That’s a fairly unreasonable take. We are talking about a hobbyist Github account reverse engineering decades old hardware. The warning is in italics clearly after the introduction. This is stuff for the experts. What more do you want?
Those are good venues to sneak JPEG XL into the mainstream. It would be a pity if it became another JPEG 2000. On the other hand, JPEG 2000 was probably just too advanced and computationally complex to be widely adopted at the time. Sometimes I look back at it and, after all the extensions and revisions, it feels like it has everything—but it’s still a niche codec. A cautionary tale, and a pattern that tends to repeat itself with codecs...
AV1 is being actively claim-charted by a lot of companies right now, and lawsuits are almost certainly coming. The same process is already starting for AV2, but most players are waiting for the AV1 cases to mature first.
People keep calling the AV-family codecs “royalty free,” but in practice they increasingly look like a legal and financial gamble.
That is a very sour take on Iceye. Based on what I’ve read Iceye is doing better business than Umbra. They can’t be that bad. Also, Iceye has demonstrated very good military performance in helping Ukraine.
Beta 5.2 was when I had the best time with Counter-Strike. de_dust with a Colt was fun. Never forget the AWP snipers lurking near the big front door in cs_assault. There were some weird maps like cs_siege — I think it had some sort of a moving vehicle there somewhere in a tunnel.
Daala was never meant to be widely adopted in its original form — its complexity alone made that unlikely. There’s a reason why all widely deployed codecs end up using similar coding tools and partitioning schemes: they’re proven, practical, and compatible with real-world hardware.
As for H.265, it’s the result of countless engineering trade-offs. I’m sure if you cherry-picked all the most experimental ideas proposed during its development, you could create a codec that far outperforms H.265 on paper. But that kind of design would never be viable in a real-world product — it wouldn’t meet the constraints of hardware, licensing, or industry adoption.
Now the following is a more general comment, not directed at you.
There’s often a dismissive attitude toward the work done in the H.26x space. You can sometimes see this even in technical meetings when someone proposes a novel but impractical idea and gets frustrated when others don’t immediately embrace it. But there’s a good reason for the conservative approach: codecs aren’t just judged by their theoretical performance; they have to be implementable, efficient, and compatible with real-world constraints. They also have to somehow make financial sense and cannot be given a way without some form of compensation.
It’s a bit like developing an F1 car. Or a cutting edge airplane. Lots of small optimizations that have to work together. Sometimes big new ideas emerge but those are rare.
Until the new codec comes to together all those small optimizations aren’t really worth much, so it’s a long term research project with potentially zero return on investement.
And yes, most of the small optimizations are patented, something that I’ve come to understand isnt’t viewed very favorably by most.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly. Not long ago, someone showed up on Hacker News who had, on his own, begun to rediscover the benefits of arithmetic coding. Naturally, he was convinced he’d come up with a brand-new entropy coding method. Well, no harm done and it’s nice that people study compression but I was surpised how easily he got himself convinced of a discovery. Clearly he knew very little.
Overall, I think this is a positive ”problem” to have :-)
> Security patrol will come and bother you if you hand around the bridge for a few minutes?
There’s a land war in Europe. Hundreds of thousands have lost their lives during the past few years. There have been cases of sabotage against the Baltic states as well as the Nordic states. Things are pretty grim there and lurking around basic infrastructure pretty much guarantees a talk with the police.
My eyes were opened when a field called gamification appeared in the early 2010s. In a few years many gamification researchers had tens of thousands of citations, h-indexes nearing hundred. Well, if you think about it they’re gamers, they’ve been grinding their RPG characters, sniping skills and whatnot for thousands of hours. It’s only natural that these guys and girls figure out how to reach the maximum scientific high score.
Some of the gamification researchers are near the top 500 of that 2% list. Now ask yourself, is gamification something that should make you one of the top 500 scientist in the world? I doubt it, but modern science is a citation game. Nothing else.