H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC) • Hacker News Board

Re: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

#21

Post by yewenjie » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 2:02 PM UTC

DrBazza wrote: post #9

Naively hoped I'd read 'this will be released to the community under a GPL license' or similar. Instead found the words 'patent' and 'transparent licensing model'. I appreciate that it costs money and time to develop these algorithms, but when you're backed by multi-billion dollar "partners from industry including Apple, Ericsson, Intel, Huawei, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Sony" perhaps they could swallow the costs? It…

Is H.265 released under a GPL-like licenses? If not, how do softwares like Handbrake use it?

Re: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

#22

Post by p_l » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 2:02 PM UTC

DrBazza wrote: post #9

Naively hoped I'd read 'this will be released to the community under a GPL license' or similar. Instead found the words 'patent' and 'transparent licensing model'. I appreciate that it costs money and time to develop these algorithms, but when you're backed by multi-billion dollar "partners from industry including Apple, Ericsson, Intel, Huawei, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Sony" perhaps they could swallow the costs? It…

The dirty secret of video codecs is that you can't make a modern video codec that isn't patent encumbered, which in turn makes it so that even if they wanted to be open, they go for defensive patents, which in turn perpetuate the situation.

At least the patent licenses usually used with MPEG mean that private use of open source implementations is free.

Re: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

#23

Post by CJefferson » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 2:02 PM UTC

DrBazza wrote: post #9

Naively hoped I'd read 'this will be released to the community under a GPL license' or similar. Instead found the words 'patent' and 'transparent licensing model'. I appreciate that it costs money and time to develop these algorithms, but when you're backed by multi-billion dollar "partners from industry including Apple, Ericsson, Intel, Huawei, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Sony" perhaps they could swallow the costs? It…

GPL would seem like a very weird choice -- that would mean it couldn't be put into any closed source product?

Re: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

#24

Post by clouddrover » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 2:03 PM UTC

hirako2000 wrote: post #4

KitDuncan wrote: post #2

Can we all just agree on using AV1 instead of another patent encumbered format?

How does x264 etc get away with it?

They don't get away with it. The are two separate issues: the software copyright license and the H.264 patent license. x264 itself is licensed under the GPL:

http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html

But if you use an H.264 encoder or decoder in a country that recognizes software patents then you need to buy a patent license if your usage comes under the terms of the license:

https://www.mpegla.com/programs/avc-h-264/

Re: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

#25

Post by 0-_-0 » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 2:03 PM UTC

aey wrote: post #20

Unklejoe wrote: post #14

It's interesting that they are able to continue improving video compression. You'd think that it would have all been figured out by now. Is this continued improvement related to the improvement of technology? Or just coincidental? Like, why couldn't have H.266 been invented 30 years ago? Is it because the computers back in the day wouldn't have been fast enough to realistically use it? Do we have algorithms today tha…

Compression is AI. It’s never going to be “all” figured out.

Another way if saying it is that compression is understanding.

Re: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

#26

Post by sp332 » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 2:03 PM UTC

Unklejoe wrote: post #14

It's interesting that they are able to continue improving video compression. You'd think that it would have all been figured out by now. Is this continued improvement related to the improvement of technology? Or just coincidental? Like, why couldn't have H.266 been invented 30 years ago? Is it because the computers back in the day wouldn't have been fast enough to realistically use it? Do we have algorithms today tha…

I don't know much about H.266, but some of the advances in H.265 depended on players having enough RAM to hold a bunch of previous decoded frames, so they could be referred to by later compressed data. Newer codecs tend to have a lot more options for the encoder to tune, so they need a combination of faster CPUs and smarter heuristics to explore the space of possible encodings quickly.

Re: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

#27

Post by cycrutchfield » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 2:04 PM UTC

eigenvalue wrote: post #6

Can anyone verify if this is a real number? It’s possible sometimes to make surprising claims (such as 50% lower size) by relying on unusual or unrealistic situations. I would rather if they use a standard set of test videos with different content and resolutions, and some objective measure of fidelity to the original, when quoting these percentages. But if the 50% number is real, then that is truly remarkable. I won…

>some objective measure of fidelity to the original

This is part of the problem. What is an "objective" measure of perceptual fidelity to the original?

Re: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

#28

Post by dahfizz » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 2:04 PM UTC

Unklejoe wrote: post #14

It's interesting that they are able to continue improving video compression. You'd think that it would have all been figured out by now. Is this continued improvement related to the improvement of technology? Or just coincidental? Like, why couldn't have H.266 been invented 30 years ago? Is it because the computers back in the day wouldn't have been fast enough to realistically use it? Do we have algorithms today tha…

Here is a hint:

> Because H.266/VVC was developed with ultra-high-resolution video content in mind, the new standard is particularly beneficial when streaming 4K or 8K videos on a flat screen TV.

Compressing video is very different from gzipping a file. It's more about human perception than algorithms, really. The question is "what data can we delete without people noticing?", and it makes sense that answer is different for an 8k video than a 480p video.

Re: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

#29

Post by im3w1l » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 2:04 PM UTC

50% is very impressive. It's not just a gold rush of low hanging fruit anymore, they did real work, created real benefits. I'm willing to pay a little tax on my devices or softwares for this.

Re: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

#30

Post by k_bx » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 2:05 PM UTC

Unklejoe wrote: post #14

It's interesting that they are able to continue improving video compression. You'd think that it would have all been figured out by now. Is this continued improvement related to the improvement of technology? Or just coincidental? Like, why couldn't have H.266 been invented 30 years ago? Is it because the computers back in the day wouldn't have been fast enough to realistically use it? Do we have algorithms today tha…

From what I've heard (would love to hear more expertise on this), it's incredibly hard to invent a new video compression algorithm without breaking an existing set of patents, and there's also no easy way to even know whether you're breaking anything as you develop the algo. Thus the situation we're in is not that it's too hard to develop better codecs, but that you've very disincentivized to do so.