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...
On top of being much more complex to encode and decode, and being encumbered by patents, JPEG 2000 was only marginally better than JPEG in terms of quality vs. size. At the time it came out, it wasn't worth using; nowadays it's thoroughly outclassed by any newer image codec (JPEG XL, WebP, HEIC, etc).
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.
I've never understood why some people seem to cheer this on like a corporation owning some maths was their local sports team.
For a while I assumed some people had put in a lot of effort on H.264 encoders and so the digital sharecroppers were angry and jealous that someone might be advocating for messy freedom.
But some people seem to just enjoy the thought of corporations putting a tax on video distribution.
Luckily those greedy corporations have repeatedly shot themselves on the foot and so their influence is waning.
How long has it been since AV1 was released? About eight years, and there's still no credible patent holder. The vultures are always circling around compression standards. You shouldn't take that too seriously. Even if a lawsuit is filed, there's a legal defence fund to protect against baseless claims.
Most importantly, there is no alternative. As kasabali said, the patent situation for the other codecs is a mess. Additionally, they could be hit by the same "No FRAND" problem. If someone comes forward with a patent that was used unintentionally, the situation is the same for all codecs.
> in practice they increasingly look like a legal and financial gamble
As opposed to what, like HEVC? Where you need to pay 3 different patent pools to be sure (which all has different terms), then there's still other patent holders that aren't in any pools and come and hit you with loyalty requests any time under terms however they like to?
There should be a stronger push to fight these trolls. AOM has enough resources to bust their garbage patents and make them pay damages for patent racketeering. At least until software patents are banned for good.
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.
>> And yes, most of the small optimizations are patented, something that I’ve come to understand isn’t viewed very favorably by most.
Codecs are like infrastructure not products. From cameras to servers to iPhones, they all have to use the same codecs to interoperate. If someone comes along with a small optimization it's hard enough to deploy that across the industry. If it's patented you've got another obstacle: nobody wants to pay the incremental cost for a small improvement (it's not even incremental cost once you've got free codecs, it's a complete hassle).
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