Comment by dajonker
7 months ago
I believe patents play a big role here as well. Anything new must be careful to not (accidentally) violate any active patent, so there might be some tricks that can't currently be used for AV1/AV2
7 months ago
I believe patents play a big role here as well. Anything new must be careful to not (accidentally) violate any active patent, so there might be some tricks that can't currently be used for AV1/AV2
I think patents are quickly becoming less of a problem. A lot of the foundational encoding techniques have exited patent protection. H.264 and everything before it is patent free now.
It's true you could still accidentally violate a patent but that minefield is clearing out as those patents simply have to become more esoteric in nature.
...till someone decides to patent one of the new techniques used
You can't patent something that's in use. Prior art is a defense to a patent claim/lawsuit.
But that's not my main point. My main point is that we are going down a fitting path with codecs which makes it hard to come up with general patents that someone might stumble over. That makes patents developed by the MPEG group far less likely to apply to AOM. A lot of those more generally applicable patents, like the DCT for example, have expired.
There are numerous patent trolls in this space with active litigation against many of the participants in the consortium who brought AV1. The EU was also threatening to investigate (likely to protect the royalty revenues of European companies)
It has always seemed very weird to me that compression algorithms were patentable.
1) it harms interoperability
2) I thought math wasn’t patentable?