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Leonardo's Blog
Personal blog · blog.chiariglione.orgbusinessother
Leonardo's Blog is a personal blog at blog.chiariglione.org about business. Since 2017, 14 different Hacker News readers have linked it 42 times, most often “MPEG: A crisis, the causes and a solution”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Leonardo Chiariglione's blog, written by the MPEG co-founder, on video codec standards, patent licensing, and the royalty-free AV1 dispute.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Leonardo's views on MPAI, MPEG, ISO and a lot more...
Most-linked posts?
- MPEG: A crisis, the causes and a solution5 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2018-01-29
- /a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solution/3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-06-06
- A Future Without MPEG2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-06-06
- MPEG: A crisis, the causes and a solution2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-01-29
What Hacker News says?
While none of this is false, it's a bit of a misdirection to imply that the 'mighty MPEG' was a monolithic actor preventing this course of action from taking place. In fact, the individual collaborators that MPEG (or ITU) brought to the table were the same sorts of hardware companies, software companies, universities, research institutes, and media companies that are surprisingly familiar among AV1's contributors, a…
Comment linking /2018/01/28/
on “AV1: A new general-purpose video codec”Submitted MPEG: A crisis, the causes and a solution as a story · 189 points
HN discussionApple didn't care about free codecs before H.265 for the same reason ISO and Leonardo Chiariglione didn't: "the best codecs require big $$$ to research and competitive royalty-free codecs will stifle innovation by not sending money back to researchers"[0]. The ISO business model was to not care about patents as long as everyone agreed to charge FRAND rates, so they could just pick the best technology and rely on the…
Comment linking /iso/
on “H.264 is Magic (2016)”Submitted A Future Without MPEG as a story · 103 points
HN discussion> A uniform and transparent licensing model based on the FRAND principle (i.e., fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) is planned to be established for the use of standard essential patents related to H.266/VVC. Maybe. On the other hand, maybe not. Leoanardo Chiariglione, founder and chairman of MPEG, thinks MPEG has for all practical purposes ceased to be: https://blog.chiariglione.org/a-future-without-mpeg/ The…
Comment linking /a-future-without-mpeg/
on “H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)”Submitted Life inside MPEG as a story · 77 points
HN discussion> MPEG (like it or not, MPEG represents the industry) Not so much anymore. The licensing fiasco with HEVC has reduced MPEG's relevance, particularly for web video. Here's what Leonardo Chiariglione, founder and chairman of MPEG, says about it: https://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solu... https://blog.chiariglione.org/stop-here-if-you-to-know-about... And they're shaping up to make VVC ( https://en…
Comment linking /a-future-without-mpeg/
on “Is WebP really better than JPEG?”Submitted Co-founder of MPEG bemoans patent licensing issues as a story · 32 points
HN discussionYes, and in fact this is explicitly the business model[0] of ISO MPEG and ITU VCEG. They pay for their basic research by letting participants patent and license the resulting standards-essential inventions[1]. HEVC/H.265 has been in development since 2004, i.e. right after AVC/H.264 was published, and took almost a decade to actually be standardized. There's even an H.266, which started in 2017, a few years after H.…
Comment linking /a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solution/
on “What will enter the public domain in 2025?”Submitted Thirty years of audio coding and counting as a story · 14 points
HN discussionHere's one. See the "High Quality (AV1) Report": http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/hevc_2018/ As for HEVC's obsolescence, Leonardo Chiariglione, founder and chairman of MPEG, thinks AV1 has the bigger future because HEVC's licensing is too messy: http://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solut...
Comment linking /a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solution/
on “Firefox brings smooth video playback with the fastest AV1 decoder”Submitted MPEG: A crisis, the causes and a solution as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> There isn't any reason they couldn't do the same for HEVC The practical problem with HEVC licensing is that it's complex and uncertain. There are three separate patent pools (MPEG LA, HEVC Advance, and Velos Media) and there are other licensors who aren't in any patent pool. The licensing situation is so bad that Leonardo Chiariglione, founder and chairman of MPEG, calls HEVC an "unusable modern standard": http://…
Comment linking /a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solution/
on “AV1 beats x264 and libvpx-vp9 in practical use case”Submitted MPAI – do we need it? as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> all the investments (collectively hundreds of millions USD) made by the industry for the new video codec will go up in smoke and AOM’s royalty free model will spread to other business segments as well. https://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solu... He is not a coder, not a researcher, he is only part of the worst game there is in this industry: a money maker from patents and "standards" you need t…
Comment linking /a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solution/
on “Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG”Submitted Why is MPEG successful? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI really don't know what you're trying to argue. We're talking about web video here. There's nothing stopping Apple from adding VP9 support. VP9 outperforms H.264 and the other major browsers have added support for it. Apple will be adding support for AV1. Like VP9, AV1 is royalty-free. The Alliance for Open Media has been so effective (even before AV1's release) and HEVC's licensing has been so terrible that MPEG i…
Comment linking /a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solution/
on “Apple Backs AV1: What Does This Mean for the Future of Video Codecs”Submitted The life of an MPEG standard as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> the competition continues to clobber AV1 in every aspect Which competitor beats AV1 in licensing? VP9 matches it in licensing. No other codec beats it. Even Leonardo Chiariglione (founder and chairman of MPEG) says AV1's licensing has MPEG beat: http://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solut...
Comment linking /a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solution/
on “AV1 codec ecosystem update”Submitted 30 years of MPEG, and counting? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionRead this if you want the other side of the story: http://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solut... > So don’t expect that in the future you will see the progress in video compression technology that we have seen in the past 30 years. Google has bought a whole "camp" which is badmouthing MPEG for monetary reasons. Nothing has been over-hyped as much as AV1. Who is really evil? In the end it will all b…
Comment linking /a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solution/
on “AV1 and the Video Wars of 2027”Submitted MPEG: Business model based ISO/IEC standards as a story · 2 points
HN discussionMPEG-LA is a very bad example. For starters, it's not MPEG; and furthermore there isn't a single MPEG patent pool anymore. There's like three of them, plus patent holders that haven't actually joined a pool, and that's made H.265 licensing a living nightmare. Don't take my innovating-hating Stallmanite commie ass's word for it. Leonardo Chiariglione himself - a man who is adamantly opposed to royalty free formats be…
Comment linking /a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solution/
on “Instruction Sets Should Be Free: The Case for RISC-V [pdf] (2014)”Submitted Compression – the technology for the digital age as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWhat do you believe HEVC is winning? The major online video platforms (YouTube, Vimeo, Netflix, Twitch, etc.) are all going to AV1. HEVC had its shot but the terrible licensing stunted its growth and AV1 will replace it. Leonardo Chiariglione says the MPEG business model is broken and I think he's right: http://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solut...
Comment linking /a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solution/
on “Cisco Leap Frogs H.264 Video Collaboration with Real-Time AV1 Codec”Submitted Thirty years is a long time as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAfter he got kicked out of MPEG, Leonardo Chiariglione opened his own standards organization[0] called MPAI, which is focused primarily on... standardizing machine learning techniques for video coding tools. I'm not sure if they've actually shipped anything yet, though. [0] With blackjack, and hookers: https://blog.chiariglione.org/the-mpai-framework-licence-app...
Comment linking /the-mpai-framework-licence-approach-to-standard-essential-patent-sep-licensing/
on “Netflix's bet on advanced video encoding”Submitted MPAI – do we need it? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe problems trying to develop a royalty-free video standard at ISO might be instructive here. MPEG floated a standard called IVC (Internet Video Coding) that was specifically designed to only use Option 1[0] patented inventions. After it was published they got a bunch of Option 2[1] declarations that effectively killed the standard. ISO doesn't actually require patent holders to declare what patents are being infri…
Comment linking /video-compression-patents-an-obtuse-story/
on “Apple, Google, Facebook's AV1 standards group under EU antitrust investigation”Submitted The MPEG machine is ready to start (again) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
