More on MPEG4

ratajik writes: "Salon is running a story about how MPEG-LA (the alliance of companies in charge of licensing MPEG4) are planning on charging .25 cents for each copy they sell, and a .02 cent an hour "use fee" for anyone viewing MPEG4. They have a interesting slant on how this will make open-source alternatives much more attractive, and will likely kill off use of the MPEG4 standard in the long run."

Comments

Re:I hope MPEG-4 fails

[bumbadi]

MPEG-4 is a complete mess. Completely true. It is too complex, too big, has too many options. It tries to be everything to everybody, and fails. It has dozens of profiles and levels, and except audio-video compression, all others are completely useless. It has profiles for transmission of facial data, 3D data, shape decoding, Structured Audio etc. All of them are extremely lowlevel and crude specially facial data transmission and 3D data transmission. To say that they will be of use in 3D games & interactive applications is a pipedream. Basically, MPEG 4 is far too complex for these things, and is definitely not enough. Further, the advances made in MPEG 4 are incremental only, and it should be not too difficult to acheive similar effects by different means.If you look at the H.263 standard, you'd know that much of Mpeg 4 is simply H.263 in disguise (specially the video part), with some frills added. Standard committes in recent times have gone completely overboard and created mammoth, unusable standards. MPEG 4, and more recently JPEG 2000 are a case in point. JPEG 2000 uses 4 times the CPU time of JPEG!. And this is despite the fact that wavelet is a O(n) transform and DCT is O(n2).And upcoming H.26l is going to take decoder complexities to completely new heights!