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H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

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

#161

Post by jariel »

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…

Yes, but what does " backed by " mean?

Does it mean money, or not? Because if not, then Fraunhofer does not exist.

But there is absolutely a problem here, because said 'mega businesses' actually should have a strategic imperative to want to make internet technologies more widespread.

Why on earth would MS want to limit their main line of business for a tiny big of IP related revenue?

It would seem to me, that G, MS, Huawei and all of the various patent holders should be trying their best to remove any and all barriers to adoption. There are enough bureaucratic hurdles in the way to worry about, let alone legal concerns.

Even if MS or whoever had to buy out some laggard IP owners who didn't want to play ball, it would probably still make sense for them.

Fraunhofer or anyone else are not in that situation, but the behemoths running vast surpluses are, it just seems shortsighted for them to hamstring any of this.

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

#162

Post by dylan604 »

trentnix wrote: post #150
grishka wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

What it does do though is allow someone to start from zero, and catch up to the rest of the competition very fast and cheap. They can then offer their "product" cheaper in order to gain market share. As long as they are getting/keeping customers, there's no need to innovate. You can have a viable business without spending tons of cash on R&D, and if you're making money that way, who cares?

*I am no way endorsing this kind of business model, but it exists and does well.

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

#163

Post by TD-Linux »

otterley wrote: post #63
corty wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market is rather unhappy. E.g. Win10 doesn't ship an H265 codec because it's too expensive.

At 99 cents for the add on, the decision to charge users smells more like a political decision than an economic one. The cost to Microsoft is undoubtedly far less than that. 99 cents is basically the bare minimum you can charge when you accept credit cards as a method of payment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#P...

$0.20 for MPEG-LA, $0.40 for HEVC Advance, and "call us" for Technicolor and Velos Media. $0.99 doesn't sound far off.

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

#164

Post by jcranmer »

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 aren't a thing in ~~Europe~~ a few European countries.

Look at all those European patents in the MPEG-LA license pool!

https://www.mpegla.com/wp-content/uploads/avc-att1.pdf

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

#165

Post by jeffbee »

becauseiam wrote: post #114
TheRealSteel wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

H.265/HEVC takes about ten times as much computation to encode than H.264 [1], so H.264 still has legitimate technical use cases, even with licensing/patents aside. This makes it great for a company like Netflix or YouTube, but less good for one-to-one and/or battery sensitive use cases like video calls. However, specialized chips help, and some mobile devices can record in HEVC in real time (mine from 2019 can). I b…

iPhone 7 onwards[1], Qualcomm Snapdragon 610 onwards[2], and Intel Skylake and later CPUs[3] can all encode and decode H.265 in hardware to varying profile levels. 1: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT207022 2: https://www.qualcomm.com/snapdragon/processors/comparison 3: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Hardware/QuickSync

QuickSync is actually a feature of Intel's integrated GPU. Parts without GPUs, no matter how recent, don't have QuickSync.

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

#166

Post by jariel »

p_l wrote: post #66
sph wrote: post #32

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 Why is that?

Pretty much every method involved in high-efficiency video compression has a patent on it, doesn't matter how small part is involved. Now compound this by the fact that a) trying to make an exhaustive patent search to get a verifiable claim that you don't infringe on any patent is very problematic b) known patent pools like MPEG-LA are known not to cover everything. So you can make a reasonable bet that you avoid inf…

"make an exhaustive patent search to get a verifiable claim that you don't infringe on any patent"

Is there even such a thing?

Isn't the problem that one has to actually go to court to get the answer to this question?

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

#167

Post by fefe23 »

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…

It's even worse than that. The main driving force behind VVC is AFAIK the Heinrich Hertz Institute, which used to be independent and has now been sucked into the Fraunhofer mothership, which is one of the big research organisations in Germany.

Fraunhofer has a budget of over 2 billion Euros, and 30% of their money comes from public funding. They run over 70 institutes, so they do much more than this.

The root problem here is that nowadays public research is funded with industry money, which means there has to be a return on investment, hence the patents. In fact, this has metastasized into universities being graded by their patent portfolio volume. So I would expect there to be patents even if 100% of the funding came from the tax payer.

It would have been possible to do the whole process just with public money and zero patents. In fact, I would love it if some research team collated all the patent tax payments across the population of Germany and compare the bottom line cost for the country.

I wager it would have been cheaper without patents, too.

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

#168

Post by oefrha »

zionic wrote: post #139
donatj wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, the first step in this is getting the ffmpeg av1 library to a good usable place. It's currently so slow as to be near unviable. I'd happily switch when it becomes a usable option.

Isn't that largely dependent on hardware acceleration from CPU manufacturers? Or is ffmpeg always software encoding?

FFmpeg isn’t “always software encoding”, that statement doesn’t make much sense since FFmpeg/libavcodec is more of an interface and you can add support for any external encoder/decoder, hardware accelerated or not. However, FFmpeg’s builtin encoders and the most popular external encoders including x264 and x265 are all software encoders. There are hardware accelerated encoders from GPU vendors, e.g. the nvenc encoder for H.264 and H.265 is available for use on Nvidia GPUs if your FFmpeg is compiled against CUDA SDK. It’s a lot faster than x264 and x265 on comparable settings but results are usually a bit worse.

You were probably thinking about hardware decoding though.

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

#169

Post by jcranmer »

speedgoose wrote: post #109
pault wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All of the French patents listed in this license pool care to disagree: https://www.mpegla.com/wp-content/uploads/avc-att1.pdf

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

#170

Post by vertex-four »

jcranmer wrote: post #164
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 aren't a thing in ~~Europe~~ a few European countries. Look at all those European patents in the MPEG-LA license pool! https://www.mpegla.com/wp-content/uploads/avc-att1.pdf

Software patents can exist, but are almost always unenforceable, is my understanding of it from researching this for my own media-related project.
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