Comment by lanius

9 years ago

I am always blown away when reading about codecs. Video compression seems to be the perfect intersection of math, programming, and psychology.

23 comments

lanius

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21  9 years ago

And money. This is what happens when a lot of money is thrown at a problem.

  • danbmil99  9 years ago

    For the record. Yes, a lot of money was spent developing this codec. However, a lot of creativity and risk-taking was involved as well.

    It was far from clear 15 years ago when xiph released Theora (aka vp3, ancestor of av1) that going up against mighty MPEG, with their enormous war chest from a decade of royalties, and dozens of patents (and the money to defend them) that success in the end was even possible much less assured.

    It's really a wonderful story of the triumph of open source philosophy over the IP licensing model.

    • niftich  9 years ago

      While none of this is false, it's a bit of a misdirection to imply that the 'mighty MPEG' was a monolithic actor preventing this course of action from taking place. In fact, the individual collaborators that MPEG (or ITU) brought to the table were the same sorts of hardware companies, software companies, universities, research institutes, and media companies that are surprisingly familiar among AV1's contributors, and MPEG's licensing scheme -- the patent pool being its primary innovation -- was a way to seek mutually assured use of each other's work.

      The story here isn't that the Big Evil companies behind the MPEG codecs were beaten by the Good companies behind the Alliance for Open Media -- the story is that the pool of companies is kinda-sorta the same or comparable, with plenty of them playing both sides, a fact not lost on the founder of MPEG [1][2].

      [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16261313

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    • rayiner  9 years ago

      > It's really a wonderful story of the triumph of open source philosophy over the IP licensing model

      It’s not an “open source philosophy over the IP licensing model.” It’s bankrolling a codec with content, device, and middleman revenues rather than content player revenues. The $_ dollars that Sony or Panasonic got for every DVD player through patent licensing has simply been replaced by the $_ that Google gets for every ad impression on YouTube or sale in the Google Play Store. It’s not a philosophical shift, merely a business model shift enabled by Internet video distribution.

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    • CharlesW  9 years ago

      > It's really a wonderful story of the triumph of open source philosophy over the IP licensing model.

      3-5 years will tell whether it's a triumph or a tragedy. It's certainly not possible to know today. Fans were quite sure Beta meant the end of VHS, but there are so many other (more important, in many cases) factors than the technology.

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