Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

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in 02016 it was patented magic in many countries. now the patents have all expired, or will in a few months, since the standard was released in august 02004 after a year of public standardization work, patents only last 20 years from filing, and you can't file a patent on something that's already public (except that, in the usa, there's a one-year grace period if you're the one that published it). if there are any exceptions, i'd be very interested to hear of them

userbinator points at https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264..., but most of the patents there have a precedence date after the h.264 standard was finalized, and therefore can't be necessary to implement h.264 itself (unless the argument is that, at the time it was standardized, it was not known to be implementable, a rather implausible argument)

what's surprising is that the last 20 years have produced a few things that are arguably a little better, but nothing that's much better, at least according to my tests of the implementations in ffmpeg

it seems likely that its guaranteed patent-free status will entrench it as the standard codec for the foreseeable future, for better or worse. av1 has slightly better visual quality at the same bandwidth, but is much slower (possibly this is fixable by a darktangent), but it's vulnerable to patents filed by criminals as late as 02018

but it's vulnerable to patents filed by criminals as late as 02018

Ah, if we get through year 2038 we get latent free AV1!

why do you put an extra zero in front of the year?

He’s a time traveler from 38056

Because he's a true believer in the Long Now religion. But not enough of a true believer that he uses six or seven digits ;-)

Also, he uses that (and no capital letters) as a "bozo filter" - anyone who replies about that rather than the substance of the comment, he defines as someone he doesn't want to talk to anyway.

Personally, I think it's rather an obnoxious move. He's deliberately derailing discussion about the content, and he has decent content. But he insists on playing this game instead of just talking about the substance.

it's a little bit like wearing a mohawk or a short skirt. a certain kind of people reveal what kind of people they are by harassing the mohawk-wearer and blaming the target for it. nobody is going to read this thread and be dumb enough to say, 'oh, yes, clearly, the person who was derailing discussion about the patent status of h.264 and the future of video codecs, in order to advocate the far more important topic of proper capitalization, was someone other than animalmuppet'

(i recommend you knock it off)

but yeah, the main benefit is that it gets people to read about the long now foundation

1. Fine. You didn't derail the discussion; you just deliberately opened a tempting door for it to be derailed. As a "bozo filter". Is that better?

2. The person who derailed the conversation was 293984j29384.

3. It's AnimalMuppet, not animalmuppet.

4. Why do I care? I think about that scene in Chariots Of Fire where the track coach is talking to a sprinter, and explaining that is starting steps are too far apart. As he explains what it's like, he says "It knocks you back" and slaps him lightly in the face. The runner rocks back slightly. "Knocks you back" and slaps him lightly. He does this four times. Then he says, "You see?"

That's what you're doing to your readers with your dates and your lack of proper capitalization. Sure, they can read it. But it costs them a small amount of unnecessary effort to parse it. Does it matter? As the track coach said, "I can get you another two yards." Two yards isn't much, in a 100 yard race, but it's enough to matter. (And posts are read more often than they are written. It's a small matter for each reader, but if 10 people read it, or 100, it adds up.)

Look, if you want to do that in a blog, that's fine. You do you. I won't care. But I care about HN, and I care about you making it a worse experience for people. I wish you would stop doing so.

so much projection

293984j29384 asked a perfectly reasonable question; they are blameless. you're the one who chose to start heckling the people who are actually talking about interesting things, attempting to harass them into formatting their comments more to your personal liking. that's what makes hn a worse experience for people

and if you think you're enforcing some kind of community standards by doing so, i have bad news for you

Yep, 02016 = 1038

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