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Comment by monocasa | Hacker News Reader

Google is anticompetive and Dolby is. Just like in Google v. Oracle there are no true good guys here, only outcomes that are better or worse for the general public that various corporate entities have aligned themselves to for some perceived short term benefit.

Open standards are good for the general public, as are allowing re-implementations of APIs. Taking a look at Google's anticompetive use of search combined with ads would be absolutely fantastic too, but I'm not going to gate other actions on it unless there's some semblance of a chance that the connections between the two actions are anything other than theoretical.

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So it’s open source? What happens as soon as Google abandons it and stops supporting in Android? YouTube? Do you think Apple will ever support it?

This is a standard, not a piece of software. Nothing "happens" just like nothing "happened" to mp3 or jpeg when they stopped being actively changed.

MP3 was not "an open standard", it was a patented technology, owned by the Fraunhofer institute and lead to hilarious lawsuits against people putting MP3 capabilities in both hardware and software without even knowing they had to pay license fees, until Fraunhofer gave up and gave MP3 to the world. And not "way back when", this is a story that didn't have a happy ending until 2017. And then only because technology had passed it by with the industry having mostly moved on to newer, better codecs.

> until Fraunhofer gave up and gave MP3 to the world

I thought the patent ran out.

In the US, patents don't just "run out", the patent owner has to actively not bother tweaking something trivial, filing for a new patent on top of their own while it's still active, and then start arguing that even though the old patent runs out, folks who act on that are now in violation of the new patent.

Is there any relation to this situation and how there were attempts to enforce the _patent_ (not the standard) of JPEG[1] that ultimately mostly failed?

[1] http://www.pubpat.org/jpegsurrendered.htm

Standards are only as open as their implementations. The fact that google isn’t really involving anyone in this and first introduced it in a closed door hush hush event makes me extremely skeptical.

A standard created by one body requires adoption by others before it can be a standard unless the first party owns the market. Implementations don't have to be open..

It's an open standard, so better than open source per se since you're not reliant on any particular source tree.

And in those cases you've listed, you're left with strictly more options than if it's not an open standard.

You’re not left with an “option” of an audio standard that none of your customers hardware or browsers support.

If the open solution doesn't take off in favor of the proprietary solution, then you're in essentially the same end state as if there was no open solution in the first place.

Not after you’ve already encoded your audio to support it. From history we know that Google isn’t going to do the leg work it takes to make the standard ubiquitous.

Why would you only encode your media in a format that none of your customers have support for in the first place?

Additionally, being an open standard, you can probably rely on ffmpeg supporting it. This allows you to transcode into something that your proprietary encoder will support for ingest if it comes to that.

Yes because transcoding audio couldn’t possibly lead to lesser quality.

Neither of these (HDR10+/DV, open spatial audio/Atmos) are due to compression, so yeah, kind of. They're both metadata schemes on top of other, pluggable compression schemes. So yeah, I wouldn't expect a conversion to necessarily end up with a loss of quality.

This is also ignoring the first sentence: your whole supposition is based on a scenario where you as the content producer for some reason encoded in a format that your customers don't have, and don't have the masters for some reason. Which is basically absurd for anything that would need dynamic HDR or spatial audio.

The browsers will support this. Customer hardware from large venders will take more time or never happen if they are getting paid not to. But other hardware can take it's place.

You think Apple will support it or even Microsoft? The large hardware vendors not supporting it is really a big deal don’t you think?

They both support the AOM.

They both also "support" Khronos - doesn't mean anything.

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