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.
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.
It is stated in the article they're backing HDR10+.
Not sure about the audio.
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"
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.
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?
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).
[1] https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=183479 [2] https://pastebin.com/m5NfUTbc
The entire points of Dolby Vision is that it should give you the same image no matter what display you display it on, if the device is capable of displaying it. It’s an absolute format of light and color values, rather than a format based on RGB values.
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.
"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?
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.
If support for playing Ambisonics was added to (say) vlc, and easy-to-use conversion tools from Atmos to Ambisonics also existed, that'd probably go a long way to increasing it's adoption.
Libre and gratis ambisonics encoding and decoding software has existed for more than a decade. It is the domain of enthusiasts rather than regular consumers.
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!
Even a ton of modern motherboards have TOSLINK and lots of new equipment as well so its a worthwhile way to get a baseline quality 5.1 audio that still holds up very, very well for home systems today. DD+ with a good receiver and large speakers will blow away most of the cheaper Atmos systems.
You could also theoretically do this with most computers or a laptop with the right hardware and a little software digital encoder but the issue is that most of the time the way they have instituted DRM means that the browser is not going to even have access to 5.1 in the first place or your device (like any Nvidia graphics card for example - even if the HDMI output can include high quality audio) is going to just get 2.1 audio.
Dolby is more than a standard or spitting six channels of raw audio out of speakers. That's just the end product, because it's not just standard itself.
It is, for example, the hardware that is in cinemas and home theaters (encoders, decoders, Dolby RMU...), the certification processes that Dolby does in cinemas and recording and mixing studios, the mixing technicians who work with all that and send the final mixes with the netflix/hbo/whatever specifications, vendors, integration partners, speaker manufacturers...
There are also plugins that work in DAWs like Pro Tools, the ecosystem (Dolby Atmos Renderer, Dolby Atmos Production Suite), just to scratch the surface.
One thing is to publish a standard and another the ecosystem around that standard. It is interesting that there are new standards, but given Google's history with its long term attention span I have my doubts that this will materialize into anything more than an internal asset for google.
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.
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
Standards bodies are comprised of its member companies, who negotiate (oftentimes quite hard!) with one another over what IP ends up in the standards. They're non-governmental trade organizations (though I suppose with ISO it gets semi-governmental).
Disclosure: I work at Dolby but do not have anything to do with standards. I dabbled in standards bodies at a previous startup but am really not qualified to weigh in on any of this, besides the stray pedantry around language.
Interestingly enough, stereo was under patent in the 1930s -- so you did need a license then.
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.
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.
Sure, because that adds a ton of new complexity!
Going from 2 to 3+ in a digital format does not add complexity.
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.
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.
Hmm, it's not:
In terms of petroleum infrastructure, it's like slightly adjusting the ratios at the refinery.
What adds complexity is determining how many channels to use and what to put through them.
That is the important part now.
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.
You think patents is why e-Ink is 'barely affordable'? Could you elaborate on what data you used to form that conclusion? A simple question, lets say price of a panel versus cost of the raw materials to make it? What margin do you think they're making? Do you know?
> And E Ink, the company, has such a patent moat that it has acted as a monopoly, which Behzadi says has kept prices perhaps too high. But E Ink lost a big patent fight in 2015, and the market could expand soon.
The fact that almost everyone wants e-Ink technology, but e-Ink prices still are still really high [2][3] leads me to believe that either there are still patents at play that prevent competition from rising up, or that the competition hasn't managed to catch up for some other reason. It might also be the case that all of this is simply due to the aftershock of COVID supply chain disruptions, in any case I haven't found a better explanation yet.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2016/05/get-ready-world-covered-electr...
[2] https://www.digikey.de/de/products/detail/e-ink-corporation/...
[3] https://goodereader.com/blog/e-paper/e-ink-has-gallery-plus-...
I disagree. It leads me to believe the underlying technology, electrophoretics isn't capable of achieving the volume scaling and update speeds that would make it achieve mass market pricing. Also the links you provided, do not substantiate the main thesis that's being asserted, ie "there are still patents at play that prevent competition from rising up". Further, the quotation you provided was from Behzadi who was a kickstarter guy who failed to deliver the product he promised and then proceeded to blame everyone else except himself.
There's a simple question you can ask to prove this to yourself. Ask everyone who is making this claim, which specific patent is blocking them and how exactly it blocks their idea. You'll instantly realize the people making these claims are not actual display engineers with knowledge of electrophoretics. Typcially, at best, they're bullshitters trying to sound clever or at worst like Behzadi, scammers who are trying to hide having overpromised and then misspent other people's money.
Stupid Doug.
Stupid deltarholamda!
Na. Just kidding I'm sure deltarholamda is fucking smart!
We don't see a lot of real innovation from small companies because of proprietary audio and video formats.
in schiit's case they do most things via rca audio or usb/pcm + a dac
in other cases, there are lots of wired headphones/iem via a 1/4" or 3.5mm audio jack, but basically none via lightning.
But no one is using it.
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!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_quantizer
[2] https://f.hubspotusercontent00.net/hubfs/5253154/Dolby%20208...
In practice it's an entire ecosystem of certifications, professional calibration of panels, efficient encoding formats, etc...
To reproduce the end effect of Dolby Vision you'd have to have a team of people liaising with television manufacturers, and makers of production software like DaVinci Resolve.
It's not a trivial task that can be done through open source. It's real work that costs money.
We can all hope and wish for open standards, but it's a bit like trying to come up with an open architecture for a railway bridge. It'll still take real work to customise it to any particular valley, the local geography, and the specific requirements. Dolby Vision is similar. The mapping from the full signal range to each specific panel is a complicated thing that requires quite a bit of work to determine.
When i watch See and compare the DV version vs plain HDR version on my LG C1 the difference is big
I have an (older) LG OLED, and haven't seen anything in DV that I didn't think would be just as good in HDR10, although I haven't compared the same content in both DV and HDR10 directly.
Dolby Vision is effectively 12 bit while using only 10 bits for encoding the actual signal. HDR10 is effectively... 10 bit. To achieve the same 12-bits of dynamic range they'd have to come up with a HDR12 format or something.
You can think of 8-bit SDR brightness as something like 0 nits to 255 nits of brightness. This is technically wrong because it's a nonlinear curve, but ignore that for a minute. Increasing this to 10 bits like with HDR10 gives you 0..1,023 nits with the same "steps". Going further to 12 bits lets you take this to 4,096 nits while continuing to preserve the same level of gradation.
The hiccup with this is that some displays have 600 nits of peak brightness and some have 2,500 nits. There are rare displays that can go to 4,000, and prototype displays that go to 10K nits.
HDR10 only goes to 1,000 nits.
Dolby Vision goes to 4,000 nits.
Does this matter now on some cheap LCD TV that only goes to 600 nits? Probably not.
Does it matter on an OLED panel that only goes to 1,000 nits? Maybe, because Dolby Vision has more true-to-life mapping from the maximum range to the display panel range.
Will it matter more with next-generation panels capable of 3,000+ nits? Almost certainly.
Then again, HDR10+ has dynamic metadata, which compensates a lot for its lower bit depth. Additionally, most smart televisions smooth the "steps" in smooth areas, largely eliminating the artefacts caused by HDR10.
At the end of the day, they're both significantly better than SDR, but Dolby Vision is a touch better, especially on high-end panels.
[1] - https://www.itu.int/dms_pubrec/itu-r/rec/bt/R-REC-BT.2100-2-...
[2] - https://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/hdr10-vs-dolby-vision
[3] - https://avdisco.com/t/demystifying-dolby-vision-profile-leve...
[4] - https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.php?p=16546620&postcount=...
This is opposed to HDR which has reference monitors and should look exactly the same on different, calibrated systems.
HDR10 and all the other stuff came along much much later
Aren't both formats just some meta data on top of the same video file? Netflix etc. serve both, depending on what your device supports.
Pretty sure that both blurays and "4k TV" channels use HDR10(+) as well.
Not like the viewer has to know or care about it (from what I can tell, they're basically identical anyway).
Probably most important for good uptake is a fancy name. HDR10+ just doesn't sound snazzy enough.
--But it goes to 11.
The post production sound department for a film will create and mix the sound to a specific format (usually 5.1) and depending on how it will be distributed, Dolby (or other) is used for encoding the distribution.
Dolby has been popular because it solves for cases when someone only has stereo or when a theatre doesn’t have a specific capability (Atmos) by mixing down or up the film’s delivery format.
It is preferred that audio sources are uncompressed PCM in the WAV format. Most audio in a film is actually mono, but is mixed to a surround format with various effects and processing applied to achieve a desired effect.
When the mixing process is complete, it is then rendered to a delivery format which is usually a lossless format and/or a property format.
It is worth mentioning that the sound mix for cinema distribution is not the same for digital distribution.
> Google has a lot of influence on hardware manufacturers
You know we could make it so that living does not require "business model".
Correction: greedy assholes rentseeking proprietary schemes. There is nothing in capitalism that says you must obtain your money through unethical means.
Considered unethical by who? I wouldn't classify me disagreeing with those who consider those two concepts as unethical as a "lack of understanding"
In fact, there are several different explanations why these are unethical. One (Marx's) comes from labor theory of value (which I don't believe in, I think it is self-contradictory, but even classical liberals did believe in, that's why they hated rent seeking).
Every ethical argument is based on some ethical principles (like axioms). The question is, do you disagree with the argument (the derivation of the conclusion) or with the principles?
I'm tired of this sophistry where people claim "this is not a real capitalism". Why cling to the term then? Capitalism has always been a designation of the actual, real system, not some liberal utopia with no rent seeking. (The actual reason is that you can, somehow hypocritically, acknowledge the flaws of the system, while claiming TINA, anyway.)
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.)
There is. Ethics constitute a voluntary constraint on behavior. Businesses with no ethics are less constrained, and therefore can outcompete businesses so encumbered.
Company with online video and advertising monopoly wants to use that monopoly to destroy competitors isn't "amazing", it's "business as usual".