I agree in general, but note that those pushing patented codecs aren't idiots and have an upgrade treadmill ready for users where at each decision point it'll make sense to upgrade to a newer codec with new patents.
Having said that, the silliness of patented codecs seems to have been recognized for lower bitrate use cases (image, speech, audio) so I guess it's only a matter of time for video.
I think a Googly approach where the encoder and decoders are assumed to be software like anything else in Chrome and updated every 6 weeks would be interesting to see.
Even though there are better alternatives to MP3 from both a technical and legal perspective, and even though Apple has been pushing for AAC within iTunes, nothing is close to replacing MP3 as the defacto standard for distributing audio files.
There are multiple reasons for this, like the huge cost of re-encoding everything that was once encoded in MP3, the broad hardware and software support or the fact that MP3 is good enough for most purposes.
Broadband plays a role here as I'd bet that if it weren't so prevalent today, then people would actually want formats that sound better at lower bitrates. As it is, Amazon doesn't have a problem in selling songs encoded at 256 kbps, although you won't hear a difference when comparing that to an 128 kbps encoded AAC file from iTunes.
An upgrade scheme only works if files encoded with the newer codecs don't have a problem being played on older software/hardware, because here's the thing ... H.264 is already good enough as far as video codecs go, just as MP3. And this is doable, but the newer patents will most likely touch the encoders, not decoders and the newer patents themselves will get more fragile over time, as you can't really innovate on top of the same technique forever.
All in all I agree with the general sentiment ... proprietary platforms are more dangerous than patents and native apps are more dangerous to the future of the Internet than proprietary codecs.
Just as a counterpoint that illustrates the patent upgrade treadmill, you say that nothing has come close to displacing MP3 for distributing audio files, yet if you're distributing that audio as the soundtrack for a video then MP3 has been quite firmly displaced by AAC due to bundling by the MPEG group (even though pirates held out with MPEG-4/DivX & mp3 for years).
You could even argue that the fact that it always comes with such (relatively) large size video files makes the improvements of AAC over MP3 even less relevant, but still the "standard" has moved on and everyone needs to keep up. I also believe that 3G phones needed to support AAC but I could be just making that up.
I've seen one "mp3 player" that dropped AAC support, but I can't see that happening for any device that also wants video. The direct result will be paying separate royalties on two mostly overlapping audio formats.
Transcoding is still expensive for video, but not for audio. There's certainly some cost to transcoding all the world's MP3s, but given that a single modern CPU can encode and decode audio at 100-500x realtime, it's fairly small.
Comments
I agree in general, but note that those pushing patented codecs aren't idiots and have an upgrade treadmill ready for users where at each decision point it'll make sense to upgrade to a newer codec with new patents.
Having said that, the silliness of patented codecs seems to have been recognized for lower bitrate use cases (image, speech, audio) so I guess it's only a matter of time for video.
I think a Googly approach where the encoder and decoders are assumed to be software like anything else in Chrome and updated every 6 weeks would be interesting to see.
Even though there are better alternatives to MP3 from both a technical and legal perspective, and even though Apple has been pushing for AAC within iTunes, nothing is close to replacing MP3 as the defacto standard for distributing audio files.
There are multiple reasons for this, like the huge cost of re-encoding everything that was once encoded in MP3, the broad hardware and software support or the fact that MP3 is good enough for most purposes.
Broadband plays a role here as I'd bet that if it weren't so prevalent today, then people would actually want formats that sound better at lower bitrates. As it is, Amazon doesn't have a problem in selling songs encoded at 256 kbps, although you won't hear a difference when comparing that to an 128 kbps encoded AAC file from iTunes.
An upgrade scheme only works if files encoded with the newer codecs don't have a problem being played on older software/hardware, because here's the thing ... H.264 is already good enough as far as video codecs go, just as MP3. And this is doable, but the newer patents will most likely touch the encoders, not decoders and the newer patents themselves will get more fragile over time, as you can't really innovate on top of the same technique forever.
All in all I agree with the general sentiment ... proprietary platforms are more dangerous than patents and native apps are more dangerous to the future of the Internet than proprietary codecs.
Just as a counterpoint that illustrates the patent upgrade treadmill, you say that nothing has come close to displacing MP3 for distributing audio files, yet if you're distributing that audio as the soundtrack for a video then MP3 has been quite firmly displaced by AAC due to bundling by the MPEG group (even though pirates held out with MPEG-4/DivX & mp3 for years).
You could even argue that the fact that it always comes with such (relatively) large size video files makes the improvements of AAC over MP3 even less relevant, but still the "standard" has moved on and everyone needs to keep up. I also believe that 3G phones needed to support AAC but I could be just making that up.
I've seen one "mp3 player" that dropped AAC support, but I can't see that happening for any device that also wants video. The direct result will be paying separate royalties on two mostly overlapping audio formats.
Transcoding is still expensive for video, but not for audio. There's certainly some cost to transcoding all the world's MP3s, but given that a single modern CPU can encode and decode audio at 100-500x realtime, it's fairly small.