[HN Gopher] Google wants to take on Dolby with new open media fo...
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Google wants to take on Dolby with new open media formats
Author : mmastrac
Score : 296 points
Date : 2022-09-22 16:17 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.protocol.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.protocol.com)
| sportstuff wrote:
| There is difference between hearing vs listening vs feeling. I
| hope more creative stuff comes out this. My first experience on
| 5.1 was Top Gun.. The next one to top that was in Audium with
| sound and vibrations from everywhere. Nothing to top the sound of
| silence.
| chadlavi wrote:
| obligatory relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/
| crazygringo wrote:
| This is amazing. It's truly bizarre that 5.1 surround sound, or
| HDR, or spatial audio, would be proprietary paid formats -- I
| mean, what if someone told you there was a license for _stereo_
| audio?
|
| And sure it's in Google's self-interest so that they can bring
| these technologies to YouTube without paying anyone else. But it
| benefits everybody, so this is really fantastic news for everyone
| if it's something that takes off.
| EGreg wrote:
| Yep. Once again, open standards smashing capitalism's
| rentseeking proprietary schemes helps a wide array of people
| around the world including new entrants who would have
| previously been priced out.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| > capitalism's rentseeking proprietary schemes
|
| Correction: greedy assholes rentseeking proprietary schemes.
| There is nothing in capitalism that says you _must_ obtain
| your money through unethical means.
| EGreg wrote:
| It is also true that there is nothing in capitalism that
| precludes this rentseeking scheme. Everything about it is
| quintessentially capitalist: a top-down organization
| employs people (job creation) and pays them money which it
| gets by restricts other people and organizations from using
| something (private ownership) unless they pay (rentseeking)
| and to take down its rivals (competition) to take over an
| entire industry. The only aspect that's missing is to abuse
| publicly available resources (extraction) and dump its
| waste (pollution).
|
| It is actually fine for trailblazers to charge large
| amounts for new tech. But open source gift economies can
| eventually break their stranglehold.
|
| Unless they use the power of government to enforce their
| rentseeking, which can be especially egregious with
| "intellectual property".
|
| (Yes it is possible to be a libertarian who criticizes
| capitalism as using government force.)
|
| https://twitter.com/mozilla/status/1549775652123033601
| js8 wrote:
| That's lack of understanding of origins of the term
| "capitalism". Capitalism is typically characterized by (a)
| free market for labor and (b) private ownership of means of
| production. Both of these concepts have been considered
| unethical. The fact that liberals also consider "rent
| seeking" unethical doesn't change that.
| dTal wrote:
| > There is nothing in capitalism that says you must obtain
| your money through unethical means.
|
| There is. Ethics constitute a voluntary constraint on
| behavior. Businesses with no ethics are less constrained,
| and therefore can outcompete businesses so encumbered.
| SllX wrote:
| They're paying to use Dolby's encoding schemes. It's not the
| idea of "stereo audio" that's patent encumbered, it's some of
| the encoding schemes that can output stereo audio (much less so
| these days, patents are expiring and all of MP3's have). Same
| with surround audio and spatial audio and HDR: Dolby has an
| encoding scheme that works well and gets the desired result, is
| high quality, usually higher quality than the alternatives, and
| they market it well.
|
| I'll welcome anyone that wants to enter the space that thinks
| they can do better, but Dolby is good at what they do, and
| Google often has massive commitment issues for new projects
| (although notably, not usually when it comes to codecs). I
| suspect what will happen is YouTube will develop their own HDR
| and audio codecs, and it'll just be used on YouTube and almost
| nowhere else. That'll be enough to drive client support, but
| it'll be one more HDR format in addition to HDR10+ and Dolby
| Vision, and it'll be one more set of audio codecs in addition
| to like the half dozen to a dozen they already decode, and
| ultimately this will be to increase the quality of YouTube
| while minimizing their licensing costs. That's fine.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > I'll welcome anyone that wants to enter the space that
| thinks they can do better,
|
| "Do better" is tricky to define. By some metrics, Ambisonics,
| a decades-old, license free technology, "does better" than
| Atmos does. But by others, it does worse. Which metrics are
| important?
| dTal wrote:
| I think the most important figure of merit is sadly how
| much money it will make the people in charge of
| implementing it in consumer devices.
| SllX wrote:
| Content is King here. Do you have source material and do
| you have playback devices or software out in the world?
|
| Google has both with YouTube, Chromecasts and Android
| phones and TVs. They're one of the few power players that
| can unilaterally change up their codec and metadata suite,
| but only as far as YouTube goes.
|
| So "do better" means getting enough content behind a tech
| stack and still delivering a satisfying experience to the
| customer. If they can meet or exceed what Dolby delivers, I
| think that would be great! Even if they only match Dolby,
| that's still pretty good.
| kasabali wrote:
| > I suspect what will happen is YouTube will develop their
| own HDR and audio codecs
|
| It is stated in the article they're backing HDR10+.
|
| Not sure about the audio.
| m0RRSIYB0Zq8MgL wrote:
| For audio they are working on something new called
| Immersive Audio Container
|
| https://aomediacodec.github.io/iac/
| SllX wrote:
| Yeah there's some supposition in the article so I'm not
| clear if it's HDR10+ or an extension of it, just that
| Google wants to do something to break Dolby's bank and
| they've got a heist crew with something to prove (i.e.
| Netflix, Samsung, Meta, et al.) and a placeholder name for
| the audio stuff ("Immersive Audio Container"). The
| distinction hardly matters since it'll just be one more
| format (or set of formats) for manufacturers to support.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > and ultimately this will be to increase the quality of
| YouTube while minimizing their licensing costs.
|
| Yes, I can also imagine they have specific requirements on
| the file format like quickly skipping to timestamps, highly
| variable bitrate, handling text and graphics well etc. I
| imagine their requirements to be so general that it'll
| benefit anyone, especially those that do streaming.
|
| In either case "just one more standard" (or relevant xkcd) is
| an unavoidable obstacle for every new standard, and does not
| mean the project will fail. I have lots of critique against
| Google but this is one thing they are positioned to do well,
| and have a decent track record. And given how the competition
| operates, is frankly refreshing.
| SllX wrote:
| Agreed.
| daveslash wrote:
| Speaking of Stereo Audio vs Encoding Schemes, there was a
| great article posted here a while back about diving into
| audio formats on 35mm movie film [0]. There's a photo showing
| the analog stereo wave-form alongside two digital tracks:
| Dolby and Sony [1]. So the audio is physically printed onto
| the film in 3 different formats (1 analog, 2 digital) and
| it's up to the projector to decide which one is needs/has-
| the-hardware-for.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30919904
| suzumer wrote:
| Youtube already has it's own HDR video codec with VP9. Also,
| HDR10+ and Dolby Vision aren't HDR formats, they're formats
| for storing dynamic metadata that can help TVs better display
| HDR video. The article seems to misinterpret what their
| purpose is. HDR video can be presented just fine without
| HDR10+ or Dolby Vision.
| SllX wrote:
| Thanks!
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _HDR video can be presented just fine without HDR10+ or
| Dolby Vision._
|
| To see HDR content at its full dynamic range, you'll need
| an HDR-capable device or display. Viewers watching on non-
| HDR devices/displays will see an SDR1 video derived from
| the HDR source.
|
| 1 "Standard dynamic range" or "smooshed dynamic range"
| jmole wrote:
| > To see HDR content at its full dynamic range, you'll
| need an HDR-capable device or display.
|
| Not exactly - you need an HDR Mastering display to see
| HDR content at full dynamic range. There are essentially
| no high volume consumer-level devices, with the exception
| of maybe Apple's XDR lineup (MBP, iPad, iPhone, Pro
| Display) with the capability of displaying non-windowed
| HDR content at full brightness.
|
| Everything else relies on tone mapping, even the latest
| 2022 OLED & QDOLED TVs.
| suzumer wrote:
| Even HDR mastering monitors can only reach 2000 to 4000
| nits [1], whereas PQ gamma goes up to 10000 nits. This is
| why most hdr streams contain metadata containing
| mastering display peak luminance.
|
| [1] https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/dp-v3120
| CharlesW wrote:
| Good info, thanks! Can you elaborate on why you qualified
| this with "non-windowed"?
| pa7ch wrote:
| So if VP9 and AV1 already store HDR data, How is Dolby
| Vision used? Its HDR metadata shipped alongside video
| formats that don't already encode this data?
|
| Like if I stream netflix to a TV supporting Dolby Vision
| what format is the video being streamed in and is the TV
| manufacturer just paying Dolby for the right to correctly
| decode this HDR info then?
| [deleted]
| izacus wrote:
| Dolby Vision is a format of that metadata - it's hiding
| either at the beginning or as part of a frames in
| proprietary metadata extensions. When the video is being
| played, this metadata is extracted by video decoder (or
| demuxer) and then sent together with video frames to the
| display where the display then applies the (color, etc.)
| metadata to correctly show the frames based on its
| capabilities.
|
| Since the format of this metadata is proprietary, the
| demuxers, decoders and displays need to understand it and
| properly apply it when rendering. That's the part that
| needs to be implemented and paid for.
|
| But that's really not all of the technology - Dolby
| Vision isn't just the metadata format, it's also
| definition of how the videos are mastered and under which
| limitations (e.g. DV allows video to be stored in 12-bit
| per pixel format, allows mastering with up to 10.000 nits
| of brightness for white pixels and defines wider color
| range so better, brighter colors can be displayed by a
| panel capable of doing that).
|
| https://www.elecard.com/page/article_hdr is actually a
| pretty good article that overviews this topic (although
| you do need a basic understading how digital video
| encoding works).
| suzumer wrote:
| Dolby Vision supplements the HDR data already present in
| a video. For example, when you buy a Blu-ray disc that
| supports Dolby Vision, the disc contains several m2ts
| files containing HEVC encoded videos. Present within the
| HEVC stream is also the metadata, which supplies metadata
| for each frame. To see what this data is, I used[1], and
| then got the info for frame 1000 and saved it as a json
| in this [2] pastebin. As you can see, it contains info
| regarding the minimum and maximum PQ encoded values, the
| coefficients of the ycc to rgb matrix, among other
| things. This allows TVs to better display the HDR data,
| as currently, video data encoded using rec. 2020 color
| primaries with max light level of 10000 nits is far
| outside what current TVs are capable of displaying, so
| metadata showing max pq of a frame or scene allows these
| devices to make better decisions.
|
| [1] https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=183479 [2]
| https://pastebin.com/m5NfUTbc
| Melatonic wrote:
| This could put pressure on Dolby to release their older stuff
| for free (no licensing) which would be a huge win for
| everyone. But I agree about Google - the whole point of Dolby
| is to have a high quality standard that is the industry
| choice for consistency. That does cost money (mainly in
| licensing their stuff or chips that use their encoder) but
| the way I see they have to make profit somehow. Is it
| overpriced? Probably.
|
| Is older standard dolby digital (and dolby digital plus) 5.1
| surround sound still pretty damn good? Yep - and it should be
| free. They have 20 years of newer, superior stuff to make
| money from!
| SllX wrote:
| AC-3's (Dolby Digital) patents all expired in 2017. I'm not
| sure about E-AC-3 (Dolby Digital Plus), but my
| understanding is producers just move onto new sound
| technology. It's not that DD and DD+ don't both sound
| great, it's that people move with advances in sound
| production to stay on or near the state of the art. If you
| want to write an AC-3 encoder/decoder, go for it, but
| that's not much help for folks that want to use AC-4,
| TrueHD and Atmos.
| UltraViolence wrote:
| All of this is basically easy to make an alternative
| implementation of. Just use a slightly different audio codec
| and rearrange the fields a bit in the format.
|
| Probably most important for good uptake is a fancy name. HDR10+
| just doesn't sound snazzy enough.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Right, HDR11 sounds so much better.
|
| --But it goes to 11.
| pdntspa wrote:
| Thank god. Do you know how much of a pain in the ass it is to
| cleanly sample most modern movies because of this proprietary
| codec bullshit?
|
| The best results come from ripping voiceovers out of the center
| channel... but busting through encryption and figuring out the
| right proprietary codec to open the audio is a pain.
| suzumer wrote:
| I've found that the easiest way to extract audio data from a
| Blu-ray movie is to rip the file using MakeMKV and then use
| FFMPEG to convert the audio data to my codec of choice be it
| wav, aac, opus, etc. FFMPEG takes care of identifying the
| right codec to decode.
| pdntspa wrote:
| Does it work with the proprietary stream formats like DTS?
| I believe I am using some plugin for Audacity for that, but
| I hate doing the actual sampling in Audacity so it then
| gets loaded into another editor.
| suzumer wrote:
| Yes, it works with DTS. Here is the full list of
| supported codecs: https://www.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-
| all.html#Audio-Codecs
| sosborn wrote:
| Perhaps of interest:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_patent_394325
| rodgerd wrote:
| > This is amazing.
|
| Company with online video and advertising monopoly wants to use
| that monopoly to destroy competitors isn't "amazing", it's
| "business as usual".
| Bombthecat wrote:
| Dolby vision is patented. There is already a free version,hdr+
| , which samsung supports.
|
| But no one is using it.
| izacus wrote:
| And you can read in this article why - Dolby aggressively
| made deals with streaming services to push their technology
| to profit from royalties on end-user devices.
| BonoboIO wrote:
| What is exactly patented in Dolby Vision? There has to be
| some innovation to be patentable. HDR10 and HDR10+ exist.
| zokier wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrightSide_Technologies
|
| HDR10 and all the other stuff came along much much later
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Dolby Vision is poorly documented but I did find a long PDF
| explaining how it works.
|
| It does provide significant value worthy of patent
| protection.
|
| The main thing they did was develop a nonlinear color space
| designed so that each "bit" of information provides equal
| value. This way no bits are wasted, making compression more
| efficient and have fewer artefacts.
|
| The color space is also set up so that the "lightness"
| channel is accurate and brightness can be rescaled without
| introducing color shifts.
|
| They also came up with a way of encoding the HDR brightness
| range efficiently so that about 12 bits worth of data fits
| into 10 bits.
|
| The format also allows a mode where there is an 8-bit SDR
| base stream with a 2-bit HDR extension stream. This allows
| the same file to be decoded as either HDR or SDR by devices
| with minimal overhead.
|
| Last but not least they work with device manufacturers to
| make optimal mapping tables that squeeze the enormous HDR
| range into whatever the device can physically show. This is
| hard because it has to be done in real time to compensate
| for maximum brightness limits for different sized patches
| and to compensate for brightness falloff due to
| overheating. Early model HDR TVs had to have FPGAs in them
| to do this fast enough!
| suzumer wrote:
| While Dolby did design the perceptual quantizer gamme
| (PQ) [1] that almost every HDR device today uses, they
| waived patenting it [2] when it was standardized in SMPTE
| 2084 [3]. Everything that is proprietary about Dolby
| Vision (everything except PQ gamma) is relatively mundane
| and just dynamic metadata.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_quantizer
|
| [2] https://f.hubspotusercontent00.net/hubfs/5253154/Dolb
| y%20208...
|
| [3] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7291452
| adolph wrote:
| It may be in someone's self interest to make anything that any
| of us do zero cost, at which point we do not have a business
| model for living (other than some form of the dole contingent
| on agreeing to whatever conditions put thereupon). To the
| extent that Dolby creates value and reasonably licenses their
| development I think the employees of Dolby have a better claim
| to a fair living than a pure patent troll or an ad farm.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| There _was_ a license for stereo audio. See: Blumlein and EMI,
| Fantasound, etc
| crazygringo wrote:
| It made a lot more sense back in the analog days, when
| figuring out how to encode and decode stereo audio on an LP
| was non-trivial.
|
| But things like 5.1 audio or HDR or spatial audio aren't that
| much more than adding a bunch of extra channels/bits to a
| stream, defining relative power levels, and the signal
| strength follows a curve, and oh there's some positional
| metadata.
|
| The heavy lifting is done by compression algorithms which
| deserve to be patented because they do genuinely non-obvious
| stuff. Just like the way Dolby got digital audio onto a
| filmstrip was similarly clever.
|
| But stuff like 5.1 surround sound... it's just channels, man.
| In the digital world, it seems like it should be awfully easy
| to design an open standard.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Ambisonics has existed since the 1970s. It is license-free,
| and doesn't define a speaker layout (which is one of the
| reasons why it is not widely used).
| layer8 wrote:
| It's not just channels. If you want just channels, you can
| use 5.1 PCM no problem.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| "Seems like", and the reality are often different. That's
| some of the ingenious nature of these inventions--they seem
| like they should be obvious and easy. And yet they aren't.
| Not at first. It took a _heavy_ amount of investment,
| organization, and talent to get to the point of
| stereophonic sound alone.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > It took a heavy amount of investment, organization, and
| talent to get to the point of stereophonic sound alone.
|
| Sure, because that adds a ton of new complexity!
|
| Going from 2 to 3+ in a digital format does not add
| complexity.
| worik wrote:
| > Going from 2 to 3+ in a digital format does not add
| complexity.
|
| What adds complexity is determining how many channels to
| use and what to put through them.
|
| That is the important part now.
| bradstewart wrote:
| Is certainly can add complexity when you consider
| bandwidth and/or processing constraints.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| If you figure out a particularly clever way to save on
| those, sure.
|
| But the baseline of "okay, compressed audio isn't very
| demanding, throw 3x as much bandwidth and processing at
| it" does not add meaningful complexity.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Yup. Joint encoding [1] is really the main thing, but
| that's something that codecs already do, ever since MP3
| with stereo music.
|
| The overall point remains: multichannel open container
| formats exist, and open audio codecs exist. An open
| standard for 5.1 surround sound, for example, seems like
| a relatively straightforward combination of the two. I'm
| not saying you can do it overnight, but compared to other
| open-source efforts, it's tiny.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_encoding
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Multichannel joint encoding doesn't sound trivial to me.
|
| Hmm, it's not:
|
| https://patents.google.com/patent/JPH1051313A/en
| KerrAvon wrote:
| That's like saying "we should all drive hydrogen cars
| because you can just replace all the existing petroleum
| infrastructure with hydrogen infrastructure." Yes, but
| you have to execute on that. Any practical use of digital
| multichannel audio must consider bandwidth and decoding
| power as constraints.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The heavy lifting is done by compression algorithms which
| deserve to be patented because they do genuinely non-
| obvious stuff. Just like the way Dolby got digital audio
| onto a filmstrip was similarly clever.
|
| Or... we could have governments begin funding universities
| like they did in the past, and the research would be
| available for all?
|
| Seriously, we have to re-think patents. The amount of money
| all that rent-seeking crap is costing societies each year
| is _absurd_ , and not just in payments to trolls, but also
| stifled progress - think of stuff like e-Ink that's
| _barely_ affordable.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| Imagine my shock when I found out I have been paying
| royalties to Doug Stereo for decades.
|
| Stupid Doug.
| worik wrote:
| Cleaver Doug!
|
| Stupid deltarholamda!
|
| Na. Just kidding I'm sure deltarholamda is fucking smart!
| JohnFen wrote:
| > what if someone told you there was a license for stereo audio
|
| Interestingly enough, stereo was under patent in the 1930s --
| so you did need a license then.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I believe HDR10+ is open and royalty free. Dolby Vision is not.
| __david__ wrote:
| I was involved with digital cinema in the mid 2000s and
| attended standards meetings. Dolby was constantly trying to
| push their proprietary format for 5.1 audio into the standard
| but luckily everyone else at the table pushed back, correctly
| pointing out that just raw PCM 5.1 audio was perfectly adequate
| (and didn't require a bunch of licensing fees!). Dolby had to
| actually innovate (with Atmos) to get anyone to actually listen
| to them.
|
| Though I'm quite disappointed with ATSC 3.0 which appears to
| have given in to them and used their proprietary audio codec
| which no one supports yet. I'm extremely skeptical that it
| provides a tangible benefit over more widely supported formats.
| Yay, regulatory capture.
| phh wrote:
| Well French dvb standard is requiring e-ac3, so not all
| standardizers got the memo... (And it's being used mostly in
| stereo)
|
| Fwiw, Dolby does bring something compared to PCM, which is
| metadata to dynamically change dynamic range on the final
| device, allowing higher ranges with perfect home cinema and
| smaller range when in a noisy environment
| splitstud wrote:
| babypuncher wrote:
| You don't need a license from Dolby to encode or play 5.1 audio
| unless you are using a format that Dolby owns (like AC-3,
| TrueHD, etc). Plenty of free and non-Dolby proprietary audio
| formats support arbitrary numbers of audio channels.
| aesh2Xa1 wrote:
| From the fine article:
|
| > Google has a lot of influence on hardware manufacturers
| justinclift wrote:
| Wonder how well this will compare to Ambisonics?
|
| That's supposed to be a "full sphere" surround sound format
| (developed ~50 years ago), but hasn't been picked up widely:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambisonics
| TD-Linux wrote:
| It is, in fact, Ambisonics (among other features).
|
| Though you don't actually need any of the fancy new stuff being
| worked on to use Ambisonics - you can already use Opus with
| Ambisonics today in MP4.
| ilamont wrote:
| While I don't have sympathy for proprietary formats that come
| with an added use charge, alternative Google formats forced upon
| the world in the name of a "healthier, broader ecosystem" tend to
| create friction and unwanted overhead. Thinking of AMP and webP
| in particular.
|
| And uncertainty ... how long will such efforts last before Google
| loses interest or is forced to abandon them?
| izacus wrote:
| AMP is not a format.
| bmicraft wrote:
| Webp wasn't bad and back then there really weren't any
| alternatives that performed significantly better than jpeg
| ck2 wrote:
| Until they cancel the project and it is in the Google Graveyard
|
| https://KilledByGoogle.com
|
| https://Gcemetery.co (nice layout but stopped updating?)
| crazygringo wrote:
| The irony of GCemetary being dead is kind of amazing. Maybe
| keeping things going is a little harder than they thought ;)
| ck2 wrote:
| When I see a website that stopped updating in 2020 I kinda
| get sad.
|
| We lost a lot of people.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Fortunately, in this case the creator listed on the About
| page appears to be very much alive :)
| https://twitter.com/naeemol/
| anigbrowl wrote:
| As a consumer, I don't care. dolby makes money from licensing,
| but don't ask that much, they innovate constantly, and they do a
| lot of public education.
|
| This seems like one corporation flexing on another rather than
| great sense of mission; it's not like Google doesn't have IP of
| its own that it prefers to keep locked up. I suspect that this
| signals a strategic desire to move into the A/V production space,
| where customers have big demands for storage and computing
| resources.
| anotherman554 wrote:
| Dolby vision playback effectively doesn't work on PCs, so if
| you are a consumer that uses PCs, you have a reason to care.
| hparadiz wrote:
| Dolby vision is basically broken on Linux and not great on
| Windows.
| Melatonic wrote:
| From what I remember it basically does not work in any
| browser based setup - have to use Netflix apps or dedicated
| software?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I can't argue with that as I only know about their audio
| side.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| I care because ATSC 3.0 includes AC-4, a proprietary Dolby
| format. None of my software will play the audio from ATSC 3.0
| over the air broadcasts for this reason.
|
| ATSC 3.0 is a government standard for how public airwaves
| should be used. It strikes me as wrong that the government has
| basically mandated Dolby licensing for hardware manufacturers
| and software libraries.
| layer8 wrote:
| ATSC 3.0 doesn't mandate Dolby AC-4, it also supports MPEG-H.
| Both require licensing. The thing is, there is no equivalent
| patent-free technology available (object-based 3D audio).
| izacus wrote:
| Exactly. Which is why "I don't care" is a very shortsighted
| and terrible look on a standard that's at least royalty
| free.
| layer8 wrote:
| Yeah, my point is you can't blame ATSC 3.0 for making use
| of the existing standards. And it's not too different
| from how a lot of mobile/wireless technology depends on
| patents.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Do you feel the same way about the EU forcing exertions to
| use USB C?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| That's a good counter-argument which I agree with. I was
| looking at the issue in terms of voluntary consumer behavior
| (visiting theaters, buying TV or hifi equipment) and
| industrial supply rather than public good considerations.
| Where limited resources are allocated by government as
| (ideally) neutral broker we should certainly prefer openness.
|
| There is an argument for patent protection as innovation
| motivator, but lockup periods are more likely to lead to
| runaway market dominance due to preferential attachment.
| Where there's a monospony (like government as owner of
| spectrum) that's probably going to lead to negative outcomes.
|
| Thanks for widening my perspective on that issue.
| toast0 wrote:
| Well of course ATSC 3 includes a new proprietary Dolby
| format, ATSC 1 got AC-3 as a mandatory audio format, too.
|
| I'm not sure if ac-4 is mandatory, but it seems like it is?
| Kind of a big pain indeed.
| kieranl wrote:
| Atsc mandates ac-3. Ac-3 audio is actually dolby-d. They
| just could not call it Dolby in the standard so they
| renamed it to ac3 instead.
| izacus wrote:
| Competition is always good for a consumer, especially here
| where right now you simply don't have a choice but to pay the
| rent to Dolby on every TV audio device.
|
| C'mon, this is market capitalism 101
| rodgerd wrote:
| How is one of the richest monopolistic companies in the world
| deciding to destroy a market segment "competition" that is
| "good for the consumer"?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Luckily I'm not a capitalist and am not convinced my life
| will be improved by shaving costs down to nothing until there
| is only one supplier left standing. Fort that matter I'm not
| much of a consumer, I'm still using a 10 year old TV XD
|
| What's weird to me is how google is selling this as a win for
| the public, when the marginal costs added by Dolby are so
| low. Even in the audio production space, Dolby stuff is a
| little expensive for an individual (surround sound plugins
| costing hundreds of dollars) but it's not a big overhead for
| a recording studio. Their product is quality and consistency
| at industrial prices and imho they deliver on this.
|
| There isn't an underground of frustrated audio engineers
| dreaming of how theatrical sound could be so much better if
| it weren't for big D. Spatial audio rebels build quadrophonic
| sound systems for raves, but you didn't hear it from me.
| debacle wrote:
| I have an entire speaker setup that runs on the chromecast
| protocol(s?)
|
| They've been repeatedly bricked (features rolled back, support
| changed, can't set up complete groups, etc) by Google in the last
| few years, to the point where I don't even think I have them
| connected right now.
|
| I don't trust consumer products from Google at all.
| keepquestioning wrote:
| Surprised Dolby has survived for so long.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| The EU is randomly investigating the Alliance for Open Media on
| antitrust concerns --
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-eu-antitrust-re...
|
| Can anyone understand how it's in anyone's best interest to
| investigate / potentially stop an open source standard / royalty-
| free format that has buy-in from tons of big orgs?
| rodgerd wrote:
| > Can anyone understand how it's in anyone's best interest to
| investigate / potentially stop an open source standard /
| royalty-free format that has buy-in from tons of big orgs?
|
| Because "using my monopolistic profits in one area to destroy
| your business in another area" is textbook anticompetitive
| behaviour.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| I guess I get it but is anyone aside from the rent-seeking
| royalty holders worse off if open standards win out?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > randomly The Commission has information that
| AOM and its members may be imposing licensing terms (mandatory
| royalty-free cross licensing) on innovators that were not a
| part of AOM at the time of the creation of the AV1 technical,
| but whose patents are deemed essential to (its) technical
| specifications
|
| Sounds worth looking into.
| GreenPlastic wrote:
| The last thing I want to do is upgrade all my TVs and audio
| equipment for new standards
| RubberShoes wrote:
| (Someone who works in streaming)
|
| While I see both sides, I don't agree with this strategy. In
| fact, I think the public should be more aware of just how
| damaging Google/YouTube is to the streaming ecosystem and if you
| really stretch this argument, the planet.
|
| It is true - HEVC's original licensing structure was a nightmare,
| but it seems to have been resolved and we now have hardware
| decoders in nearly all modern consumer devices.
|
| This is also becoming true of Dolby's formats. maybe I am biased
| or not as informed as I could be but they did the R&D, worked
| with some of the brightest (pun intended) in the industry and
| created a production-to-distribution pipeline. Of course there
| are fees, but vendors are on board and content creators know how
| to work with these standards.
|
| Now here comes one of the largest companies in the world. HEVC?
| Nope - they don't want to pay anyone any fees so instead they're
| going to develop the VP9 codec. Should they use HLS or DASH?
| Nope, they are going to spin DASH off into our own proprietary
| HTTP deliverable and only deliver AVC HLS for compatibility
| reasons. Apple customers complain and after years they cave and
| support VP9 as a software decoder starting with iOS14. This means
| millions of users eat significant battery cycles just to watch
| anything, including HDR video.
|
| Then we get to Chrome. HEVC? Nope. Dolby? Nope. HLS? Nope. The
| most popular browser in the world doesn't support any of the
| broadcast standards. It's their way or fallback to SDR and the
| less efficient AVC codec.
|
| So now anyone else in the streaming industry trying to deliver
| the best streaming experience has to encode/transcode everything
| three times. AVC for compatibility (and spec) reasons, HEVC for
| set-top boxes and iOS, and VP9 for Google's ecosystem. If it
| wasn't for CMAF the world would also have to store all of this
| twice.
|
| In the end, to save YouTube licensing and bandwidth costs, the
| rest of the industry has to consume 2-3x more compute to generate
| video and hundreds of millions of devices now consume an order of
| magnitude more power to software decode VP9.
|
| If and when Project Caviar becomes reality, it'll be another
| fragmented HDR deliverable. Dolby isn't going away and Chrome
| won't support it, so the rest of the industry will have to add
| even more compute and storage to accommodate. In the name of
| 'open' and saving manufacturers a couple dollars, the rest of the
| industry is now fragmented and consumers are hurt the most.
|
| YouTube weirdly admitted this fragmentation is becoming a
| problem. They can't keep up with compute and had to create custom
| hardware to solve. Of course, these chips are not available to
| anyone else and gives them a competitive edge:
| https://www.protocol.com/enterprise/youtube-custom-chips-arg...
| izacus wrote:
| As someone who worked in streaming, I hope new opensource
| formats burn down the incestual cesspool of rentseeking codecs
| and bury them under tons of concrete.
|
| You're literaly commenting here on an article where Dolby CEO
| gleefuly explains how he made profit by using streaming
| services to make users pay for their own patents and royalties.
| And we didn't even get to the DRM which lies deeply integrated
| into every part of those formats. Or insane complexity of HEVC
| and Dolby Vision profiles which somehow don't bother you at
| all.
|
| So, AVC, HEVC, Dolby anything, DTS anything, burn the
| rentseekers to the ground. I'm sorry if you need to transcode
| an additional video format for that.
| _HMCB_ wrote:
| Through Google Fonts, they can track page views under the guise
| of beautiful fonts for your site. I wonder if they could do the
| same with these media formats.
| agilob wrote:
| Would be nice if they started from opensourcing chromecast
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Month M + 0: Google to take on $INDUSTRY_STANDARD with
| $GOOGLE_THING standard
|
| Month M + 4: Google shows off $GOOGLE_THING and announces
| $PARTNER devices
|
| Month M + 9: $PARTNER releases first devices with $GOOGLE_THING
| support (also supports $INDUSTRY_STANDARD, of course)
|
| Month M + 18: Google disappointed with lack of adoption of
| $GOOGLE_THING announces first-party products with $GOOGLE_THING
| support
|
| Month M + 24: Google's internal team working on first-party
| $GOOGLE_THING products dissolved
|
| Month M + 36: $PARTNER announces future products will no longer
| support $GOOGLE_THING due to lack of demand
|
| Month M + 48: Google removes all mentions of $GOOGLE_THING from
| their websites, docs, etc.
| [deleted]
| mmastrac wrote:
| I think Google's commitment to core technologies bucks this
| trend. Go has been long-lived and received lots of love.
| AV1/VP8/etc have been evolved and they've continued putting
| money into them.
| taylodl wrote:
| That's because Google uses Go internally. It's not consumer-
| facing technology.
| bzxcvbn wrote:
| AV1 wasn't created by Google. Neither was VP8, although they
| did release it to the public after acquiring the company that
| created it.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| What's in it for Google? Less friction allows users to consume
| more which gives Google more data?
| izacus wrote:
| Dolby is earning money by jumping in the bed with streaming
| services and then asking every purchased device to pay them
| money for the privilege of decoding it.
|
| Making hardware devices like Android TV cheaper helps adoption
| of Googles platforms and services.
| olyjohn wrote:
| It's not about making their stuff cheaper. They just want to
| take the royalty money they pay and put it in their pockets.
| They're not going to pass the savings onto the customers.
|
| Nobody ever passes the savings on to customers.
|
| The royalty is probably a couple of cents at the most per
| device. It makes more sense for them to just pocket the
| millions in savings and show extra profit to their
| shareholders. It would be dumb to give up millions to drop
| the price a few cents, which won't even be noticed by
| consumers anyways.
| izacus wrote:
| The Google formats are explicitly royalty free, so I'm not
| sure what you're talking about here.
|
| Is Google evil because it wants the royalty money how can
| it be so low that it doesn't matter? :P
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Integration on YouTube and Play Video for free.
| digdugdirk wrote:
| Perhaps just a computationally inefficient process they see
| some potential in throwing AI at?
|
| Maybe it would be easier for them to tie in to their speech
| recognition/translation if they controlled the whole stack?
|
| Does anyone have any experience with Dolby and could shed some
| light?
| TuringNYC wrote:
| Being able to sell TPU compute instances via algos fine-tuned
| to run cost-effectively on TPU instances?
| duped wrote:
| There is already an open media format (edit: for object-based
| immersive audio), it's called SMPTE 2098. Granted it's basically
| the mutant stepchild of DTS and Dolby ATMOS, but it does exist.
|
| The real problem isn't the hardware manufacturers but the content
| producers. Dolby engages in blatant anticompetitive behavior that
| basically requires hardware manufacturers to support their codecs
| and make it impossible to innovate on the actual media formats in
| a way that might compete. For example: paying for content to be
| released in atmos or giving away the tools to author it for free.
| scarface74 wrote:
| So it's anticompetitive to give away tools for free or paying
| content owners to use it?
|
| Would you say the same about a search engine company that gives
| its browser away for free and pays its competitor in mobile a
| reported $18 billion a year to be the default search engine for
| its platform?
|
| I would much rather tie my horse to Dolby than a company that
| has the attention span of a toddler.
| diob wrote:
| Yes and yes.
|
| Although honestly, it's always a nuanced thing.
|
| But typically the idea is to use money and undercutting to
| force out competition, then when the competition dies quality
| goes to crap.
| scarface74 wrote:
| So it would be like if a big tech company used its money
| from search to fund an audio standard and give away the
| software for free to undercut a rival...
| diob wrote:
| Yes
| duped wrote:
| Yes, loss-leading in general can be anti-competitive. And I'm
| not the only one who thinks so! It obviously depends on the
| scale, but having been in the space in the past I can tell
| you the "we are literally paid to use this" hurdle is next to
| impossible to clear.
|
| https://www.aeaweb.org/research/loss-leading-bans-retail-
| com....
| mattnewton wrote:
| > So it's anticompetitive to give away tools for free or
| paying content owners to use it?
|
| If the intent is to drive others out of the market, it could
| be right?
| scarface74 wrote:
| So what is the intent of any company that gives away
| software or any startup that operates at loss funded by VC
| money?
|
| Or if the same company gave its mobile operating system
| away for free to undercut a rival and then as soon as it
| became ubiquitous, started making much of it closed source
| and forcing companies to bundle its closed source software?
| mattnewton wrote:
| If you ask Peter Thiel, it's certainly not to engage in
| competition for the ultimate benefit of consumers. Not
| that he somehow speaks for everyone in VC funded startups
| at all. I just don't find many other voices willing to
| say "competition is for losers" out loud where regulators
| might hear, even if the structure of their investments
| looks like it needs to find a monopoly to me.
| [deleted]
| water-your-self wrote:
| >So it's anticompetitive to give away tools for free or
| paying content owners to use it?
|
| Absolutely. Go look at how carnegie won the steel market by
| starving his competition.
| asveikau wrote:
| More recently, Microsoft and Internet Explorer.
| scarface74 wrote:
| And absolutely nothing came of it in the US. Microsoft
| was not forced to unbundle IE, no browser choice,
| nothing.
|
| Now all platforms are bundled with browsers and plenty of
| other software.
| asveikau wrote:
| I think that has more to do with who was running the DOJ
| in the 90s vs. the early 2000s.
|
| > Now all platforms are bundled with browsers and plenty
| of other software.
|
| This is an interesting question. You could take it as
| Microsoft's argument before the DOJ being correct, that
| browsers become an inextricable part of an OS. Whether or
| not they would have been _had they not included it_ , it
| seems like we can say in hindsight, of course it would
| have. But surely Microsoft's decision to do so influenced
| the way the market went.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Does that also apply to every other service and software
| that is either given away for free to gain traction? Does
| it apply to money losing VC backed companies?
| duped wrote:
| Impact and outcomes matter more than explicit behavior
| when you look at this, it isn't a binary "do x and get
| banned" kind of program.
| freedomben wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
| monocasa wrote:
| Google is anticompetive and Dolby is. Just like in Google v.
| Oracle there are no true good guys here, only outcomes that
| are better or worse for the general public that various
| corporate entities have aligned themselves to for some
| perceived short term benefit.
|
| Open standards are good for the general public, as are
| allowing re-implementations of APIs. Taking a look at
| Google's anticompetive use of search combined with ads would
| be absolutely fantastic too, but I'm not going to gate other
| actions on it unless there's some semblance of a chance that
| the connections between the two actions are anything other
| than theoretical.
| scarface74 wrote:
| So it's open source? What happens as soon as Google
| abandons it and stops supporting in Android? YouTube? Do
| you think Apple will ever support it?
| monocasa wrote:
| It's an open standard, so better than open source per se
| since you're not reliant on any particular source tree.
|
| And in those cases you've listed, you're left with
| strictly more options than if it's not an open standard.
| scarface74 wrote:
| You're not left with an "option" of an audio standard
| that none of your customers hardware or browsers support.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The browsers will support this. Customer hardware from
| large venders will take more time or never happen if they
| are getting paid not to. But other hardware can take it's
| place.
| scarface74 wrote:
| You think Apple will support it or even Microsoft? The
| large hardware vendors not supporting it is really a big
| deal don't you think?
| slac wrote:
| They both support the AOM.
| monocasa wrote:
| If the open solution doesn't take off in favor of the
| proprietary solution, then you're in essentially the same
| end state as if there was no open solution in the first
| place.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Not after you've already encoded your audio to support
| it. From history we know that Google isn't going to do
| the leg work it takes to make the standard ubiquitous.
| monocasa wrote:
| Why would you only encode your media in a format that
| none of your customers have support for in the first
| place?
|
| Additionally, being an open standard, you can probably
| rely on ffmpeg supporting it. This allows you to
| transcode into something that your proprietary encoder
| will support for ingest if it comes to that.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Yes because transcoding audio couldn't possibly lead to
| lesser quality.
| monocasa wrote:
| Neither of these (HDR10+/DV, open spatial audio/Atmos)
| are due to compression, so yeah, kind of. They're both
| metadata schemes on top of other, pluggable compression
| schemes. So yeah, I wouldn't expect a conversion to
| necessarily end up with a loss of quality.
|
| This is also ignoring the first sentence: your whole
| supposition is based on a scenario where you as the
| content producer for some reason encoded in a format that
| your customers don't have, and don't have the masters for
| some reason. Which is basically absurd for anything that
| would need dynamic HDR or spatial audio.
| izacus wrote:
| This is a standard, not a piece of software. Nothing
| "happens" just like nothing "happened" to mp3 or jpeg
| when they stopped being actively changed.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| MP3 was not "an open standard", it was a patented
| technology, owned by the Fraunhofer institute and lead to
| hilarious lawsuits against people putting MP3
| capabilities in both hardware and software without even
| knowing they had to pay license fees, until Fraunhofer
| gave up and gave MP3 to the world. And not "way back
| when", this is a story that didn't have a happy ending
| until 2017. And then only because technology had passed
| it by with the industry having mostly moved on to newer,
| better codecs.
| worik wrote:
| > until Fraunhofer gave up and gave MP3 to the world
|
| I thought the patent ran out.
| nightski wrote:
| Standards are only as open as their implementations. The
| fact that google isn't really involving anyone in this
| and first introduced it in a closed door hush hush event
| makes me extremely skeptical.
| ipaddr wrote:
| A standard created by one body requires adoption by
| others before it can be a standard unless the first party
| owns the market. Implementations don't have to be open..
| [deleted]
| andirk wrote:
| Is there any relation to this situation and how there
| were attempts to enforce the _patent_ (not the standard)
| of JPEG[1] that ultimately mostly failed?
|
| [1] http://www.pubpat.org/jpegsurrendered.htm
| galdosdi wrote:
| Sometimes, yes. Selling something for below cost with the
| intent to drive your competitors out of business is called
| "dumping" and has been illegal since the 1800s.
|
| Because selling a product below cost is fundamentally
| unsustainable, there is no logical reason to sell a product
| for less than cost besides doing so temporarily with the
| hopes of being able to later recoup the loss with higher,
| above cost prices. This is anticompetitive because an
| inferior product can win out if it is backed by bigger
| pockets that can afford to stay unprofitable longer than the
| company making the superior product.
|
| This is basic economics, not really something that needs to
| be thought out and debated from scratch by HN over and over
| everytime it comes up, so it really would be helpful if
| everyone who is thinking about commenting on economic issues
| like this tries to at some point spend a couple hours reading
| an AP Microeconomics text. If a high school kid or college
| kid can do it in a semester, and intelligent adult can cover
| the high points in a weekend.
| monocasa wrote:
| Like most calls to just understand econ 101, the real life
| applications are significantly more complex.
|
| > Because selling a product below cost is fundamentally
| unsustainable, there is no logical reason to sell a product
| for less than cost besides doing so temporarily with the
| hopes of being able to later recoup the loss with higher,
| above cost prices.
|
| There are plenty of other reasons. The one applicable here
| is "commoditize your complement". Zero cost to consumer
| codecs mean more eyeballs on youtube videos, which means
| more ad revenue for Google. That thought process doesn't
| lead to later ramping up consumer costs. And if it's truly
| an open standard, how are they going increase costs when
| anyone can simply release a free implementation?
| scarface74 wrote:
| Anyone can release a "free version" of a phone that runs
| Android. How successful of an effort will that be without
| proprietary Google Play Services?
| monocasa wrote:
| Which wouldn't be an issue if play services was an open
| standard.
| arbitrage wrote:
| How much demand is there for phones that run Android
| _without_ Google Play Services?
| scarface74 wrote:
| In the US - none. That's the point, Google used open
| source and gave software away for free to crush
| competitors and then used its market dominance and slowly
| made more of Android closed.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-
| grip-on...
| Aissen wrote:
| If only it was the only thing... Did you know Dolby is actively
| fighting open source software like VLC behind the scenes ?
| Anyone having a Dolby license is pressured to stay away from
| VLC, even when it's a superior technical solution.
|
| The reason is simple: VLC/OSS developers have been implementing
| Dolby technologies without paying a dime or using proprietary
| blobs. How dare they!
| hot_gril wrote:
| I look at the current reality of VP8/9 with dissatisfaction.
| Google went all-in with it and made Meet/Hangouts use it. But
| encoding, decoding, or both end up being done on the CPU usually,
| since hardware support is way behind. Zoom and FaceTime just used
| H.264 (and 5?), and it's way more efficient as a result. I don't
| normally care a ton about efficiency, but it actually matters
| when your laptop's fans are overpowering the audio in a meeting
| and draining your battery to 0 within a short time span.
|
| Also, ironically, even Google Chat didn't seem to support webp
| images until recently. I appreciate the idea of open standards,
| but compatibility matters way more to the end user.
| ugjka wrote:
| Whatever the pirates adopt will be the de facto codec
| IshKebab wrote:
| Nah, piracy is much less popular than it used to be. And there
| are plenty of formats that have been quite popular with pirates
| but had zero use commercially. Matroska for example.
| kyriakos wrote:
| And porn
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Honest question: what would currently be the most commonly
| audio format supported by pirates for pirated movies? I've got
| a home cinema projector but never paid much attention to the
| audio (just using my stereo: it's a good stereo but it's not
| 5.1 or anything).
| pixelatedindex wrote:
| Personally I see a lot of AAC/AAC+ and some Dolby Digital.
| izacus wrote:
| You get all of them, since they tend to be ripped as-is from
| the source media. I commonly see Dolby Digital+ (because
| Netflix/Prime/etc. use them), Dolby TrueHD (because BluRays
| use that) and nowadays there's more and more Atmos.
|
| Ocassionaly you can see an odd DTS/DTS-MA now and then, but
| not a lot.
| foghorp wrote:
| What does Dolby actually do on a day to day basis?
|
| Do they have researchers working on new audio and video formats?
|
| Or is it now all just a self-perpetuating machine for generating
| licensing revenue, based on existing patents?
|
| Sorry for the ignorant question but I'm clueless about their
| ongoing contributions to the industry.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| Most of the industry uses HDR grading tools made by Dolby.
| Anechoic wrote:
| _Do they have researchers working on new audio and video
| formats?_
|
| Short answer is yes. Search for "Dolby" under "Author
| Affiliation" in the AES paper search [0] and you can see the
| research they publish. (the papers themselves are unfortunately
| behind the AES paywall, but if usually authors will send you
| the paper if you ask nicely).
|
| [0] https://www.aes.org/publications/preprints/search.cfm
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Yes. Dolby Laboratories is what came up the PQ transfer
| function which is what's responsible for HDR10, HDR10+, and
| Dolby Vision, for example. Dolby Atmos is similarly an actually
| new way to handle spatial audio. They've also created things
| like ICtCp ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICtCp )
|
| So they do actually contribute some worthwhile stuff. And some
| of it is open standards (like PQ & ICtCp).
|
| They also absolutely troll licenses though. Dolby Vision being
| a perfect example, check out the "profiles" section of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_Vision and you'll see some
| truly dumb Dolby Vision profiles that exist obviously just to
| slap a Dolby Vision license & branding on an otherwise boring,
| generic video format. Dolby Vision 9 is a perfect example, it's
| not even HDR at all. It's literally the same stuff we've all
| been watching for a decade+, but with marketing wank shoved
| onto it.
| izacus wrote:
| Sue everyone violating their patents probably :P
| solarkraft wrote:
| We are seeing a deeper and deeper split between Google (webm/VP9,
| webp, AV1, strongly pushing their formats) and Apple (HEVC, HEIC,
| Atmos, completely boycotting Google's formats), with Microsoft
| caught in the middle, supporting neither that well.
|
| Apple's stance is especially interesting because it's unclear to
| me what they gain by pushing license fee encumbered formats.
| CharlesW wrote:
| By supporting de jure standards (vs. Google projects which hope
| to become de facto standards), Apple gets a 3rd-party ecosystem
| for use cases where it wants one. Examples include USB, Wi-Fi,
| MPEG-4, Thunderbolt/USB4, web standards, etc. In many cases,
| Apple is an active participant in the standards process of de
| jure standards which are important to their business
| objectives.
|
| When de facto standards develop enough momentum to have
| customer value on their own or as part of other de jure
| standards, Apple will support them at the OS or app level.
| Examples include MP3, VP9, Opus, VST3, etc.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| Apple is a governing member of Alliance for Open Media that
| develops AV1 standards.
|
| They joined quite late but are there.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| I figured that it was because Apple is more heavily involved
| with Hollywood than Google is, from production to distribution,
| and Apple would rather side with standards formulated by
| trusted experts, professionals, and academics with long track
| records like MPEG than ones that seemingly came from nowhere.
| ajross wrote:
| > standards formulated by trusted experts, professionals, and
| academics with long track records like MPEG
|
| I genuinely can't tell if this is humor or not. If it is,
| bravo.
| tpush wrote:
| Perhaps formulate a point instead of pretending to be
| incredulous.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Fortunately, MPEG got lobotomized by ISO a few years back[0].
| So there's room for a new standards org (e.g. AOM) to
| overtake them. In fact, Apple joined AOM recently, so
| presumably they will be providing their own expertise to that
| organization too.
|
| [0] Specifically, Leonardo Chiariglione got fired and the
| MPEG working group cut up into a bunch of pieces.
| kyriakos wrote:
| Apple prefers to pay dolby than help Google in any way it
| seems.
| asciimov wrote:
| Apple is just supporting the technology people likely already
| have in their homes.
| mminer237 wrote:
| I think it's actually the opposite. Historically, nothing but
| Apple devices have been able to easily view HEIC images. I
| think half the reason Apple does it is to make life as hard
| as possible for people not using Apple devices, so they will
| give up and switch.
| sparrc wrote:
| > Apple...completely boycotting Google's formats
|
| This is not exactly true, they are a "founding member" of AOM:
| https://aomedia.org/membership/members/
|
| > Apple's stance is especially interesting because it's unclear
| to me what they gain by pushing license fee encumbered formats.
|
| My guess is cheaper hardware. AV1 is simply behind HEVC in
| terms of hardware (ie, ASIC encoder/decoders) support.
| lelandfe wrote:
| They also recently added WebP/M support to macOS, iOS, and
| Safari: https://caniuse.com/webp
| [deleted]
| phyzix5761 wrote:
| Given Google's history of killing projects I'm not jumping on
| this ship just yet.
| robertheadley wrote:
| Subtext: Google doesn't want to pay licensing fees.
| limeblack wrote:
| Or wait for the patents to expire. H.264 won't take to much
| longer to expire it's around 12 years I believe and yet Google
| has released vp8.
| pier25 wrote:
| Anyone remembers the open format HDR10+ pushed by Fox, Panasonic,
| and Samsung?
|
| Me neither.
|
| The world at large has settled on Dolby Vision and Atmos and it
| will be very difficult to change this. Not only from the consumer
| end but specially in the pro audio/video end.
|
| Google would need first to offer plugins for DAWs, video
| software, etc, to work with these formats before there's enough
| content that manufacturers and streamers consider it.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Of course I remember HDR10+, along with HDR10 and HLG. All of
| which are quite common and broadly used.
|
| _Hollywood movies_ primarily standardized on Dolby Vision, but
| the entire HDR ecosystem very much did not. Sony cameras for
| example primarily only shoot in HLG, even for their cinema
| cameras.
|
| Similarly games regularly opt for HDR10/HDR10+ for their HDR
| output instead of Dolby Vision. Why? Because it's cheaper, and
| dynamic metadata is largely pointless in an environment where
| the lighting content of the next dozen frames aren't known
| izacus wrote:
| If I remember correctly, broadcasting is on non-Dolby
| standards as well. UK uses HLG right?
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Broadcast TV is HLG because it's backwards compatible with
| non-HDR TVs. And yes used by UK (BBC is the one that came
| up with HLG even)
| pier25 wrote:
| > _Hollywood movies primarily standardized on Dolby Vision_
|
| No, pretty much the entire video/streaming industry did.
| Apple, Netflix, Disney, HBO, etc, either stream in DV or
| HDR10 (non plus).
|
| Physical Bluray is slowly dying (I own a bunch of those) so
| streaming is really where most of the HDR video content
| lives.
|
| > _Similarly games regularly opt for HDR10 /HDR10+ for their
| HDR output instead of Dolby Vision_
|
| Fair point, but consumers keep complaining the PS5 doesn't
| have DV which is an indicator of what people want. DV is
| actually a big selling point for the Xbox Series X.
|
| On PC, I don't know. I've been playing HDR in consoles for
| years but support on Windows has been pretty bad until
| recently. My impression is HDR is so much more popular on
| consoles vs PC. Same with Atmos and surround.
| izacus wrote:
| That's funny, since PS5 doesn't support Atmos at all and on
| Windows you need to buy a paid plugin to make it work for
| anything that's not a Home Theatre system.
|
| (And even if you have a home theatre system, Windows games
| will still prefer outputting 5.1 / 7.1 PCM and mixing 3D
| effects by themselves).
|
| I'd also be interested to hear where those Dolby Vision
| complaints for PS5 are coming from, I haven't heard anyone
| really say that despite HDR being debated quite a lot :)
| TheTon wrote:
| For games another reason they don't need dynamic metadata is
| they produce their content on the fly and they're doing tone
| mapping themselves already and can tailor it to the display
| characteristics.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Dolby Vision is
| actually a mess of a standard, with several different not-quite-
| compatible "profiles." Streaming video is Profile 5, UHD Blu-ray
| Discs are Profile 7[1], and iPhone Dolby Vision is Profile 8.
| Profile 7 cannot be converted into Profile 5 [completely
| incompatible and different algorithms!], devices that implement
| Profile 5 can't necessarily play Profile 7, but Profile 7 can
| with difficulty be theoretically converted into Profile 8 which
| is basically stripped-down Profile 7 with quirks[2]. Basically,
| Dolby Vision is fragmented within itself. Fun stuff.
|
| [1] And within Profile 7, there is the difference between the MEL
| (Minimum Enhancement Layer) which just adds HDR data, versus the
| FEL (Full Enhancement Layer) which actually adapts a 10-bit core
| video stream into a 12-bit one for FEL compatible players. Not
| all Profile 7 implementations can handle FEL, but can handle MEL.
| So even the profiles themselves have fragmentation. FEL and MEL
| are, within Profile 7, actually HEVC video streams that are
| 1920x1080 that the player reads simultaneously with the 4K
| content. So a FEL/MEL player is actually processing 2 HEVC
| streams simultaneously, so it's not a huge surprise why it isn't
| used for streaming DV.
|
| [2] Profile 8 comes in 3 different versions, Profiles 8.1 through
| 8.4. 8.3 is not used. Profile 8.1 is backwards compatible with an
| HDR10 stream, Profile 8.2 a SDR stream, and Profile 8.4 an HLG
| stream. Big surprise that iPhone uses 8.4 because HLG can be
| seamlessly converted into SDR or some other HDR formats when
| necessary.
|
| https://professionalsupport.dolby.com/s/article/What-is-Dolb...
| smm11 wrote:
| Pono Player checking in.
| mirkodrummer wrote:
| Any suggested readings about codecs/encodings/formats/algorithms
| used or whatnot? I'm afraid it's the thing I lack most as a dev
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| AKA we will crush your smaller company focused on high quality
| standards with our half assed support that lasts until you're
| dead, maybe people will confuse this for "open"
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| I love it when a powerful corporation's self interest happens to
| align with the public's interests.
| Bombthecat wrote:
| Do they?
|
| Imagine android tv disabling atmos because of licensing or
| netflix, then using the new format which needs a new receiver.
|
| I spent 2k on mine for atmos 4 ceiling speakers..
| kyriakos wrote:
| By the time that happens dolby would have the next iteration
| of atmos and you'll have to get a new receiver. This is the
| sad truth about modern consumer electronics, very short life
| span.
| izacus wrote:
| Why would they disable Atmos?
| foxbee wrote:
| 'Google wants to take on...'
|
| My immediate reaction to reading these few words is - "another
| tool for the Google graveyard"
| rektide wrote:
| It's super unclear to me why Dolby keeps being the ones to do
| basic things. What is underneath the marketting gloss? It feels
| like we are all paying a lot for high bit depth, paying a lot for
| multi-channel audio.
|
| I have never understood how or why it is that expensive
| proprietary codecs keep taking over. Maybe there is more value
| add somewhere, but it's very unclear, esepcially under the gloss
| of (usually deeply non technical) marketting fluff.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| They invented a lot of this stuff first, some of the
| preliminary work going back decades. It's not a secret. It
| predates digital audio.
|
| There's nothing stopping open source digital codecs from
| ruling, but they need people working for them.
|
| Personally, I'd rather pay dollars than data.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Partly marketing and licensing deals with studios - they do
| market very heavily. But they did pretty much invent the whole
| surround sound thing as we know it today, as well as a host of
| other realtime audio processing technologies. They're kinda the
| luxury mattress company of theatrical audio - it's expensive,
| but once you get it installed it's really nice to have.
|
| When I did audio production in the film industry, Dolby stuff
| was a post production expense but not e very big one. Their
| license fees aren't staggeringly expensive, and the quality and
| reliability of the playback system was its own argument - if
| the Dolby 5.1 sounds right in one theater it's going to sound
| right in another, and that's a big deal because bad sound can
| really kill a movie, even if the audience can't articulate why
| (most people don't think too much about sound).
|
| Digidesign (the manufacturers of Pro Tools & later owners of
| Avid) are a far more aggressive company that has maintained a
| virtual lock on its market with a combination of very expensive
| hardware and moat-building strategies.
| izacus wrote:
| Don't underestimate existing business relations and contracts.
| The format you're using is the format that your
| TV/soundbar/tablet support. There's only a few manufacturers of
| those and they have decades of business relationship with
| Dolby.
|
| Breaking those proprietary realtionships with open source has
| always been a losing battle - look at HEVC vs. VP9 vs. AV1
| battles or AptX vs. AAC vs. Opus.
|
| Media industry is a surprisingly tight knit and very
| conservative club that doesn't adopt outsiders easily.
| UltraViolence wrote:
| Like DTS HD Master Audio (which is basically HiRes PCM) and
| Dolby TrueHD (which too is basically HiRes PCM)? We're
| basically paying for an alternative WAV or FLAC format.
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