Kostya's Boring Codec World

Late (and still great) Sir Pterry was a writer who wrote great footnotes as well as the books to contain them (name any other author who put a footnote even into the book title!). And while Thief of Time probably was not written for this particular footnote, it would’ve not been half as good without it:

Every society needs a cry like that, but only in a very few do they come out with the complete, unvarnished version, which is “Remember-the-Atrocity-Committed-Against-Us-Last-Time-That-Will-Excuse-the-Atrocity-That-We’re-About-to-Commit-Today! And So On! Hurrah!”

I think this describes the best the situation observed in this world as well: too many groups (from individuals to communities spanning many nations) think they were greatly wronged in the past and this excuses whatever they’re going to do. In the best case it’s merely against the perceived/appointed enemies, in the worst case it’s against everybody. Of course since those people think they’re right (or don’t think at all) they don’t want to understand that their enemies are likely to retaliate in the same way with the same reasoning.

The classic example would be Christianity with its usual claim about great persecutions during Diocletian times (not paying attention to how many religions were there and practiced legally while only a couple of them were forbidden—probably for being too peaceful). That apparently gave them right to pursue the competitors opponents in equally or even more cruel ways; and of course that has not stopped when neither the original opponents nor the Roman Empire were around.

Another classic example would be Israel. I whole-heartedly agree that Jews should not have been killed or persecuted just for being different (neither in 1938-1945 nor in other time periods) and they deserve their own state. What I don’t agree is that their tragedy gives them the right to behave in the same way as it was done unto them back in the day. Yet paradoxically enough currently Israel has an anti-Semitic government in both senses, hostile both to Palestinians and Jews except of very special sort (who don’t want to defend Israel by themselves). At least they’re not talking expanding their Lebensraum, otherwise the similarity would too much to bear. And no friendly country does not do much against it because of the unfortunate associations (even with a token ICC verdict against Netanyahu some European countries openly declared they won’t comply because it would be anti-Semitism). Mind you, I don’t have anything against the population itself beside the fact they elected this government (more than once) which may lead their country to destruction by pissing off allies and courting with enemies. But I’ll talk about USA a bit later.

Moving to Europe, there’s a Catholic version of Israel called Poland. Since most of the people do not have a reason to learn about it, here’s a short version: the golden years of it were when the Kingdom of Poland united with Grand Duchy of Lithuania forming Rzeczpospolita (essentially the word “republic” or “commonwealth” translated into Polish). With that union they got a lot of Ukrainian lands whose agricultural output was responsible for a good deal of Rzeczpospolita wealth. And yet, unlike Lithuanians, they treated Ukrainians badly for being of a different branch of Christianity (and maybe not having their own state). Eventually Ukrainians started an uprising, ending up with their own republic and dealing a mortal blow to Rzeczpospolita in a Pyrrhic victory—the weakened Poland was eventually conquered and split up between two European empires (Austro-Hungarian and German) and russia. Wiser people would’ve made some conclusions about tolerance and treating own population decently, Poles instead found no fault with them (because nobody does) and decided that it’s a martyrdom they have to bear because they’re special. So the next times they re-instated their republic it went the same way: mistreating non-Poles, suffering from the mistakes, only reinforcing them in their idea of martyr nation. And nowadays it looks like they’ve not learned anything, still holding 80-year old grudges against Ukrainians (because they dared to kill occupational Polish officers and settlers on Ukrainian territory) fuelling them into anti-Semitism level of hate. If you look you can see the news in any given week about Poles either beating Ukrainians for speaking Ukrainian (which sounds not that different from Polish BTW) or other Poles for mistaking them for Ukrainians. And those notions are instigated predominantly by their current president and the main opposition party who, unlike the government and many ordinary Poles, do not even formally condemn such behaviour.

And finally let’s talk about USA. It is hard to argue that they suffered any injustice beside being forced to pay taxes (some claim that taxes were rather the pretext and the real reason was prohibition of trade with French colonies from which rum distilleries in British colonies obtained cheap and abundant molasses; in either case it was about the money and unwillingness to give them away). So in order to be less ashamed about it they threw it some ideas about liberty and human rights in general (no slaves need apply) and started an uprising. Apparently this combination of being the first democratic republic (if you don’t count the ones appearing in Europe a century before) and reluctance to pay money gave them the main two pretexts for doing anything: being the missionaries of democracy (which compelled them to occupy various other lands at different times, democratic or not, as well as trying to annex Canada) and paying for something being a great offence. Or maybe rather “we could smuggle our greed under a pretence of higher moral ideals, we can do it again”. No wonder they spawn the ideologies like effective altruism (aka “I know better what to do with my money, don’t make me pay taxes”). I’ve started writing this post before the current USian president made a claim that he wants European countries to pay for the past military aid that Ukraine received for free before his term, but it’s definitely not against the trend. Timeo Danaos…

The sad thing those examples show is that such behaviour is not self-destructive (enough) and it can mutually subsist on the similar behaviour from the other side (think about the classic example of long-lasting blood feud from Romeo and Juliet Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) but its substrate (people infected with those ideas) will suffer even if they feel great and superior to everybody else. I’d recommend scepticism and clear thinking but I know that people don’t like to think in general, let alone about the things that would make them feel bad and less important.

I semi-jokingly say that that Alsace deserves to be called Südpfalz since the cultural border there is not clear unlike the country borders. And I mentioned back in the day that a lot of places in central Rheinland-Pfalz (or Rheinland-Palatinate if you don’t recognise its proper name) sound even more French than those close to the border (no matter from which side—e.g. both have river Lauter and a town named after it, be it Lauterbourg or Lauterecken; and Hœrdt is on comparable distance from the border as Hördt). But recently I’ve seen something that made me even more suspicious about the influences.

There’s a small town not far from Mainz called Gau-Algesheim and it has rather peculiar variation of the local dialect. Here are two examples of it:

This is a bench installed in the town centre in the memory of one of its distinguished citizens. The words on that bench are “Weck, Worscht & Woi” which I believe map to the common German “WerkBrötchen, Wurst & Wein” (or “workbun, sausage and wine” auf Englisch). Side note: thanks for the commenter for the correction, I should’ve looked in the dictionary first.

And this is one of the billboards you can encounter there. There are others, featuring other picturesque sights of the town like Graulturm, but the motto remains the same on all of them. I really have no idea what the words “so charmant” may mean in the local dialect but you cannot convince me that they don’t sound suspiciously French.

Hopefully I was able to demonstrate my point that there’s something fishy going there. I’ll keep investigating the mysteries of the land (here’s another example: the centre of local shoe industry was in Pirmasens and yet the museum dedicated to it is located in Hauenstein instead—with a shoe stolen from Montabaur, which is a very long way from either of them), at least for my own amusement.

I use my own player for playing videos. It’s not very optimised (video frame decoded with VA-API gets downloaded to my own frame structure in main RAM, which gets uploaded to SDL texture and only then displayed—the proper way is to allocate EGL texture once and use it both for VA-API decoding and displaying; or maybe the same but Vulkan and semaphores all the way) but apparently playing back 25fps video even in that way takes less CPU than updating one line with play time in gnome-console at about 10fps.

I have a feeling something went wrong with the modern software…

With this matter, I hope I actually shan’t have more to write about. But this thought needed to be written out (only if to unload it from my head).

For some reason the current state of affairs around “AI” reminds me a lot of alcohol. Mind you, it’s a useful substance (as a solvent or a disinfectant), some people may even use it in recreational purposes or to deal with stress—but there are always some people abusing it, often for no good reason, and giving bad name to it all. Also there were countries whose budget was largely dependent on alcohol over-consumption but that’s less important here.

The situation with “AI” assistants looks entirely familiar: some people use it responsibly and even achieve useful results with it, but it’s usually other people (a loud but hopefully still minority) who abuse such tools to the point they get high with imaginary power and behave themselves as typical drunks: some boast how much they can consume (tokens or pints of beer), some vomit uncontrollably (you can see the results on GitHub—when it is still up of course), some suffer from neuro-toxic effects (and can’t move or code straight any longer without an external support), some lose all internal restraints (there’s little difference between alcoholics raising ruckus because their favourite liquor store is closed when they want to get a drink and AIcoholics trying to push slop to some project without caring what the change does and why the project in question doesn’t want to accept it). And occasionally you can see the entertaining stunts that would cause normal person a serious damage (like falling from a third floor or deleting a production database) but with a person in question not realising that at all.

Hopefully the situation with “AI” will mature and normalise so that the technology abusers will be shamed for their actions and become an exception instead of current “sport fans right after the match” vibe.

“AI” as itself does not interest (or bother) me much, so I find it more interesting to look how this phenomenon interacts with the world around. Here’s one rather unexpected parallel.

I’m not trying to claim that current “AI” fills exactly the same niche or follow exactly the same history, but I find the coincidences rather amusing.

Hollywood started when most of the movie studios moved to California in order to be far from Edison’s company which owned a lot of patents on cinema equipment; there they started to indulge in mild and hard copyright violations—the most prominent example, let’s call it The Big Mouse to protect the guilty, was founded by a person whose original character was essentially stolen from him, so he created that Big Mouse (which looks suspiciously close to his first creation) and started to make money by taking public domain works and creating derivatives (which now were protected by all possible USian laws, to the extent of the certain nickname copyright term extension act got). And apparently they thrived on the fact that screenplays being derivative work could be used without any royalties to the original author (unless you explicitly want to use that work or author’s name for better publicity of course), so the studios saved a lot of money by producing a completely “original” script definitely not based on some book or another script sent to them by some naïve scriptwriter (I’m not sure that Nosferatu was even the first movie to pull such a trick but it definitely had a lot of followers in the following century).

Now look at the “AI” produced content and make the comparison for yourself.

Then there’s a common trend of financial gravitation, when smaller companies grow into larger ones by absorbing everything around (and occasionally merging) so even if you start with the cloud dust of many indepedtent researches it will eventually accrete into just a couple of giant companies (maybe with some satellites) absorbing anything they can reach. So like in Hollywood you have half a dozen of major studios and a couple of small fish, there maybe about the same number of large “AI” companies with no serious competition. It may also explain why the heads of the companies are often people who don’t understand anything about the businesses they run but that’s so common that you rather need to list rare exceptions.

And partly this can be explained (damn! I said I see it as a coincidence, not something following the same trajectory by obeying the same general laws) by their productions being soulless large-budgeted “original” productions (I’ll probably just call it SLOP for short) that use a lot of GPUs to render the final result.

But there’s definitely a difference! Hollywood is known for its accounting system that raises relatively large sums of investments and subsidies and then reports losses on movies no matter how much income they bring. I’ve never heard “AI” companies being accused of hiding profits, only for using a creative accounting to hide losses in order to attract more investments. Definitely nothing in common here!

So there you have it, two completely different categories of enterprise, giving you ephemeral products (in the sense that you watch a movie or run an “AI” agent for some task from them and then you’re left with nothing substantial afterwards, only vibes and feelings) and demonstrating similar behaviour. To repeat it at least for the third time, this is just a coincidence—but I get fun wherever I can find it.

Of course neither stupidity nor greed (nor a combination of both) has been scarce at any point of human history, but in these days it feels like the main driving force behind various decisions at all possible scales, from individuals to the countries.

Naturally, despite having the common mechanics (some entity pursuing short-term gains while destroying the prospect of long-term gains) there are different flavours of it and I’ll try to review some of those.

First of all there is something that can be called goodwill monetisation. In this case somebody tries to convert existing reputation, connections and such for instant financial gain even if that leads to ruining them (and the profit they generated) for rather meagre compensation. The simplest example is any company selling its customer base data to e.g. advertisers (large corporations can get off with it by being monopolists and not having much reputation to lose in the first place). But the biggest beautifullest example of it is USA as a state. Back in the day I wrote a post about it that USA got as successful as it was until quite recently because it created a field and rules for everybody to play by. But certain somebody decided that USA is too important so if it will demand money from other trade participants just because and they will comply—not understanding that the trade was flowing to the USA because it was an attractive country for that and his decisions make it less attractive country and in the future others would think twice before doing any business with it (a small personal example: I haven’t bought anything USian in 2025 even if I had done that before occasionally and I’m not sure if I’ll ever consider it again). Similar acts regarding other things (like trying to leverage NATO to act as its personal army as well as buying more USian weapons just because; all while demonstrating how unwise it is to rely on them or—as Switzerland has recently learned—even to get what you paid for). I’m pretty sure more examples will keep providing themselves, all I can say that all trust-based systems would have the same effect (e.g. try to cash in 10% of total company stock or “crypto”coins emission in a short time and their price will drop even during such transactions and probably will remain low for a long time after).

Then there’s management. By that I mean not merely a swear-word (equivalent to being stupid and greedy sociopaths) but the acts of destroying company in the long term for short-term benefits (resulting in bonus for the manager, the only important thing here). You know, outsourcing production overseas, laying off staff just to show certain level of expenses cut (even if you have to hire those people back next quarter and not all of them will agree to come back), rushing production and cutting corners and so on and so on. Probably you can point at any large company for that but the best example IMO is Boeing with its catchy slogan “if it’s Boeing I’m not going”. Usually the companies have some robustness so when the aftermath of management starts to show it’s too late to save them (of course there are small miracles like Lou Gerstner and RedHat but in general don’t bet on it). I heard that vestments and options are supposed to fix that but I suspect it won’t work as good while there are no repercussions for doing badly (i.e. if you screwed up your current company you’ll still get your precious metal parachute and get employed by another company—unless you need a presidential pardon to remain in business of course).

There’s also general stupidity best illustrated by this joke: Security arrested a man who tried to smuggle uranium in his underpants. They ask him why did he do that and does he realise he won’t have any children now? To that he replied that he’d get enough money to leave to his grandchildren. This case is nothing new and happens every day to many individuals (you probably can name a couple of examples yourself). And if you wonder how it’s different from the previous two cases, it’s the nuances: in goodwill monetisation you kill the hen laying eggs for making a pillow (not even a soup!), management usually destroys somebody else’s property for their personal gains, here it is exercising a plan without thinking about consequences while those consequences backfire and make the original goal unachievable.

Another case can be called “a bull in a china shop”. Here some entity is so envious about money going past them that it makes a desperate grab for them, making things worse for everybody. Since this is a blog (occasionally) about multimedia, the most appropriate example would be codec licensing. The idea was simple: a committee creates a codec from the best technologies submitted by different entities (companies, universities, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft etc), then everybody enjoys the best technology for a reasonable fee, which is used to pay the original creators—everybody wins. But then not just the patent holders involved in the codec creation got stupid greedy but completely unrelated entities as well, so now we have at least three patent pools for H.EVC and nobody is willing to use VVC at all (maybe except Brazil). So of course it’s the best time to raise fees on H.264.

And of course it gets better! The natural reaction to such thing is to move away from patented stuff—which Alliance for Open Media did. So the predators moved after them. Even before AOMedia there was VP8 and Nokia with its famous patent that apparently covered any modern video codec. And there’s D*lby, definitely not a nice company (fun fact: unless I’m mistaken, when this originally British company moved to USA, D*lby Labs Licensing Corp got incorporated earlier than D*lby Labs Inc.). For a long time it was known for its cinematic equipment and, more importantly, for charging significantly more money for its ATSC A/52B codec than others for their codecs combined (I don’t have official numbers of course but I heard that while H.264+AAC decoding cost ten cents or less per unit, for ETSI 102 366 you had to pay over a dollar per unit; plus a custom license deal—in other words, it’s better not to deal with their stuff at all). With their successor codec not being that popular (despite so many wonderful DRC modes!), D*lby Vision not being too widespread either, their only winning move was apparently to go after the competition. So first they sued two companies here in Germany for using AOMedia OACv0 (aka Opus) which allegedly violates their patents, later they went after other companies for using AV1 which allegedly violates their patents (AOMedia definitely needs to produce more stuff to get sued after, IAMF might be not enough). I don’t know if D*lby wants a one-time ransompayment, or a constant stream of royalties for a free stuff (don’t ask me how it would work, they don’t care either), or to be bought by large AOMedia member(s). All I can say is that this situation definitely makes it worse for everybody not even directly involved in it.

If you wonder if there are other types of stupid greediness being practiced, there definitely are—idiots can be very inventive after all. Meanwhile the (dis)honorary mention goes to “AI” companies for blending all of those flavours of stupid greed into one large slop.

What a time to be alive!

It’s been four full years of/since February 24, 2022 when russian reich openly invaded Ukraine with boisterous claims that they’ll take Kyiv in three days and the rest of territory in a week. They wanted small victorious special military operation but something went wrong. Despite having much larger territory, population, economy, more allies and being prepared for it they still failed to achieve their goals—and by those I mean their real goals of occupying and fully annihilating Ukraine, using its resources (people included) to continue a war on other territories; their declared goals change depending on the situation at the frontline (or as one of them said, the goal of it will be formulated when it’s over).

Nobody believed that Ukraine would stand and yet it does despite all the help russia receives from its allies like Belarus, China, DPRK, Iran, and, apparently, USA. The situation is far from being good, with russian attacks targeting almost exclusively civilian targets, currently trying to leave Ukrainian cities without electricity and heating during the extremely cold weather. And yet Ukraine stands.

At least this war exposed some things: that russians are no people (not because of some biological differences, mind you, they lack moral qualities that make humans humans and not just slightly smarter primates), that their money (or natural resources) buy affection indeed (often enough to close eyes to russian transgressions and atrocities—there are enough countries and international organisations serving as an example), and that it’s apparently contagious (just look at the USA that resembles russia even more with each passing day).

I’m not optimistic about the future but I really hope that Ukraine will stand and russia will fall down (despite efforts of USA to preserve it—not for the first time too). Only this way we’ll get some peace—until people forget and let another bully run unopposed.