video conferencing standards group within the CCITT (now International Telecommunications Union), which generally required FRAND declarations from patent holders.
My recollection is that MPEG-LA was set up as a clearing house so that implementers could go to one licensing organization, rather than negotiating with each patent owner individually.
All the patents for MPEG 1 and MPEG 2 must be expired by now.
Besides patent gridlock, there is a fundamental economic problem with developing new video coding algorithms. It's very difficult to develop an algorithm that will halve the bit rate for the same quality, to get it implemented in hardware products an software, and to introduce it broadly in the existing video services infrastructure. Plus, doubling the compression is likely to more than double the processing required. On the other hand, within a couple of years the network engineers will double the bit rate for the same cost, and the storage engineers will double the storage for the same cost. They, like processing, follow their own Moore's Law.
So reducing the cost by improving codecs is more expensive and takes more effort and time than just waiting for the processor, storage and networking cost reductions. At least that's been true over the 3 decades since MPEG 2.