It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video • Hacker News Board

Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video

#221

Post by niftich » Fri, May 10, 2019, 1:39 AM UTC

clouddrover wrote: post #218

qalmakka wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which, exactly like GIF in its very beginning, is encumbered by an infinite amount of patents. You can't replace an open format with a patented one; killing video patents is the very reason AV1 exists.

Which patents is HEIF itself encumbered by and who runs a patent licensing pool for HEIF?

MPEG tells [1] rightsholders to file Patent Statement and Licensing Declarations to ISO/IEC. ISO/IEC maintains [6] a spreadsheet of received documents and the relevant standards that they concern. Examining that spreadsheet, I found four declarations that concerned the HEIF standard, all four submitted by Nokia Technologies Oy. These documents [2][3][4][5] provide references to patents approved or pending.

The patent or patent application numbers, in order of their appearance in these documents:

AU 2014255577, CA 2909566, CN 201480034418.2, EP 14785343.6, IN 6931/CHENP/2015, KR 2015-7032685, RU 2015146961, US 14/254120, US 14/617266, WO PCT/FI2016/050063, US 14/618650, WO PCT/FI2016/050064, GB 1418114.3, WO PCT/FI2015/050671, WO PCT/FI2014/050582, US 14/583332, PCT/FI2014/051052, PCT PCT/FI2016/050381, US 15/578288

This is where I'd start.

Sources:

[1] https://mpeg.chiariglione.org/patents [2] https://isotc.iso.org/livelink/livelink/fetch/2000/2122/3770... [3] https://isotc.iso.org/livelink/livelink/fetch/2000/2122/3770... [4] https://isotc.iso.org/livelink/livelink/fetch/2000/2122/3770... [5] https://isotc.iso.org/livelink/livelink/fetch/2000/2122/3770... [6] https://www.iso.org/iso-standards-and-patents.html

Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video

#222

Post by clouddrover » Fri, May 10, 2019, 1:45 AM UTC

niftich wrote: post #221

clouddrover wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which patents is HEIF itself encumbered by and who runs a patent licensing pool for HEIF?

MPEG tells [1] rightsholders to file Patent Statement and Licensing Declarations to ISO/IEC. ISO/IEC maintains [6] a spreadsheet of received documents and the relevant standards that they concern. Examining that spreadsheet, I found four declarations that concerned the HEIF standard, all four submitted by Nokia Technologies Oy. These documents [2][3][4][5] provide references to patents approved or pending. The patent…

Nokia has licensed their HEIF patents under royalty-free terms:

https://github.com/nokiatech/heif/blob/master/LICENSE.TXT

So that solves that problem.

Which other patents is HEIF encumbered by?

Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video

#223

Post by reaperducer » Fri, May 10, 2019, 1:49 AM UTC

simcop2387 wrote: post #157

reaperducer wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Challenge accepted. https://www.hampsterdance.com/classics/originaldance.htm Just did it on my 2011 MacBook Air. Pushes all four cores up... about 15%.

Try this, http://www.voots.name/

That one actually did better.

Two cores went up 20%. The other two didn't budge. Go figure.

Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video

#224

Post by niftich » Fri, May 10, 2019, 1:50 AM UTC

clouddrover wrote: post #222

niftich wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MPEG tells [1] rightsholders to file Patent Statement and Licensing Declarations to ISO/IEC. ISO/IEC maintains [6] a spreadsheet of received documents and the relevant standards that they concern. Examining that spreadsheet, I found four declarations that concerned the HEIF standard, all four submitted by Nokia Technologies Oy. These documents [2][3][4][5] provide references to patents approved or pending. The patent…

Nokia has licensed their HEIF patents under royalty-free terms: https://github.com/nokiatech/heif/blob/master/LICENSE.TXT So that solves that problem. Which other patents is HEIF encumbered by?

Your statement that "Nokia has licensed their HEIF patents under royalty-free terms" is not true, because the license-in-question's [1] grant is "to, use, run, modify (in a way that still complies with the Specification), and copy the Software within the Licensed Field."

Licensed Field is defined to be: "(...) the non-commercial purposes of evaluation, testing and academic research in each non-commercial case to use, run, modify (in a way that still complies with the Specification) and copy the Software to (a) generate, using one or more encoded pictures as inputs, a file complying with the Specification and including the one or more encoded pictures that were given as inputs; and/or (b) read a file complying with the Specification, resulting into one or more encoded pictures included in the file as outputs."

It is pretty clear from this reading that their patent grant is for non-commercial evaluation, testing and academic research only.

[1] https://github.com/nokiatech/heif/blob/master/LICENSE.TXT

Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video

#225

Post by tomc1985 » Fri, May 10, 2019, 1:52 AM UTC

These "It's year 20XX, throw out this outdated tech!" arguments get so very old after a while

Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video

#226

Post by qwerty456127 » Fri, May 10, 2019, 1:53 AM UTC

Hell no, it's not. None of my devices can play HEVC videos filmed with a recent iPhone without severe performance glitches. I fear to imagine how hard it is going to be to play AV1.

MP4 AVC feels like a great replacement for animated GIFs and almost every device in use today plays it nicely yet, sadly, most of the websites that would allow inserting a GIF in a post won't allow an MP4 file instead. For some sites you even have to convert an MP4 to GIF before uploading it just to see it converted back to MP4 on their side for serving.

Perhaps it could be handy if img tags would just be extended to accept video files (of all the video formats the browser supports) below certain size. Or we should better (perhaps) just forget such a category as an "animated picture" and switch to treating them like regular videos, introducing a separate button to insert such alongside to the "insert picture" button.

Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video

#227

Post by parentheses » Fri, May 10, 2019, 1:58 AM UTC

singhkays wrote: post #217

parentheses wrote: post #161

I don't think it can be killed unless (unordered) - looping is solved and convenient to configure - it can be cross media barriers (copied into a text, copied into an e-mail, etc.) - it pleases the bandwidth gods (are gifs usually smaller? i know that they have a limited color palette)

Your problems 1 & 3 are solved in the article. I compare the size of the GIF to the videos. In one of the scenes it's ~11 MB for GIF and < 500 KB for AV1 video

My bad. I should have read more of the article before "contributing".

That being said, #2 is critical. I often open Safari to get gifs to copy to iMessage because Chrome and Firefox don't properly copy gifs.

AV1 may be a way to make that more "standard" (big hand wave) but adoption is conditional upon this type of common man friendly portability.

Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video

#228

Post by ddingus » Fri, May 10, 2019, 2:19 AM UTC

__jal wrote: post #193

izzydata wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that they are more images than videos. They have no possible way to contain sounds so the annoyingness is limited to having unwanted images in your browser. You can tell your browser to block a particular still image. You can do the same thing to block a GIF. You don't need a pause/play feature on a 2-5 second sequence.

No, the point is control. You have no idea what I need.

Most people require much less.

Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video

#229

Post by bscphil » Fri, May 10, 2019, 2:23 AM UTC

errantspark wrote: post #60

You can pry my GIFs from my cold dead hands. Aesthetically speaking GIFs have a character that you gotta jump through a lot of hoops to approximate with another format. In addition to that they function everywhere, always autoplay, can't have annoying audio, and support transparency, these are all important features that nothing else on the 'market' can match. I'm aware that there is lossless animated WebP with trans…

If you want a "degraded" aesthetic, nothing is stopping you from encoding a gif, then encoding the gif to a video format. The last stage should be roughly lossless, and the video will still use way less space than the corresponding gif.

Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video

#230

Post by bscphil » Fri, May 10, 2019, 2:25 AM UTC

ChrisGranger wrote: post #22

AV1 is not enabled by default in Firefox 66 on Linux. You have to flip a switch in about:config to get it to work. media.av1.enabled For what it's worth, AV1 videos play really slowly on my machine. There's probably a reason AV1 is not enabled by default yet.

As far as I know, dav1d can be enabled even on 66:

    media.av1.use-dav1d = true