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H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

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

#91

Post by DrBazza »

CJefferson wrote: post #23
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?

"or similar" - I mean an open-source free license to use, that is not encumbered by patents. GPL was the first license name to pop into my old-man brain.

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

#92

Post by detaro »

jiggunjer wrote: post #67
p_l wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are compliant with MPEG patent licenses - they distribute source code you have to compile yourself and for non-commercial use. If you build x264 or other open source implementation of h.264/h.265, and embed it for example in commercial video conferencing software/appliance, you have to pay patent licensing fees for that product . It's also why Firefox downloads a blob from Cisco to handle MPEG-4 video - Cisco co…

How much does Cisco pay (to MPEG?) for that?

If I understand correctly, around 10 million USD per year (according to https://www.mpegla.com/wp-content/uploads/avcweb.pdf that's the cap, and from what I've heard Cisco is selling enough actual products to hit that cap, so providing their software for free to everyone else doesn't cost them any extra in licensing fees, just hosting and such)

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

#93

Post by p_l »

speedgoose wrote: post #72
p_l wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Software patents aren't a thing in ~~Europe~~ a few European countries. Sure it's difficult to ignore the American market for a company, but an independent developer could specify a state of the art video codec without thinking about patents. Edited because I didn't know that some European countries accept software patents.

Software patents are a very complex thing.

For example, many countries in EU do not allow patents on software, but that's not something you can claim to be true for all of them - at least before Brexit, since iirc UK was pretty happy to provide software patents.

Then there's a case where if you're really willing you can, as far as I understand, force a patent dispute through WTO, with possibility of patent valid in USA being executed for example in Poland, despite the fact that the patent is invalid in Poland (it doesn't matter if your software is part of physical solution in Poland, algorithms of any kind are not patentable).

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

#94

Post by lowwave »

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…

MIT, FreeBSD will also do.

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

#95

Post by p_l »

cyphar wrote: post #45
p_l wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The dirty secret of video codecs is that you can't make a modern video codec that isn't patent encumbered The existence of Theora, VP8, VP9, and now AV1 seems to contradict that theory. You could argue that they infringe on some unknown patents, but that is also arguably true of patent cabals like MPEG (you just hope that the cabal is big enough that there aren't any patentholders lurking outside). The only differe…

As others mentioned, VP8, VP9 and AV1 all are patent encumbered - they just happen to have licenses that are royalty-free and as someone mentioned, include retaliation clauses which help fighting off submarine patents - but that's essentially a possibly high-stakes game of chicken.

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

#96

Post by vertex-four »

ihuman wrote: post #62
selectodude wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?Art... Care to try your luck?

I'm confused. How is Sisvel able to sell a license for AV1 patents when they're not a member of AOMedia? Do they actually have AV1 patents, or are they trying to trick companies that would rather pay up than risk violating patents?

Basically, unlike copyright, you don't even have to know that someone else patented something in order to infringe on a patent and have them come out of the woodwork later. It's just even more expensive if you do know.

The patent system was not designed to have every tiny little technique patented, and this is its failure mode.

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

#98

Post by ctdeneen »

syshum wrote: post #61
m3kw9 wrote: post #17

It will be first adopted by pirates for sure

H264 seems to still be the preferred codec in this space, even though H265 is a smaller file size. Largely due to the CPU over head of H265, though I am not sure why more people do not use GPU encoding over CPU Encoding, I have never been able to notice the difference visually

Nvidia's NVENC doesn't support CRF, one of the more popular methods of rate control during encoding.

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

#99

Post by sp332 »

xiphias2 wrote: post #40

Shouldn't deep learning based video codecs take over dedicated hardware video decoders as more tensor cores become available in all new hardware? NVIDIA's DLSS 2.0 supersampling is already moving into that direction.

Instead of a video file or stream, that would be more like shipping a program that recreates the video. It might be cool, but it's not really feasible to play back that kind of thing on normal TV hardware.

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

#100

Post by josaka »

speedgoose wrote: post #72
p_l wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Software patents aren't a thing in ~~Europe~~ a few European countries. Sure it's difficult to ignore the American market for a company, but an independent developer could specify a state of the art video codec without thinking about patents. Edited because I didn't know that some European countries accept software patents.

I think Europe does allow software patents of a sort: See https://www.epo.org/law-practice/legal-texts/html/guidelines... Or you might have a particular definition of the term in mind that excludes these, but I think when most folks here the term, they'd include what the EPO permits.
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