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H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

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141–150 of 435 posts

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

#141

H.265 is still not mainstream, and not used to full extend of its performance I'm not sure if 265 is worth spending efforts on now when 266 is about to crash the party, and will be equally adopted at least "equally poorly"

H.266 will take many years to become a usable standard. H.265 is quite mainstream - even some cheap smartphones shoot it. Many modern DLSRs / mirrorless cameras shoot it.

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

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that the market is happy to pay more, it's that there is essentially no choice.

A captive market is a happy market, no?

This is not a captive market. If someone were to invent a free codec that performed similarly and had both software and hardware reference implementations, the market would adopt it very quickly.

This is a market that is voluntarily paying for perceived value.

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

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software patents are not valid everywhere, x264 is brought up by VideoLAN in France, where software patents don't apply like in the rest of the EU.

They sort of half not apply in Sweden too.

What do you mean by half valid?

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

#144
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…

Of course, they can't do that, because the source technologies they've put together are themselves patent-encumbered. An AV-codec is a lot like a modern pop song: a piece of IP entirely made up of licensed samples of other people's IP.

I think a more subtle "open-sourcing" of this IP could still be possible, though. Maybe one that still requires that large corporate players that are going to sell their derivative products, acquire a license the traditional way (this is, after all, what the contributors to the codec's patent-pool and R&D efforts based their relative-R&D-labor-contribution negotiations around: that each contributor would end up paying for the devices of theirs that run the codec.)

Maybe there could be a foundation created under the stewardship of the patent-pool itself, which nominally pays the same per-seat/per-device licensing costs as every other member, but where this money doesn't come from revenue but rather is donated by those other members; and where this foundation then grants open-source projects an automatic but non-transferrable license to use the technology.

So, for example, a directly open-source project (e.g. ffmpeg) would be granted an automatic license (for its direct individual users); but that license wouldn't transfer to software that embeds it. Instead, other open-source software (e.g. Handbrake, youtube-dl, etc.) that embeds ffmpeg would acquire its own automatic license (and thus be its own line-item under the foundation); while closed-source software that embeds ffmpeg would be stuck needing a commercial license.

Is there already a scheme that works like this?

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

#145
post #61
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

Not for 4K rips. I see tons of x265 10 bit encodes, just look for UHD or 2160p copies.

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

#146
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another way if saying it is that compression is understanding.

End-credits are just text. So it should be possible to put it through OCR and save only text, positions, and fonts. And the text is also possible to compress with a dictionary.

True, but end credits take very little space compared to the rest of the movie.

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

#147
post #22
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.

> The dirty secret of video codecs is that you can't

You can, but fraunhofer certainly isn't trying!

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

0_o that is not at all the truth.

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

#148
post #106
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wouldn't Apache 2 be a better license for this since it is explicit on patents?

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

#149
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The video codec battle is not about file size, it is about streaming bandwidth.

Are those different? If I chop up a video file into chunks, I'm streaming it, and if I save a stream I have a file. With a buffer, I would expect the sizes involved to be identical. (Although without a buffer I'd expect streaming to be worse)

>Are those different?

No. In the end you transmitted a file that has a certain size. It doesn't really matter if you save that file or just use a volatile buffer.

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

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> In my humble opinion, that license mess set back innovation in the portable audio space by a good 5 years. Seeing all this, I'm convinced that copyright in general and patent system in particular does more harm than good by slowing down the technical progress of the humanity as a whole for the sake of some already rich people becoming a bit richer. The initial idea behind patent system was sensible, but the way it'…

Seeing all this, I'm convinced that copyright in general and patent system in particular does more harm than good by slowing down the technical progress of the humanity as a whole for the sake of some already rich people becoming a bit richer

There are plenty of societies that don't respect intellectual property and copyright. And those societies don't innovate at the rate as those who do.

There are certainly abuses in the copyright, trademark, and patent systems. But throwing out the baby with the bathwater is not the answer. Identifying the abuses and improving the system is the answer.

Perhaps that progress won't happen at the rate you'd prefer, but it's significantly better than burning the whole thing to the ground.

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