Kostya's Boring Codec World

For those who infer from the title I’m going to talk about something negative, this is a philosophical term with rather positive definition. Also I guess this post goes against the old Latin principle noli stercus tangere et non olebit but oh well.

I happen to observe FFmpeg (not sure how to call this iteration of it) and it looks like it’s been never greater before, with a further potential to grow:

• there’s a new developer who not only looks like a perfect fit for the project but also seemed to unite other developers;
• the development has achieved new levels and got to the modern standards as can be seen from this patchset;
• even long-standing complaints about inaction against badly behaved developers have been addressed and bans are enacted (since last year even);
• important patchsets are pushed without unnecessary delays (for example, caused by reviews);
• participating in various trade shows with constant success;
• and thanks to STF the core developers can get funding for the crucial (or even critical) work in transparent way; and apparently cryptocurrency is an option too.

The things are going so well that FFmpeg can really afford not to care about every potential contributor (that ship has sailed indeed). More than that, they’ve even got their own soft Jia Tan—a person writing under multiple accounts and who introduced what others considered a glaring security hole (like there’s anything wrong with ffmpeg launching a third-party application on user’s request). All the tell-tale signs of success are there!

I honestly don’t see how the project can get any better (and yes, I feel that I’m not worthy to use it so I don’t).

Apparently there’s some work been done recently on the ProRes encoders in jbmpeg with the intent not merely to fix the bugs but also to leave just one. So why not talk about the format support, it’s about as entertaining as the recent story in the project demonstrating once again that most of the problems in open-source development can’t be solved by throwing donations, even moderately large ones.

So, ProRes, the format with its history being a rather good demonstration about the project issues (CEmpeg and libav back then, and FFmpeg throughout its history in general). This tale is full of whimsy (depending on your sense of humour of course) and contains moral as well.
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Inspired by recent events.

It is no secret that sometimes (or rather often, I’d say) political and business considerations prevail over technical ones. The persistent rumour said that MP3 format was not so bad originally but during the standardisation phase it had been changed to contain QMF in addition to MDCT because a certain company still help a patent on it. We have a couple of video codec standards developed not for any technical merit but rather for trying to create a patent-free formats (and failing at that). We see how many modern formats (not just audio or video, but streaming protocols as well) are essentially “one of everything” because each company tries to put its own technology there (probably for patent considerations)—and then even more companies appear with a claim to own a patent on the same technology (some of them form a patent pool, some act on their own). And of course we see Nokia (not the dead phone company and not the tyre producing one either) trying to become the SCO of this decade.

You know, the modern patent system was formed with the intent of sustaining development of new inventions: an inventor brings benefit to society with new inventions, society repays by granting that inventor a protection on exclusive rights for those inventions allowing to get profit from them. In theory a mutually beneficial scheme but people always find a way to game system and here we are. IMO the best patch to the legal system would be to strip those abusing their rights of that right, be it copyright (material part), industrial property rights or anything else. But as an optimist I expect the legions of lawyers to find a workaround for it rather fast.

Anyway, I wanted to demonstrate how political and financial interests spoiled already undead (I’ll elaborate below why I think so) project. And how a certain Frenchman paved a road with good intentions there. Of course I’m talking about FFmpeg (or jbmpeg as I name it after the current most influential person).
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