For the uninitiated, could you describe why codec development is slow and expensive?

thinkingQueen 8 days ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	phkahler 8 days ago \| parent [-]
		>> 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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mike_hearn 8 days ago | parent | prev [-]

They're hardware accelerated so it's not worth making a new codec until you have a big improvement over the prior baseline, because it takes a long time to manufacture and roll out devices that are better. Verifying an optimization is worth it requires testing against a big library of videos using standardized perception metrics, it requires ensuring there's an efficient way to decode it in both hardware and software, including efficient encoding. It's easy to improve one kind of input but regress another. Most of the low hanging fruit is taken already. Just the usual stuff that makes advancing the frontier hard.