NUUG Meetup 2019-04-24: Fighting for free video - Christopher 'monty' Montgomery
Channel: NUUG
Date: 2019-04-24

Technical tactics and war stories from the FOSS audio and video codec frontier


    First they came for ARC. Free software replaced it. Then they came for GIF. Free software replaced it. Then they came for MP3. What on Earth did they expect Free software to do?

    MPEG played it a little smarter than SEA or CompuServe. Threatened lawsuits never happened; they simply hung in the air like the Sword of Damocles, poisoning the market waters. As intended, this boxed out the Free MP3 encoder projects, the people directly responsible for MP3's growing success. And the rest of the world mostly continued treating MP3 like a 'free' format and mostly didn't get sued. Mostly.

    But the Free codec hackers did not forget, and thus far we choose not to forgive.

    In this talk Monty will present recollections, technical asides, and unsubstantiable gossip in an intentionally one-sided history of the codec wars. From the early days of LAME to the dawning story of the new AV1, come hear about the tactics and maneuvers of Free codec development.

Christopher (Monty) Montgomery has been professionally active in audio and compression since 1993. He founded Xiph.Org in 1994 and began the Vorbis codec in 1998, shortly after Fraunhofer IIS and Thomson Multimedia threatened legal action against FOSS MP3 encoder projects.

Over time Monty and Xiph.Org have developed or contributed to other Free and Open Source codecs such as Speex, FLAC, Theora, Daala, CELT, Opus, and AV1. Monty's other software includes CDParanoia and Postfish, and he's contributed to Audacity and Cinelerra in the service of musical theater, video, and stage production.

Monty holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science with a concentration in music from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a M.Eng. in Computer Engineering from Tokyo Institute of Technology. He is currently a research engineer at the Mozilla Corporation, where he works on digital media standards.