xiphmont

Echoing Geoff's article, I'm a big fan of the 51nb mobos from the X62 on. The X62 was very very good, and the T70 and X210 are even better. Can't wait for the X63. One reason I'm taking time off from making X62 backlight kits is to make some new mods for the latest machines-- a 13" 3k screen and internal battery. I've gotten both running, but it takes time to work kinks out of production. It's also why I've been working on my microscope. :-)

Now this is a subject I can really get behind!

Ha, many people have asked for that :-) I jokingly suggested we should go get some VC and launch a plugin company...

Because Jarek is frankly out of line, and I see no reason to sugarcoat it.

Google pissed him off (and I'm sure he has reason to be pissed) but he's not exactly being truthful about what happened, or what is happening.

Being angry at Big Bad Company for a good reason does not give an engineer license to bend the truth any damn way he feels, and it certainly doesn't give license to just make shit up. He's lost some of my respect for a good reason, and if an Avengers reference offends him (or you) it's not my problem.

Put it in AV1 and it doesn't.

The entropy coder in AV1 right now is Daala_EC. It's the entropy coder because we measured it directly against rANS and the other candidate encoders and it performed the best.

Hell, you can check out the code, build with the different entropy coders, and test it yourself.

Not useless, just not as good as Jarek liked to claim. It's a neat technique but hardly a breakthrough. In the end, for AV1, Daala_EC was better.

As for 'needed a defensive patent', need is the wrong word. In the current patent game, you pile up defensive patents to be used in aggregate as part of a MAD-style game. It sounds insane and it is-- but it's also currently the least insane option.

In any case, Google isn't technically in the wrong here. They're not patenting jarek's work, they're patenting improvements they made to it that were necessary to use it in AV1, which they dedicated engineers to do because Jarek declined to do it himself. Only after Google put in that work (and implemented multiple suggested improvements on top of it to try to bring its performance up) could we even measure the results.

But just because Google isn't wrong, doesn't mean they weren't assholes. Having negotiated with them for things in the past, they will promise the moon and the sun and the sky, and commit only to the parts that get them what they want. I can fully believe they verbally promised Jarek far more than he got.

The answers aren't entirely separable. Hardware capable of any kind of video wasn't accessible to the larger community and it sure as hell wasn't affordable.

When Xiph.Org started (1994), even audio required high-end hardware. Yes, sound cards were available for PCs, but big enough hard disks were not.

When only the elites have access, the standards are made by elites.

I would too. We'll see what the future holds.

Yes. We still have internal investment is many pieces of Daala that didn't get adopted in AV1. I don't know the liklihood that Daala will rise again as a standalone codec project... possible, wouldn't bet on it.

The next two will be on the Constrained Directional Enhancement Filter and the Daala Entropy Coder, which AV1 adopted as it EC system. Beyond that, there will be several more though I've not yet planned out a specific order.

Luc Trudeau, who wrote most of the deeper technical papers and specifications on CfL at Xiph, has a real gift too. I'm riding his technical prose in this post. If you liked my update, you'll like his papers linked in 'Additional Resources'. They're some of the best and clearest technical documents I've ever read.

> Would AV1 have been possible in 1993 when MPEG-1 came out?

No. There weren't enough transistors in the world. I'm not being silly. Something like Av1 happens now because Moore/Dennard allow it to.

>AV1 is basically funded by Google as a quasi-charitable endeavor

Nothing charitable about it. They want to make money. So do a bunch of other companies. And they've realized the way to win that game is to relinquish control over the fundamental/infrastructural pieces.

That also has some beneficial aspects beyond 'a rising tide lifts all boats', but I feel more comfortable appealing to reliable motivations. The benefits to others aren't an accident, and they're important to e.g. us at Xiph, but let's not ascribe industry interest to anything more charitable than 'enlightened self-interest'.

MPEG is, for purposes of this discussion, a system that member companies have learned how to game. It is so thoroughly gamed that it has become dysfunctional and an impediment to progress. The open/RF development strategy is now consistently beating it despite MPEG having a consistent royalty revenue stream and a massive patent war chest. At this point, MPEG, as a self-interested system, is only trying to slow things down and keep control.

No, it's not monolithic inside, but the worst actors have solid control and it warps the behavior of the entire organization.

We saw that coming a long, long time ago and yet barely in time.

I know how you feel. But they didn't like my suggestion of "Deep Space VP9".

Short answer: yes Long answer: yes

It does exist-- from hobbyist entrepreneurs. 51nb has been selling motherboard upgrades for the old 4:3 ThinkPad models for a few years now, and others have begun to specialize in whole-system integration, additional mods, and complete systems based on this work (I'm one of those people, though I also do it as a hobby).

My three ThinkPads X60s machines are all Broadwells, with nice 12.1" 4:3 high res screens using modern backlights I fabricate myself. They work so well I intend to build more.

During my time at MIT, we referred to several explosions in the service and steam tunnels (caused by aging infrastructure) that launched street-level manhole covers into the air as the 'People's Republic of Cambridge Unmanned Space Program'.

Seems the PRoCUSP got several-upped.

I collect vintage headphones, and especially relish the truly absurd ones I can't believe anyone thought were a saleable item.

I'm up to about 300 different models.

"The original version of this article stated that IR LEDs operate from 300-325THz (about 920-980nm), wavelengths that are invisible. Quite a few readers wrote to say that they could in fact just barely see the LEDs in some (or all) of their remotes. Several were kind enough to let me know which remotes these were, and I was able to test several on a spectrometer. Lo and behold, these remotes were using higher-frequency LEDs operating from 350-380THz (800-850nm), just overlapping the extreme edge of the visible range. "

> he says he could tell the difference between high bitrate mp3 and 16 bit 44k wav.

In the early days, when all mp3 encoders were pretty bad, I could tell which encoder produced a given file. mp3 encoders today are vastly better. I've not been able to do that party trick in a long time.

I did, but I didn't want to wear a lapel mic for the video and deal with the extra hassle. It was just me (no helpers) and a couple cameras. Wired mics suspended overhead kept sound setup from adding to the logistics for each take.

The sound was done similarly to the previous video, which hadn't drawn comments. This time though, a sizable fraction of people said it was distracting.

>You really don't want non-profits filing patents. Really.

>This is pretty much the most horrible thing i can think of.

>It's infinitely easier to keep them from going bad (Example:

>MPEG-LA) if you can make their corporate bylaws, etc,

>prevent them from filing patents.

? Non-profits are corporations. They have by-laws. They also have several advantages over for-profits in the case of dissolution; eg, you can set up a non-profit so that the IP they hold is not simply sold to the highest bidder.

FTR, Xiph.Org is a registered 501(c)3 non-profit, and we hold patents.

I will not repost the entire thing here, as there's a few naughty words born of frustration, and this might well be a family forum for all I know.

My take: https://xiphmont.dreamwidth.org/84214.html

The patent does not cover rANS. rANS has been independently discovered a few times at this point. The patent filing covers Google's use of it.

I blogged about this elsewhere. From reading the filing, Google is not patenting his work. They're patenting their specific application of it, and the claims seem to me fairly tightly tailored to AV1.

Indeed (have some of those too), but I assumed we'd artificially limited ourselves to talking about i7. I'm not sure why I assumed that, because you're right of course.

? Nehalem had mobile quad cores. I'm using one right now.

Especially when it's a bit too easy to flag an article by mistake due to progressive rendering causing a misclick, or just being careless. I know I've done it, noticed, and then gone back to unflag. I wonder how often I've clicked off by a few pixels and didn't notice.

"Of course... you can have a lot of fun with this..."

:-D