[thinkingQueen]

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.

[rwmj]

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.)

[mike_hearn]

Google funding free stuff is not a real social mechanism. It's not something you can point to and say that's how society should work in general.

Our industry has come to take Google's enormous corporate generosity for granted, but there was zero need for it to be as helpful to open computing as it has been. It would have been just as successful with YouTube if Chrome was entirely closed source and they paid for video codec licensing, or if they developed entirely closed codecs just for their own use. In fact nearly all Google's codebase is closed source and it hasn't held them back at all.

Google did give a lot away though, and for that we should be very grateful. They not only released a ton of useful code and algorithms for free, they also inspired a culture where other companies also do that sometimes (e.g. Llama). But we should also recognize that relying on the benevolence of 2-3 idealistic billionaires with a browser fetish is a very time and place specific one-off, it's not a thing that can be demanded or generalized.

In general, R&D is costly and requires incentives. Patent pools aren't perfect, but they do work well enough to always be defining the state-of-the-art and establish global standards too (digital TV, DVDs, streaming.... all patent pool based mechanisms).

[raverbashing]

These are bad comparisons

The question is more, "who would write the HTTP spec?" except instead of sending text back and forth you need experts in compression, visual perception, video formats, etc

[chubot]

> Who would write a whole operating system to compete with Microsoft when that would take thousands of engineers being paid $100,000s per year?

You might be misunderstanding that almost all of Linux development is funded by the same kind of companies that fund MPEG development.

It's not "engineers in their basement", and never was

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members

e.g. Red Hat, Intel, Oracle, Google, and now MICROSOFT itself (the competitive landscape changed)

This has LONG been the case, e.g. an article from 2008:

https://www.informationweek.com/it-sectors/linux-contributor...

2017 Linux Foundation Report: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/press-release/linux-fo...

Roughly 15,600 developers from more than 1,400 companies have contributed to the Linux kernel since the adoption of Git made detailed tracking possible

The Top 10 organizations sponsoring Linux kernel development since the last report include Intel, Red Hat, Linaro, IBM, Samsung, SUSE, Google, AMD, Renesas and Mellanox

---

curl does seem to be an outlier, but you still need to answer the question: "Who would develop video codecs?" You can't just say "Linux appeared out of thin air", because that's not what happened.

Linux has funding because it serves the interests of a large group of companies that themselves have a source of revenue.

(And to be clear, I do not think that is a bad thing! I prefer it when companies write open source software. But it does skew the design of what open source software is available.)

[thinkingQueen]

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.

[roenxi]

> 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]

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.

[wmf]

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.

[mschuster91]

> 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]

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.

[somethingsome]

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