Ep. #19, Password Sharing and Patent Conflicts

Matt McClure: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the first Demuxed podcast in approximately a million years.

Phil Cluff: A hot minute, it's been since the last Demuxed podcast.

Steve Heffernan: What podcast is this?

Matt: It's got the little moon icon next to it for me in my podcast app, which means archived or dormant or something.

Steve: So sad.

Matt: So we're trying out a different format here. This is hopefully going to be a recurring monthly thing where just the three of us aren't going to have a guest and we're going to talk through video tech news, updates in the community and whatever else. But we'll still have, hopefully, more episodes with guests here over the next few months, interspersed throughout. But at least once a month you can expect to hear Phil and Steve's sultry voices, and me. I don't feel comfortable calling my own voice sultry, so we'll-

Phil: Matt, your voice is lovely.

Matt: Silky smooth, right? That's what you were saying earlier, right?

Phil: Silky smooth.

Matt: Thanks, man.

Phil: With a little bit of sibilance on the end of it.

Matt: I appreciate that. Okay. So let's dig in. I think on my general topics list, first I've got the IRL meetups are back. Worth noting that we are back in person.

Steve: IRL of SF Vid Tech, or in general? Like in the world? IRL meetups?

Matt: Yeah. I'm just saying I'm seeing a lot of IRL meetups happening now. The SF Video was back in person for most of last year. Most of the meetups were... It's been smaller than it was in 2019 before everything went online. I think the last meetup in person was February, 2020, and that was a really good one. I think we had like 40-ish people show up to that one. We haven't touched that yet in 2020.

Steve: Have we missed any meetups at this point?

Matt: We've not had a meetup one time and that was September of this last year. September the seventh, and what a streak.

Steve: Eight years.

Matt: In eight years we missed one month.

Steve: I mean, not that I can take credit. I've showed up to like one. That's amazing, kudos. Awesome. So IRLs are coming back.

Matt: They're coming back, which has been nice. The New York Video Meetup I think had their first meetup in years this month. That's not to be confused with the New York Video Tech Meetup that the Vimeo crew mostly runs, I think Vimeo and JW Player mostly organize the New York Video Tech Meetup. There's the New York Video Meetup, which is a little bit more-

Phil: More video, less tech. Is that what you're saying?

Matt: Yeah. It's a little bit more like production, creator based as opposed to streaming based. I went to it one time, it was actually one of the reasons why I started SF Video Tech because I went to that meetup thinking it was going to be about the technology and it wasn't. It was a bunch of writers and directors and creators. It was really cool, it just wasn't-

Phil: They're doing this meetup in London that's like a video creator meetup, so every couple of weeks we'll get a dancer or a model or something like that and put them in interesting situations and you take along video recording equipment and learn from each other on how to produce video. It's pretty cool.

Matt: Cool.

Phil: I enjoy it.

Matt: Nice.

Phil: I was going to say, what is getting harder... I don't know, well, you don't have this problem here. It's getting hard to find venues. It's almost like everyone closed their offices in a pandemic. Finding venues for meetups is starting to get painful for some. I find it tough in London.

Matt: I'll be honest, I don't-

Phil: You certainly do not have this problem.

Matt: No.

Steve: Is there not like a castle you can meet in somewhere?

Phil: Why does that keep coming up today?

Matt: So Heavybit, which is where the SF Video Tech was before we moved out of the BrightCove SF kitchen to the Heavybit Event Space, which was an amazing meetup space. It was perfect. And now the Heavybit Clubhouse closed, pour one out, rest in peace. Heavybit is still around, fine. But the clubhouse closed during the pandemic, and so Mux, our company, moved into an office with a nice meeting space. Overall it's great, but I will say, getting in is just-

Steve: Security?

Matt: Yeah, the security. It's just not as warm as it used to be. At Heavybit you kind of walked right in. Yeah, you'd have to go round the sketchy back alley if you showed up a little bit late.

Steve: Step over someone. Yeah.

Matt: Which, you know, the alley could be hit or miss a little bit. But you were right in the meetup when you walked through the doors. I don't know. Having to pay a Taskrabbit downstairs, it's a little bit colder on the entrance and I think it makes a difference. I don't know.

Steve: Just hand out cupcakes at the front door or something like that, make it warmer. Mittens. They would literally make it a little bit warmer.

Matt: The main thing that I really did want to make sure that I covered there was that Montevideo-

Phil: Nice pronunciation. That's brilliant.

Matt: JP and the Qual Labs folks, if you came to Demuxed you probably saw them at least mention this. There was a lightning talk that touched on this but they're doing a really cool summer camp type thing so you can go work out of their office in Montevideo.

Steve: It sounds amazing.

Matt: It sounds freaking awesome. I'm personally still trying to make it happen. But saw the meetup list for next month, it looks sick. Will Law, who's also speaking at the SF Video Tech Meetup which-

Phil: I think he just did Paris as well, didn't he?

Steve: I want to be Will when I grow up.

Matt: I want to be Will when I grow up too. Okay. So any Demuxed news? What's happening with Demuxed Europe, Phil? Is that coming around?

Phil: Sure.

Matt: Not to put you on the spot, just asking.

Phil: Not to put me on the spot.

Matt: You think it's 2023 or you think it's 2024?

Phil: Do I think it's 2023 or 2024? I would love to do one in 2023. If we're going to do one in 2023 I should probably start looking at venues pretty sharpish when I get back to London.

Steve: Castle.

Phil: We have some venues, we know some venues.

Matt: Like a sweet club in Berlin or something.

Phil: No, I mean we have some venues in London.

Matt: There's a big wall around the UK now, right?

Phil: Yeah, it's Europe in the sense that it's the continent, rather than Europe in the sense that it's the EU. It's Demuxed Europe, not Demuxed EU.

Matt: Got it. Other notes, the YouTube videos are all online, except-

Phil: For Demuxed?

Matt: Demuxed YouTube videos are all online.

Steve: Including the lightning talks?

Matt: Including lightning talks?

Phil: But not the special guest?

Matt: But not the special guest.

Steve: Oh. Why not?

Matt: I think just got the recording yesterday. Tim who is our amazing editor and cuts these things up every year, just went by the schedule and so when he was done with the schedule he just stopped editing.

Phil: Oh, it wasn't anyway. It was not in the schedule.

Matt: And then I asked him and he was like, "Oh. Sick." And so he found it and edited it for us, and color corrected a bunch of stuff.

Phil: Oh, color correction. We're sorry.

Matt: We're sorry about that. There might have been some lux turned on some monitor laptops. But anyway.

Steve: That was amazing though, the special guest.

Matt: It was really good.

Steve: Oh my gosh.

Matt: So we're excited, but that should be online by the time this podcast comes out, hopefully. But if it's not, go check it out.

Phil: We're checking out venues for 2023 right now. I spent an hour chatting about them this week.

Steve: What does that mean, chatting about? Do you have ideas?

Phil: We have ideas.

Matt: There's a comedy club that's actually a dark horse right now, that I'm trying to make happen.

Phil: What's the deal with airline food? What's the deal with iframe?

Steve: Wait, big enough to fit?

Matt: Yeah.

Steve: Wow. That's a massive comedy club.

Matt: Yeah. Honestly it looks pretty cool. I mean, there's a chance that we go back to Bespoke, which I think has been an amazing venue for us for a couple of years. But it is the ceiling. We could fit more people in there, but it would be at the cost of some of the soft seating which I thought was really valuable there. And also, we can't start before 10:00 AM if we're there again because the one door being open and the security, it just got weird. So some lessons learned there.

But then there's also the trade off of having a venue that's so turnkey, versus having a venue where we have to go install A/V. Anyway. So we're working on it, but we're also trying to avoid some other things.

What we do know now is we're leaning towards it's either going to be really early in October or late in October. But mid October is a minefield of--

Phil: ffmpeg events and an IEEE event. Yeah.

Matt: Yeah. Trying to play nice in the community, aren't we?

Phil: Yes.

Steve: But what about the one that was after Bespoke? With the dog patch?

Phil: Midway.

Matt: Midway? Midway is still in the running. Midway and Bespoke are the two top ones that we're thinking about.

Phil: Midway needs a lot of A/V. A lot of work from that perspective.

Steve: Got it, yeah. Got it. I remember you guys running all over the place in there. Yeah, okay. Cool.

Phil: It was a great venue, it was a great venue.

Matt: Okay. Let's move into the newsletter adjacent topics that we're talking about this month. I actually don't know that there's a newsletter but I have it written down in my notes as something we want to talk about. But Media Chrome marching towards 1.0.

Steve: We're going to start there?

Matt: Yeah, we're going to start there. We're just going to launch right into it. Hey, Steve.

Steve: Hi?

Matt: Tell me about it.

Steve: Yeah. Media Chrome, this thing that I've been selling to the audience here for what feels like a decade, it might literally be a decade because 2013, 2014 was the first talk on web components. Anyway.

Matt: I think so.

Steve: Yeah, 2014, there's an Alex Converse talk and then I followed that with some web components. Something like that.

Matt: I think we need a Wavelet Codex talk.

Phil: Yeah. Wasn't that the, "Dude, where's my Wavelet Codec?" Great talk title for a codec talk.

Steve: Maybe it's-- . Yeah. Well, Media Chrome, what some people may have seen is web components, browser web components for video players, building the UI components, you can build your player from scratch without needing to actually build the play button from complete scratch and things like that. Media Chrome has been around for a couple of years now, we've been building it towards more production ready and it's already being used in the Mux Player which is used across a ton of sites, and so we feel pretty confident about it. So Media Chrome itself, we're moving to 1.0.

Matt: It's also Caffeine? Caffeine uses it in their production player.

Steve: Caffeine is using it, we've been talking to Microsoft about using it.

Matt: RunwayML uses it.

Steve: Oh, they are? Cool. Yeah.

Phil: Previous guests on this podcast, by the way.

Matt: The last guest on this podcast.

Steve: Really?

Matt: Yeah.

Steve: Oh man. Yeah. So no, people are using it and have been kicking the tires. We feel pretty confident in it. SemVer versioning is an interesting thing. We've been using the 0.V4 for Media Chrome because it allows us to break things a little bit easier as we've been exploring and learning and things like that.

But now I think we feel pretty confident to move it to a 1.0., and what we've been hearing from people is certainly for production use cases, you want to feel like, okay, this is at least 1.0 before we put it in front of production viewers and stuff. There's no reason why it shouldn't be 1.0 today.

Since we're already using it in the Mux Player and it's on these production sites, but there's still a few things that we want to do to clean it up and make sure that we're not going to do anything to API or CSS breaking things in it after we actually lock it down to 1.0. Anyway, it's exciting to get there and should be in the next couple of months.

Matt: In the mean time, there's actually the Mave team rebuilt a WinAmp theme in the Media Chrome player.

Steve: I feel so happy about that.

Phil: Is there a website where you can try that with a secret URL?

Steve: Oh yeah. On stream.new.

Matt: Wait, what is the URL though?

Phil: Isn't it stream.new/V/VideoID/WinAmp? Isn't it just /WinAmp on the end of the URL?

Steve: I think it is just /WinAmp.

Matt: Okay. So if you upload a video to Stream.new and then just append /WinAmp you'll get the old WinAmp theme?

Phil: I'm pretty sure it is, yeah.

Steve: They built the Demuxed Player too, right?

Matt: Yeah, for 2023.

Steve: Yeah, awesome.

Phil: They did a great job of that as well. Really great job.

Matt: So shout out Mave.io. Okay, cool, so the other one, the next one on my list was this Vectis IP announcing a call. This was back in September, so it's been a minute since we've launched these newsletters.

Phil: What is Opus, Matt just typed in his laptop.

Matt: No, patent clouds for the Opus Codec. It was on LWN.net, so yeah, it's still... It was designed from the beginning to avoid existing patents in the field and be royalty free, and then Vectis, a premiere-

Steve: Such an evil name. Vectis.

Phil: Vectis.

Matt: A premiere, full suite IP licensing and consultancy boutique is collecting patents that are claimed to be out on Opus.

Phil: That's a weird way to say patent troll.

Matt: Yeah. It's a big mouthful for really ultimately meaning patent troll. Just throwing this out there, I think there has been... this has actually been stated by the people that are a little bit more... that have been historically skeptical about initiatives like AV1 have been, how sure are you that it won't get hit with some sort of patent? I mean, Opus is, as far as internet codecs are concerned, ancient.

Steve: Wait, no. Yeah, so Opus is a new one. God, it's so frustrating.

Matt: The new one, 2012. 10 years. 10 years old.

Steve: The new one, the new open source codec. Yeah, a decade old.

But it is frustrating because the amount of work these teams go through to actually understand the patented things and invent new things to get around them. It's incredible, the work and intelligence that goes into avoiding these patents to then have this group, who's just going to waste a ton of time. It could turn into something that, I don't know, goes to courts and I don't know how these things get resolved.

I have no idea how these things get resolved, but it's really frustrating.

Matt: No, and the worst part is that it ultimately ends up getting challenged by some guy that's like, "Well, I actually have a patent for showing pictures really fast to your cat." Somehow they got the patent for it, of shuffling papers really quick and it's basically the same thing.

Phil: IBM patented meetings under 15 minutes, very famously. Wasn't it? 15 minutes, I don't remember how long it was. That was a long time ago.

Matt: Okay, cool. So now that we showed that we know nothing about the history of codecs.

Phil: Well, let's talk about the other patent news. There's more patent news.

Matt: What was the other patent news?

Phil: The other patent news. Well, I mean-

Matt: Oh yeah. Yeah, kick it off?

Phil: Yeah? I'm going to kick it off? So Twitch and Amazon are being sued by-

Matt: Emblaze.

Phil: Emblaze. Which is right up there with Vectis for evil licensing companies, for what's described at HTTP live streaming.

Steve: Is it E-M-Blaze or just M-Blaze?

Phil: Emblaze.

Matt: E-M-Blaze.

Steve: Oh, it is Emblaze.

Phil: So this is a patent for HTTP live streaming in the most generic sense.

Matt: Not to be confused with HTTP live streaming, known as the artist known as HLS.

Phil: Correct. But they did try to also sue Apple over HLS and failed, and tried to sue Microsoft over Smooth Streaming, and failed.

Matt: This is just a bad patent troll then.

Phil: Not doing a great job of it so far. But I'm sure they'll get there, I'm sure they'll get their BSD crown.

Matt: Like a patent golem.

Steve: They're just waiting for somebody to not have the patience and just pay them. That's basically it.

Phil: Yeah. It kind of feels like that. Ooh, hey, look, here's the history of this company's name. Emblaze Video which are product names under Geo Interactive Media, which then changed to Emblaze Systems, then Emblaze and then BSD Crown Limited.

Matt: Wait, so since we initially put this in here?

Phil: Since we started talking about this sentence.

Matt: Since we started this they changed their name?

Phil: Yeah, it sounds like it. But no, I think that was just us reading the wrong bit of the article maybe.

Steve: We're nailing it today, guys.

Matt: Shall we go from there to maybe some Netflix stuff?

Phil: Yeah, let's talk about Netflix. What's going on down the road at Netflix in the South Bay?

Matt: Well, okay. You gave the news that was news to me that I had totally missed.

Phil: I can't believe that everyone in this room other than me didn't know that Reed Hastings is stepping down as the CEO of Netflix.

Matt: Yeah, I also don't know. I blame Twitter, which is a topic we'll talk about in a second.

Phil: Oh yeah, we'll get to that one.

Matt: I blame Twitter because I can't use Twitter right now because all of my clients stopped working last week and I refuse to use the hell scape that is the native application. I tried to open one. How have you people been doing this?

Phil: I don't use Twitter.

Matt: Twitter with TweetBot is glorious. Twitter without TweetBot, Twitter with the native apps, it's awful. Truly. Anyway, I feel like I'm out of the loop on a lot of things because of this. So Reed Hastings is out?

Phil: Well, I mean, he's not out.

Steve: He was still CEO.

Phil: He was still CEO. I think he's stepping down as CEO but staying on the board.

Steve: You mean like chairman or something like that?

Phil: Yeah, I think staying as chairman is what I read. But yeah, this is one of several interesting things from their Q4 results. He's stepping down.

Matt: Well, before we move on from Reed Hastings I just want to say real quick, I need to get this off my chest. I feel like Reed Hastings-

Phil: It's a great name.

Matt: It's a great CEO name. Just like Colt McCoy is a great Texas Quarterback name.

Steve: Reed Hastings.

Matt: Reed Hastings is a great tech CEO name.

Phil: It is, it really is.

Steve: I feel like this is a completely other angle, but it would be really interesting if they just fired Reed, based on their whole Netflix firing culture and everything. If they were just like, "Oh, no. Sorry. Netflix is too big for you now."

Matt: According to the handbook, the job outgrew you, Reed.

Steve: That would've been appropriate. I feel like even if it-

Matt: Make haste and get out of here.

Steve: Oooh. Blah.

Phil: Oooh. Make Hastings?

Steve: Reed this.

Matt: So the other news was in their Q4 results?

Phil: I think all of this was announced in their Q4 results, which was announced last week, right? So that was one of them, that he was stepping down. Password sharing, limitations are going to start in Q1, so if you still share a Netflix account with people outside your household.

Steve: You have three months to save $14.

Matt: I think it's like $19 now or something.

Phil: It does keep going up.

Matt: It's like 4K more expensive than it was, like six months ago.

Steve: I feel like I get an email from them every month now, like, "Oh, we're just going to increase it a little bit. We're just going to increase a little bit, don't worry about it." And then it's $1 more every single month.

Phil: I think they said that they were going to add to that, obviously, unsurprisingly, I think there is going to be an option to pay to share it with people outside your house that won't be as expensive as just a whole new subscription. I think that's how they announced.

Steve: The Big Family Plan.

Matt: I feel like in reality it's the ex that you are on good enough terms that you don't want to totally burn the bridge with plan.

Phil: That's actually what it's named in the handbook.

Matt: I have a lot of friends who when they broke up they were like, "Can I keep using the Netflix though?" And that was the olive branch that they continued with.

Steve: And you're okay to keep seeing that person's name every time you open the damn app to avoid the $14?

Phil: That's not worth $13 to me.

Matt: I think it's worth $14. It's clearly worth $14 to some people that I know. And then slowly you start passive aggressively changing the names on the other profiles.

Steve: "Super beautiful new girlfriend."

Matt: She goes to another school, you don't know her.

Phil: What's a little unclear to me right now is how... I know I travel a lot, when I'm traveling I use Netflix when I travel and on my iPad and I'm a little unclear and maybe I just didn't go and read much about this. But, hey, what if my girlfriend is at home and watching my Netflix and I'm in the US watching my Netflix? How aggressively are they going to stamp down on that? Are they going to categorize living room devices separately to mobile devices?

Matt: Didn't they try this already in smaller regions? I thought they started. There was some news. I feel like we might've even put this in the newsletter last year, about them testing this in Brazil or something like that. Testing some caps, and I think they ran into very similar issues with tracking.

Steve: What is the limit though? Is it the number of profiles you can have on the account? Because it's one thing to share a password. No, wait, is the password the same for every single person?

Phil: Yeah.

Steve: Oh, so it doesn't really matter if you have a different profile or not, it's just the password. You remember when, was it Jimmy Fallon shared his password on-

Matt: Twitter?

Steve: The Oscars? No, it was like the Oscars or something like that. He's like, "Here's my Netflix password," and like a million people signed into his account. Okay, so the limit is for any one password, how many people you can have watching at one time or something like that?

Phil: Yes. Well, that's where it gets interesting because I already pay for multiple devices concurrently, but it's supposed to be multiple devices within the same household.

Matt: This is actually a thing if YouTube TV ever cracked down on this it would be really interesting because when I travel I use YouTube TV all the time, YouTube TV is also the only household subscription we have to television so if my partner is at home watching TV and I'm on the road. Then sometimes even we'll have YouTube TV signed into different devices in the house on different streams all at the same time.

Phil: Yeah, best hope that doesn't get cracked down on.

Matt: I mean, that would be it for me, if they cracked down on that, honestly.

Steve: Well, you know what's the worst part about this? I feel like all these other streaming services are probably waiting for Netflix to make that move too, so as soon as they do that, all the other services are going to be like, "Okay, great. We have permission to do it ourselves.

Phil: Almost like layoffs, huh?

Matt: Oh god.

Phil: Is that a spicy opinion? There's definitely some layoffs happening that are happening because it's opportunistically and culturally appropriate right now.

Matt: I mean, for public companies it's one of those situations where you can't not. It's one of those tough things. Yeah, anyway.

Phil: Speaking of layoffs, Twitter. Is that a bad transition?

Matt: No, given that I think they're at... are they 75% smaller than they were pre Musk, before getting Musketed?

Steve: Can you just walk in the front door now? I walk by their building every day, I feel like I could just walk in the front door and maybe they don't even have security at the front desk any more.

Phil: They'll actually slap a badge on you and be like, "Could you do some video engineering for us? We really need to-"

Steve: Is there anyone left on their team that knows about video?

Matt: There's some people, Demux speakers. I would argue leaders in the video industry that got laid off in all of this. I'm sure they've been snapped up at this point, but some real gets there for a second. Especially given that they're talking about video being a-

Phil: Yeah. I mean, video, that's one of the Blue features, right? It's more premium, longer videos, isn't it??

Steve: What's a Blue feature?

Matt: The checkmarks, it's the checkmarks. Oh man, you missed all of this?

Steve: I did. I have twin two year olds, dude. I don't know anything.

Phil: Should we pause the recording for five minutes while we explain what's been happening at Twitter for a while?

Matt: So Elon is like, "Power to the people. Everyone can have a checkmark for $8."

Steve: Oh yeah, I know. I heard that.

Matt: Yeah. So then people would make an account being like Pfizer1000 with a checkmark and then be like, "Free insulin for everyone." Aside from getting to impersonate public companies, one of the other Blue features is longer videos.

Phil: And I think 4K video is going to be under there as well.

Matt: Well, yeah. Somebody discovered 4K big... What was-

Phil: Yeah. Somebody worked out you could effectively create a tweet thread of images and then stitch them together as a Dash manifest and serve all of the frames for Big Book Bunny in 4K 60 from a single tweet thread with an X Only hosted manifest and all the media chunks coming off of Twitter.

Steve: Just using Twitter as the hosting service?

Phil: Effectively, yes. You spoof-

Matt: This is so much worse than I thought it was when I saw it.

Phil: It's pretty crazy, because you package a video and then spoof the file as having a PNG header so Twitter thinks it's an image, but actually it's a segment of Big Book Bunny as the actual media and then the guy's created a bot. I can't remember who it is, David Buchanan? Something like that. Yeah, David Buchanan I think it is. Yeah, he created a bot that just creates an ideally private tweet thread that has all those images in, that are actually video and just stitches a manifest on top of it.

Steve: The amazing thing about that is even once they know about it, it's going to take them a year to fix it, right?

Phil: Well, no one's left working on it.

Matt: The sink that Elon carried in that one day is going to go fix this? I guess on that note, DVDs are back.

Phil: DVDs are back. Don't throw away your DVDs, folks. Keep your DVDs.

Matt: Okay. So what is this one? This was you, you posted this link that DVDs, that your wife was right about DVDs or something.

Phil: I don't have a wife.

Matt: I know, but that was the headline of the blog post or something like that.

Phil: My Wife Was Right About DVDs. Yeah, it's this common thing that we've seen over the last few years where streaming services, once something is on there, it's not necessarily on there forever and even beyond that... My favorite one recently was, I can't remember which show it was, but a guy created a show for Amazon Prime and then Prime took his show down, and he had no way to stream his own show, his own content that he'd created. Which is pretty crazy.

Matt: Because they owned the rights to it?

Phil: Yeah. And the fact is it gets even worse, I think this was part of a merger deal as well, where Amazon wanted to write off a bunch of money. One of the ways to do that is to write off a bunch of content. It's like, "Okay. It's gone. You can never get this content again."

Steve: Wait, okay. So it's one thing if I'm paying for the service-

Phil: Yeah, and you cancel the service.

Steve: Okay. But what if I bought a copy of Elf for $15 or something, they can't take that.

Phil: They absolutely can and do.

Matt: They can and do.

Steve: What?

Matt: Yeah. Same with Kindle.

Steve: What?

Matt: Yeah. You buy a temporary license to the content, not actually the content.

Phil: Okay, hear me out here, guys. Hear me out. He's gripping the microphone. Could we solve this using a blockchain?

Steve: Blockchain plus hosting it on Twitter?

Phil: Yeah. Twitter will never go down.

Matt: The funny thing is, is that I was just telling somebody the other day that one of the tech failures that I'm the most happy about is MySpace because it deleted a bunch of really embarrassing shit from the internet that makes it a lot harder to find because they like, "Oh no, we lost a bunch of images and audio."

Phil: What a shame.

Matt: So now people can't find from Screamo band from 2005.

Steve: Man. They won't even say, "Hey, we're going to take this down. Download a copy of it because you paid for it"?

Phil: No.

Steve: Because they're not cheap. It's the same price basically as buying the DVD. Wow. The world should know that.

Phil: We're putting it out there. This will go viral because of that actually.

Matt: You're on notice, world.

Steve: To the two listeners.

Phil: We didn't talk about HelloVideo Codec.

Steve: What's that?

Matt: Give us a rapid fire about Hello Video.

Phil: A rapid fire HelloVideo Codec? It's a really simple video codec implemented in really readable code.

Matt: Nice.

Steve: What does really readable code mean?

Phil: I ask myself that every day.

Matt: Really readable code is when you're writing it in that moment, and not when you're looking at it a week later.

Phil: Justin Greer, he's at Mux now, but way pre Mux he wrote a video codec in Ruby.

Steve: Ruby is very readable code?

Matt: Yes. And I think it was a reference implementation that was just like, "Here's how a simple codec works."I'm pretty sure it did one from every six seconds or something like that.

Phil: It was not fast. That's for sure. I think it only did iframe.

Matt: But it was really interesting.

Phil: It was.

Steve: So readable code here means?

Phil: Look, here you go. I'll turn my laptop to show you. Look, is that readable?

Matt: The answer is no, it is not super readable.

Phil: Nevermind, nevermind. I was wrong, I was wrong. It's like a toy codec, like a toy video codec. It's an intro codec.

Steve: A learn codec?

Matt: It's like the Duplo block of codecs.

Steve: But is that useful? I'm going to play Devil's Advocate here, because it's great, here's how a video codec works. Is that supposed to encourage you to go build your own? Because there's no way in freaking hell you're going to take a start from there and then go build an actual usable video codec, right?

Matt: It's inspiring some poor sap to go build their own codec?

Phil: One of my friends actually did go build their own codec.

Matt: I know many people who have gone and built their own codec, and I don't think any of it has gone well.

Phil: This one actually went really well. I was surprised how far they got with this one. They had an absolute requirement of no external dependencies, ffmpeg could not go on the device so any form, it was a Linux device so they pretty much had to write their own screen encoder for a device.

Matt: Was it like the NSA or something like that?

Phil: No, no. He didn't own one of the devices from the same company.

Matt: Apple?

Phil: I think they use fairly standardized codecs.

Steve: I was about to say.

Matt: What other device do I own? Cars?

Phil: No. We'll move on, we'll move on.

Steve: Are we in James Bond, Q territory here? I don't understand where this is going.

Matt: I don't either.

Steve: MI6?

Phil: We didn't talk about the 4K 8K thing either?

Steve: The what?

Matt: What's the 4K 8K thing?

Phil: From Christian.

Steve: The what?

Phil: Okay. So IEEE published a study that basically says for the vast majority of use cases, the vast majority of screen sizes, 8K isn't needed.

Matt: I feel like we already discovered that with 4K too, though.

Phil: I don't think that needed a study to tell us that.

Steve: Didn't we have a conversation with Matt from Vimeo about this? And when you actually get the screen, if you're doing VR and it's up in your face, right?

Phil: Yeah. That's pretty different though to a TV in your home, right?

Steve: Okay. Yeah, what's the scope of this?

Phil: It's all on distance from the TV and how it matters. I haven't seen anything that shows that 4K-

Steve: Didn't John Dahl give a talk on the science behind this at Demuxed?

Phil: Yeah. We all hit ourselves in the face with our phones.

Matt: There's a whole lot of pictures of people around the office putting measuring tape between their eyeballs and their monitor.

Steve: Yeah. There was a good talk that came out of that. Didn't we already solve that? Why do we need this little, whatever that is?

Phil: Okay. Okay. Sorry, IEEE.

Matt: Yeah, IEEE. Have you not been to Demuxed? Sheesh. Strobe said quality doesn't matter, and then John said actually it does, that one time.

Steve: Yeah, at least we're all on the same page.

Phil: Strongly synergy, synergy.

Matt: Unsurprisingly, we'll wrap this. We'll go full circle here. The Demuxed talks are online and I have to suggest the strobe talk. It is top notch, as usual.

Phil: How many copies of every talk in the playlist, Matt?

Matt: At this point, one, I think.

Phil: Because I sat down and took out all the duplicates. Matt's about to throw shade on YouTube, here we go.

Matt: No. No shade to YouTube, but when I selected, I just wanted to make sure that all of the ones that I just uploaded are in that playlist so I selected all the ones. Then there's a global add to playlist type dropdown, and it had a little line through that checkbox which usually means some of these are, some of these aren't.

So I checked that, thinking, "Okay, this is going to make all of these on the playlist." Little did I know that it was just going to add all of them to the playlist, whether or not they were already on the playlist, which is why some things are so nice we added them twice.

Steve: But do you have the DVD in 8K?

Matt: That's a good point.

Phil: That's not a bad idea. We should release a Demuxed DVD every year. DVD. Are we really going to reencode a thing in 576i?

Matt: So by the time this podcast is out, there will be a Demuxed DVD.

Steve: It'll be swag for next year.

Phil: And on that bombshell.

Matt: I think we're good here. All right. Well, thanks, everybody for this perfectly good episode. We'll see what we come out with here. But if you're interested in being a guest on the podcast for one of the normal episodes, please, to god, reach out.

Phil: Please, reach out.

Matt: Please reach out and then we'll subject everyone to no fewer of these, because we're going to do these once a month. Look forward to seeing you on the next one.

Steve: If you don't come on as a guest, you will be subjected to.

Matt: You get subjected to these either way. Thanks for joining, we'll see you next time. Bye.

Phil: Bye.