Kostya's Boring Codec World

“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.

I consider 2020 to be the cut-off point after which it was time for various idiots to shine and make impact on the world. And they’ve been doing an outstanding work since. Among their achievements is something I didn’t expect to see and yet here it is: being right (for completely wrong reasons).

Normally you see the opposite: somebody takes a sane idea and uses it as a pretext for some bad proposals (let’s not even touch all those proposals with the justification of “but think of the children!”, the famous Chinese Four Pests campaign should serve as a good example too—you start with a sane idea of increasing harvests by eliminating pests that hurt crops, you decide to eradicate all species seen near fields and you end up discovering a truth known to any biologist, that birds are much better at hunting insects than people and killing them was a bad idea). Occasionally you see the proverbial broken clock being right (if you generate inane ideas sooner or later one of them might be sane for a change). But recently I’ve started to notice a significant amount of ideas that are actually right but for all the wrong reasons. Most of them are political ones but you can spot some in other areas (like medicine—it is hard to explain why wearing masks was proposed during COVID-19 pandemic when they didn’t believe in the virus spreading by air).

Before moving to the powerhouse of right ideas for wrong reasons, I’d like to mention Hungarian prime minister who claims that Ukraine won’t be allowed to the EU until it conquers corruption. Of course he’s right except for one detail: it is Hungarian corruption that blocks Ukrainian membership and it’s EU that should do something about it (and yet does nothing—so it’s up to Ukraine to fight against at least one of major “patrons” of Hungarian government).

And of course the majority of right ideas for wrong reasons come from the USA. For starters, USian president had a proposal to Europe to stop buying russian gas and oil. There’s nothing wrong with that idea except when you look at the motives, and they’re not about undermining the aggressor’s main income but rather for making Europe dependent on USian fossil fuel (but still dependent on single supplier). A similar proposal for Europe to be more self-reliant in the defence sector instead of relying on USA is equally good unless you see the implied part, namely that Europe can’t trust USA to honour its obligations and that “self-reliance” means buying USian equipment to replace what currently garrisoned forces use and probably paying for the e.g. USian military intelligence services. I’m starting to see a pattern here…

For more IT-related stuff, banning TikTok is an excellent idea. I have not used it myself but from what I heard about it from different sources it’s essentially a digital drug with controlled narratives (and with a vehemently denied role of CPC in that process). Both addictiveness and propaganda are good reasons to ban it and similar creations outright. And yet we see that the main reason is not that it is bad but rather because it is not controlled by US government or corporations (is there still a difference?), so if the USian segment is sold to a USian company it’s all fine.

The last one would be the warrant put by the International Criminal Court on Netanyahu. Regardless of what you think about his recent actions against Gaza, it is his politics that created this situation and endangered lives of the people he is supposed to protect (the same applies to Iran with its mostly peaceful nuclear programme that previously was stopped by Israeli military forces at much earlier stages than “couple of weeks before a bomb”). Throw in his behaviour of a typical dictator (nominally just a prime minister but considering their recent judicial reform and similar things any other dictator in the club does), he really deserves an international warrant (especially since local courts are not likely to do anything about him). But the way ICC handled it feels more like they were politically (or even religiously) motivated instead of trying to bring justice. Sadly this is a likely story with all those international organisations—they tend to outlive their usefulness and become an empty formality often driven by petty interests of the only members who care enough to do anything.

As usual, I can’t do anything about it so I simply point out what’s wrong with this world and move on. The solution exists though: just make people remember old deeds and claims, think, and call others on their bullshit—this will make things much better in just one generation. Implementation details are left to the reader as an exercise.

Here’s something worth reminding of, something I’m not going to tackle myself and it’s not likely somebody else will pick up. I’m talking about an intermediate form between static videos and interactive games, which I called (semi) interactive movies.

The best-known representative of those is Flash. Some of you old enough may remember it as a source of annoyance in form of extremely animated ad banners, some of you not so old may remember Flash games, younger people may remember it as an annoying web player that every video hosting required until they all got rid of it (reportedly by a whim of one man). But there was a time when Flash was used for its original purpose: creating animations (often bundled with a stand-alone player) or slightly interactive animations (like a blender with several buttons you can press and depending on it a different animation will play; it was gory and disgusting, it’s better to watch something nice and cute like Happy Tree Friends instead).

Of course Flash is reasonably well supported by open-source software to the point you can even run it in the browser without installing a plug-in. But there were more and not all from the same company.

Macintosh had MacroMind Director which allowed to create interactive applications a la HyperCard. Later it was ported to Windows as well and was used to create more or less portable games or activity centres and such. Eventually it was bought up with its sibling projects and compressed into shitbrickmud-brick, but meanwhile it managed to spawn several variations. There were “Gaffed Director movies” (usually bundled with stand-alone player), there were RIFF Multimedia Movies (in .mmm files), I’m pretty sure there more flavours of it too. Rather recently ScummVM started to support some games made with Director (which is not that easy task considering different engine revisions and that it often relied on platform-specific plug-ins for extended functions like playing videos or CD audio—up to decrypting data). So if you want to have support for the formats I mentioned the best course would be probably to write a new player based on their code-base (because it’s probably the best foundation to start from and ScummVM is for playing games, not this kind of content).

Another similar system I’m aware of is Brilliant Digital Entertainment’s Multipath Movies. I haven’t played any of them but from the description it sounds a lot like those DVD menu-based games. The engine seems to be under one megabyte and its data is self-contained (one large .bhf for the content plus auxiliary .map and .nav files—a striking difference from Director with its .cxt and .dxr files referencing each other and all other external resources).

There are so many old neglected formats that deserve to be preserved for the posterity, here I hope to remind people at least of some.

P.S. Why wouldn’t I implement it? Exactly because it’s not the kind of multimedia I work with. Mostly I write a decoder and I can do whatever I want with the decoded output. Here one has more to mind inner engine workings: interpreting engine script, synchronising output composed mostly of sprites, mind potential user input and such. And hardly any work on figuring how how video is compressed. So if you want to be the next open-source software hero—well, here’s a good challenge for you.

Occasionally I watch videos about old games and gaming history (because there might be an old adventure game I have not played or an old game with a custom video format I haven’t looked at). And sometimes I see the claims about somebody doing stuff first which are not true—usually because the competition is gone or only a small group of fanboys cares, so there’s nobody to disprove their claims. One such example would be the cult status of ZX Spectrum in late USSR and post-Soviet countries: it was essentially the only microcomputer that enthusiasts could afford (except for i8080/i8086 clones that were even worse), as the result it was praised for its uniqueness, revolutionary innovations and such; when USSR dissolved, IBM PC has won the market already and the systems from e.g. Commodore were virtually unknown. IMO ZX Spectrum had two advantages: partial compatibility with i8080 thanks to Zilog Z80 CPU and cheap and simple chipset that even USSR could clone and produce. The rest was subpar or shitty (especially its graphics that rivalled CGA in being eye-gouging bad)—but hardly anybody had experience even with Bulgarian Apple II clones let alone something better. So this rant is dedicated to similar situations with both computer hardware and software.

Let’s start with hardware.

For starters, a lot of people believe that CPU was invented by Intel while in reality it’s not just TI that beat them to it, there are many other predecessors as well. See this article for more details and arguments. But considering how many CPU companies have been around and surviving since 1970s it’s no wonder people forget about the no longer existing competitors. Similarly if you know what DEC Alpha did back in the day, Pentium achievements do not look that impressive.

Similarly Nvidia claims to have invented GPU—with a definition tailored to point at their product. Who cares about SGI, 3dfx, or even Argonaut Games with their Super FX chip? Apparently people still remember it but for how long…

And speaking about game consoles, here’s a nice video pointing out some things widely believed to have been invented by N*nt*nd* while they were not.

Let’s move to software and games specifically. There’s often-repeated claim about Lucasfilm Games being a pioneer in adventure games genre by introducing a scripting engine to drive it. To me that is a perfect example of a claim people believe because others were too modest to advertise the fact. While ADVENT(URE) was written in FORTRAN, its re-imagining Zork was later re-written in ZIL—a custom language for its own virtual machine designed specially for text adventures. What’s more, Ken Williams designed a custom engine for his wife’s game (which was the first graphical adventure game BTW) and later (Sierra) On-line adventure games (and sometimes other kinds of games too) have been running on some customisable scripting engine (ADL was replaced with AGI, AGI was replaced with SCI, SCI had been in use until the company was effectively killed). Similarly this post about The Secret of Monkey Island has this passage: “Back then, the randomly generated forest was cutting edge technology. Disk space was at a premium.” One can even get an impression it was something special invented by them—until you read this post from Al Lowe which describes how he’s done it in a games released a year prior to SoMI. And I guess the same approach has been re-invented by the console game creators even earlier.

And of course I can’t go past multimedia. I wrote a post about Opus, how similar CELT design is to G.722.1 especially to its version in RealAudio (mind you, it’s still innovative but not as much as you’d expect it to be); I have not explored it further but overall Opus design resembles USAC a lot and I don’t remember hearing anything explaining that “coincidence”.

Another thing is that the only open-source multimedia player that really came close to “plays it all” was the one released last century and it was called XAnim. I mentioned it before and it deserves to be mentioned again (and again). It had everything you don’t still have e.g. in VLC: frame stepping forward and backward, support for most of the formats of the day (and I suppose a good deal of them were reverse engineered by Mark Podlipec himself; I still sometimes find to my surprise that some obscure format like DL were supported by it). And for certain formats he could not support in open-source form he actually managed to negotiate and release closed-source plugins. For a very long time it served as the source of decoders for such projects as MPlayer or FFmpeg. Even more, its Indeo decoder plugins often were the only way to decode Indeo 4 and 5 on non-x86 Unix systems. After looking at it all achievements from other open-source multimedia players do not look that impressive. And yet its site is gone and it has not got a Wickedpedia page…

Moving on, there’s an “advanced” russian operating system developed by one guy which sounded revolutionary (flat address space encompassing both RAM and disk storage, persistence, inherent security achieved by allowing only interactions between objects). You may believe it unless you actually know a bit of computing history and start asking questions like “why does this persistence and object interaction sound almost exactly like Smalltalk environment?” or “why does this idea of really flat memory space sounds almost exactly like that OS from old IBM mainframes?”. The question “why did he decide to remove all mentions of KeyKOS from the documentation?” does not require an answer IMO.

And for the end let’s talk about a certain display system. Back in the day some people were dissatisfied with X11 and decided to make a modern replacement. That windowing system was supposed to use hardware acceleration where possible, object graph to manage input from different clients (and isolate them from each other), industry-standard ways of passing messages and such. That sounds a lot like Wayland? But that’s not it, I was talking about Berlin (it appears to be memory-holed; the rather generic name does not help searches either. The sad thing is that one of the developers haven’t learned anything from it and later created a programming language with too generic name—see the other repositories of that guy I linked if you still have no idea what I’m talking about).

Why I wrote this post? Definitely not to create a “top N innovative things that were invented elsewhere much earlier”. And it’s not to shame people (let alone companies—those have no shame by definition) either. I was just trying to remind the world that you should take even wide-known claims with a grain of salt since history is written by winners and the voices of those who lost the competition are often get forgotten or remain unheard. So maybe next time you hear about how great, innovative and even revolutionary something is, think about the proof of such claim beside the claimant words themselves.

I never had a reason to care about Halloween, and nowadays real world news are more scary than any imagined horrors. Yet I remembered one of my old trips so why not mention that curious fact.

There’s a town somewhere between Frankfurt and Frankfurt-lowcost airports named Oppenheim. People coming from there are obviously known as Oppenheimer, as well as their descendants and people marrying their descendants like the famous Lillian Oppenheimer (I know her as the person who popularised origami but apparently she’s a mother of several well-known mathematicians as well) and some guy claiming to become death, destroyer of the worlds.

But the town itself is more sinister, even if you disregard its catacombs. There’s Frankensteiner Hof—or residence of Frankenstein (maybe the descendant moved to Bavaria and got famous there). As for real monsters, just around the corner from the previous landmark they have a street named simply Zuckerberg—no suffixes for street or alley at all, just Zuckerberg.

It’s much better on the other side of Hessen—in Bavarian Miltenberg they have plainly named Hauptstraße (meaning simply “main street”) and parallel to it runs Mainstraße, specially for the foreigners who don’t understand German.

The recent news about OpenZL made me think about some tangential issue.

The approach by itself is nothing new really, a lot of archivers include pre-processing step for data (I don’t know if there are an earlier examples, but de-interleaving or delta-coding floating-point data might be only slightly younger than geo file in the Calgary Corpus, LZX includes translating call addresses into absolute offset for better compression etc); more advanced archivers implement flexible processing steps (e.g. RAR had its own custom VM for pre-processing data which was essentially a security nightmare cut-down 8086 instruction set, and ZPAQ which allows to define compression steps for data-specific compression that won’t require a new decoder—in other words, something very similar to OpenZL). There’s nothing wrong with the approach and it’s probably useful outside, say, genomic data compression, it’s just it raises two questions: what is the current general compression/resources accepted trade-off and what would be a good candidate for an open-source archiver?

The first question is obvious: with the times the available CPU power and RAM grows along with the amounts of data to compress. Back in the day gzip was the golden standard and bzip2 was something eating too much RAM and worked rather slow. A bit later .tar.bz2 started to replace .tgz for, say, distribution tarballs. Nowadays it’s .tar.xz or .tar.zstd, which makes me wonder if it’s really the sweet spot for now or if things will move to adapting a compression scheme that’s slower but offers better compression ratio.

The second question follows from the first one: what would be a good candidate, specifically for open-source applications. If you look around, there are not so many of those. You can divide existing formats (don’t confuse them with implementations) into several (sometimes overlapping) categories:

• proprietary formats with an official open-source decoder at best (like RAR) or unofficial reverse-engineered one (e.g. RAD mythical sea creatures formats and LZNIB);
• open-source compression libraries targeting fast compression (LZO, LZ4, FLZ, LZF, etc, etc);
• old open-source compressors (compress, gzip, bzip2, zip);
• various programs trying to bank on well-known name while not being related (bzip3 and anything with “zip” in its name really);
• state-of-the-art compressors that require insane amounts of CPU and RAM (anything PAQ-based, NNCP);
• corporate-controlled open-source formats (brotli, Zstandard).

The question is what would be a good candidate for the next de-facto compression standard. The current widespread formats are good since they’re easy to implement and there are many independent implementations in various languages, but how much can we trust the next generation—the one with flexible input pre-processing (the third question would be if that’s really the design approach mainstream compression formats will take).

For instance, I have nothing against LZMA but considering that its author is russian how much can we trust that he won’t be visited by FAPSI representatives and forced to make changes in LZMA3 design that will make Jia Tan green with envy? As for the formats coming from corporations, are you really going to rely on their goodwill? I think the story with LZW should serve as a warning.

The only reassuring thing is that it is still rather easy to design a new compression scheme and even achieve decent compression ratio and performance (unlike training a neural network or even designing a video codec to rival H.265), so good candidates are likely to appear sooner or later.