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Comment by Taek | Hacker News Reader

I avoided a career in codecs after spending about a year in college learning about them. The patent minefield meant I couldn't meaningfully build incremental improvements on what existed, and the idea of dilligently dancing around existing patents and then releasing something which intentionally lacked state-of-the-art ideas wasn't compelling.

Codec development is slow and expensive becuase you can't just release a new codec, you have to dance around patents.

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Well, a career in codec development means you'd have done it as a job, and so you'd have been angling for a job at the kind of places that enter into the patent pools and contribute to the standards.

I don’t know about you, but I became a software engineer to write code for myself and my own interests, not to get a job where all of my labor will be vacuumed up and exploited to maximize anonymous shareholder value.

That's all great and noble, but at the end of the day it's about who has the resources. If you can get the necessary resources yourself and have complete control over their allocation, congratulations you won the jackpot of life. Plenty of people, some of whom are smarter and better than you, tried to do the same and failed due to reasons beyond their control. Try to remain a good person and not waste the opportunity if you ever get to that stage.

For the remaining 99.99% of us, we have to negotiate for resources as best we can. That typically means maximizing shareholder value in exchange for a cut of the profits. Not all your labor needs to be vacuumed up, I make enough to support my family, live a relatively safe and comfortable life with some minor luxuries and likely a secure retirement. Better deal than most people get today.

Why are you arguing so hard against someone that simply stated “I was interested in pursuing this topic as a career when I was in college but then I learned more about the field and decided to pursue something else”?

Different posters, Taek made the post you're referring to, I'm responding to voakbasda.

Regardless, why are you white-knighting for him? He made a moral argument about career choice, and I responded to said argument as someone who took the other side. This is a discussion board, we discuss things.

More codec development work is done outside of patent-centric organizations by a significant margin. Just like any other domain technological/communication standard the most significant impetuous comes from the drive to make superior products.

Work inside patent driven development groups also suffers substantial complexity bloat because there is a huge incentive for each participant to get a patentable component into the standard in order to benefit from cross-licensing. Often these 'improvements' are insignificant or even a net loss (the cost of the bitstream to signal them on is greater than their improvement over any credible collection of material).

Software patents aren't an issue in much of the world; the reason I thought there wasn't much of a career in codec development was that it was obvious that it needed to move down into custom ASICs to be power-efficient, at which point you can no longer develop new ones until people replace all their hardware.

Software patents aren't an issue in most of the world. Codecs however are used all over the world. No one is going to use a codec that is illegal to use in the US and EU.

EU would be one of the places that doesn't have software patents, which is why VLC is based there.

It's not that simple. Software patents exists in the EU, the requirements are much more strict though. For example Netflix was ordered to cease their use of H265 in germany: https://www.nexttv.com/news/achtung-baby-netflix-loses-paten...

By the time software is robust enough to make it worth while to be placed into hardware, it's pretty damn efficient. For something like ASICs, you could at least upgrade the firmware with new code, but what about Apple's chips that do the decoding? Can they be upgraded, or does that mean needing to wait for the M++ chip?

Typically you wait for the new chip.

Sometimes there are hybrid coders that can use some of the resources on the chip and some shader code to handle new codecs or codec features after the fact, but you pay a power and performance penalty to use these.

The encoder side can be upgraded, but typically decoding isn't flexible enough to add an entirely new codec to it.

Of course, you can design it to be as flexible as you want; but at one end of that you just have a regular CPU again.

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