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Comment by breve | Hacker News Reader

Royalty-free video formats are the way to go. It avoids the problem in the first place.

The internet is built on royalty-free formats and protocols. Video is not special or different.

This argument goes back to the 1990s with the MP3 format (which was patent encumbered at the time). There was an attempt to adopt an unencumbered competitor called Ogg Vorbis, but it never got any traction.

I don't know why. It's pretty much the same argument we're seeing now with JPEG XL. Ogg works perfectly fine & is a completely servicable audio codec, but browsers just took it out of their supported codecs and devices like iPods didn't support it for whatever reason, so "normies" (to use the parlance) weren't aware of it and just went with MP3 for anything and everything.

I'm sure there's some story behind why that happened...

One word: Napster.

The p2p audio piracy portion of Napster was shut down by 2001. The other common p2p sharing platforms like Kazaa, gnutella, et al. mostly supported any type of audio format (at least from what I can remember). People wanted mp3 because in their mind, mp3 == music. The hardware devices like iPod & Zune mostly had support only for formats like MP3, AAC, WAV, and AIFF (I asked ai this, so take that for what it's worth).

Anyway, it's just another example of hardware mfgs not supporting open formats, so we don't need to get too deep in the weeds trying to remember history.

I remember the history quite well and it was just a matter of ecosystem and momentum.

MP3 had mindshare. That's was what people knew and it was what people asked for. People bought MP3 players. People built software that ripped MP3s. The sales guy at the electronics store knew what MP3 was. Everything worked with MP3 and so that was what people bought and downloaded and used.

It got traction with Spotify and pretty much anyone who wasn't locked in via overlapping codecs licence requirements or network effects.

Less traction than MP3, sure, but “never got any traction” is pushing it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis#Usage

The history of media (and especially video) on the Internet was certainly not built on royalty-free formats or protocols. The stuff has been a problem for decades, and it's only recently that things have gotten better.

Of course it was. It was delivered by HTTP (royalty-free), RTSP\RTP\RTCP (royalty-free), and TCP/IP (royalty-free) and depended on DNS (royalty-free) and HTML and friends (royalty-free). Video over the internet wouldn't have worked without royalty-free formats and protocols supporting it.

Video format patent pools just wanted to extract value off the top. It's been grubby.

The internet is also built on not caring about rules/regulations, and provides a treasure trove of things that are normally not obtainable due to whatever regulations.

But it doesn't really apply when big entities with a lot of money are making the video conferencing services that would be using paid codecs. Then the consortiums have clear targets to request licenses to be paid.

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