Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

newsletter.fraunhofer.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 435 posts

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

#101

Post by speedgoose »

p_l wrote: post #93
speedgoose wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 U…

One more benefit of the brexit for mainland Europe! I didn't know about using the WTO to dispute invalide patents. I guess a WTO dispute can make sense for a Boeing software patent used by Airbus. I wonder whether the WTO would care about an independent developer. It's not very good press, but perhaps it's fine for them.

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

#102

Post by clouddrover »

p_l wrote: post #54
MikusR wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what AV1 is.

The situation with AV1 is "we are in middle of minefield and nobody got mine-clearing gear". They can be reasonably sure they do not infringe known patents from certain Patent Pools and patents declared as part of MPEG-LA bundles. They can't provide reasonable data that they do not infringe on any submarine patent, something that killed 3 attempts by MPEG-LA to provide a royalty-free codec for the web - all that was…

> The situation with AV1 is "we are in middle of minefield and nobody got mine-clearing gear".

That's true of every new video codec. It didn't stop the use of H.264 or VP9 or even HEVC.

Multiple companies have now rolled out AV1 into production. We'll see what happens.

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

#103

Post by p_l »

speedgoose wrote: post #101
p_l wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 U…

One more benefit of the brexit for mainland Europe! I didn't know about using the WTO to dispute invalide patents. I guess a WTO dispute can make sense for a Boeing software patent used by Airbus. I wonder whether the WTO would care about an independent developer. It's not very good press, but perhaps it's fine for them.

WTO doesn't care, WTO serves as a forum to get it through.

The question is, does a "practicing entity" holding the patent cares enough to go through the hardest route to get the patent executed using WTO as a forum? One needs to compare costs and benefits. It's why patent trolling involved pretty much few counties in Texas, because that's where the costs were lowest compared to benefits.

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

#104

Post by pault »

speedgoose wrote: post #77
yewenjie wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They use ffmpeg, which is developed by people who do not care about software patents because it doesn't apply to them.

Why don't the patents apply to them?

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

#105

Post by speedgoose »

josaka wrote: post #100
speedgoose wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The European patent office is not an official thing. It's an independent private organization that will gladly take your money to submit patents.

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

#106

Post by cyphar »

p_l wrote: post #95
cyphar wrote: post #45

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 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.

While they are patent-encumbered in the strictest sense of the word, they are not as aggressively licensed as H.266 -- which is what GP was lamenting. Licensing H.266 under the GPL(v3) wouldn't erase the existence of the patents and it would still be "patent-encumbered" in the same sense that VP8/9 and AV1 are.

And retaliation clauses are present in basically every free software license that has clauses dealing with patents (including Apache-2.0).

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

#107

Post by balls187 »

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…

That's Fraunhofer for you.

In the early days of MP3, all MP3 rippers and players were built off of their implementation.

Hardware and software companies had to license in order to play MP3 files. As such there was not native support for MP3's for quite some time.

In the late 90's right around the explosion of MP3's on the internet, Fraunhofer was going after companies for doing so.

In my humble opinion, that license mess set back innovation in the portable audio space by a good 5 years.

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

#108

Post by hexmiles »

sparkling wrote: post #80
dahfizz wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 differ…

So compressing a 1080p video with H266 will not result in similar file size/quality improvements as a 4k video? How much are we looking at for 1080p, 10%?

not an expert, but from what i understand is more like that they "extend" the codec with technique more effective on higher resolution content, or new "profile" (parameter) more effective for higher resolution content (a bit like you can have different parameter when you zip file).

This new techniques can also be used for 1080p video (for example) but with lower gain. Also the "old" algorithm/system are generally still used but they may be improved/extend.

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

#109

Post by speedgoose »

pault wrote: post #104
speedgoose wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They use ffmpeg, which is developed by people who do not care about software patents because it doesn't apply to them.

Why don't the patents apply to them?

I don't know for all contributors, but the creator is French and there is no software patents in France.

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

#110

Post by [deleted] »

ch_sm wrote: post #15
hirako2000 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just found av1 is about 20 to 30% more efficient than h265. I guess there was no reason to use patented algs, but h265 is now significantly more efficient than av1. I would still take freedom over patented software

> Just found av1 is about 20 to 30% more efficient than h265 > […] but h265 is now significantly more efficient than av1. What did you mean?

[deleted]
Post reply on HN