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H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

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

#221

Post by makomk »

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.

It's not just the UK that allows software patents in practice - as the discussion hints at, Germany does too, and if I remember rightly pretty much the last patent affecting MP3 was a German patent on zero-padding held by Philips, who enforced it aggressively against manufacturers of devices like music players.

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

#222

Post by lukifer »

milansuk wrote: post #59
0-_-0 wrote: 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.

Credits also contain logos/symbols (near the end), and often have stylistic flairs as well. Video compression is based on making predictions and then adding information (per Shannon's definition) for the deltas from those predictions. The pattern of credits statically sliding at a consistent rate is exactly the sort of prediction codecs are optimized for; for instance, the same algorithms will save space by predicting repeated pixel patterns during a slow camera pan.

Still, I've often thought it would be nice if text were a more first-class citizen within video codecs. I think it's more a toolchain/workflow problem than a shortcoming in video compression technology as such. Whoever is mastering a Blu-Ray or prepping a Hollywood film for Netflix is usually not the same person cutting and assembling the original content. For innumerable reasons (access to raw sources, low return on time spent, chicken-egg playback compatibility), it just doesn't make sense to (for instance) extract the burned-in stylized subtitles and bake them into the codec as text+font data, as opposed to just merging them into the film as pixels and calling it a day.

Fun fact: nearly every Pixar Blu-Ray is split into multiple forking playback paths for different languages, such that if you watch it in French, any scenes with diegetic text (newspapers, signs on buildings) are re-rendered in French. Obviously that's hugely inefficient; yet at 50GB, there's storage to spare, so why not? The end result is a nice touch and a seamless experience.

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

#224

Post by crazygringo »

baybal2 wrote: post #137

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.265 seems pretty mainstream by now. Older devices obviously don't support it in hardware, but pretty much all newer ones seem to, no?

It's just a slow percolation throughout the ecosystem as people buy new hardware and video servers selectively send the next-generation streams to those users.

The effort on h.265 has already been spent. Now it looks like h.266 is the next generation. It's going to be years before chips for it will be in devices. That's just how each new generation works.

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

#225

Post by waterhouse »

zucker42 wrote: post #180
trentnix wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. For one, this claim suffers from a correlation/causation issue. But also, do you have an actual citation for research which shows this is true?

Chapter 8 [1] of Against Intellectual Monopoly, "Does Intellectual Monopoly Increase Innovation?" looks into this, including comparing countries with stronger patent laws vs weaker laws. The results seem pretty decidedly mixed.

[1] http://www.dklevine.com/papers/ip.ch.8.m1004.pdf

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

#226

Post by jonpurdy »

My 2012 Mac Mini has quickly become much less useful since YouTube switched from H.264 (AVC) to VP9 for videos larger than 1080p a couple of years ago (Apple devices have hardware decoders). I've tested 4K h.264 videos and they play wonderfully thanks to the hardware.

My internet connection speeds and hard drive space have increased much faster than my CPU speeds (internet being basically a free upgrade).

So I don't appreciate new codecs coming out and obsoleting my hardware to save companies a few cents on bandwidth. H.264 got a good run in, but there isn't a "universal" replacement for it where I can buy hardware with decoding support that will work for at least 5-10 years.

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

#227

Post by sitkack »

sp332 wrote: post #99
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.

> it's not really feasible

How do you know this?

TV hardware is on par with browsers. Anything is a program.

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

#228

Post by Cu3PO42 »

epanchin wrote: post #213
Cu3PO42 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I work at a Fraunhofer institute, though not Fraunhofer HHI, which developed this codec, and I have no intimate knowledge on the financing of that institute or this project in particular. But some basic principles apply to all institutes the same. Fraunhofer gets roughly 30% of its funding from public sources, the remainder is raised on a per-project basis. It's a fair assumption that those industry partn…

Public sources as in the taxpayer? Why would the taxpayer fund anything that isn’t open and free. Crazy.

Yes, public sources as in the tax payer. It is worth pointing out that Fraunhofer is itself a non-profit organization.

The argument that anything funded by tax money must be open is a very fair stance. Though the line gets very blurry when you mix various sources of funding like this. To the best of my recollection I have yet to be paid from any public funding (rather than project specific funding raised from the industry, for example).

Personally, I have no qualms with the funding model, but other points of view are presumably equally valid.

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

#229

Post by toast0 »

mekster wrote: post #209
detaro wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Why is Cisco being nice about it? (Besides why not?)

I don't recall the specific timing of the release, so this might not line up, and I have no inside knowledge, just public information.

Cisco has some products which use compressed video in a browser setting. It would be useful if all browsers supported a good codec. Individually downloaded codec plugins suck, because installing is iffy. Therefore, give something away which doesn't cost licensing money to make your existing licensed products more usable.

And get some good feels on the interwebs.

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

#230

Post by speedgoose »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #208
speedgoose wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The European Patent Organisation is an intergovernmental organisation ( https://www.epo.org/about-us/foundation.html ). Not a private organization.

Alright, I was wrong. Still strange that they issue patents that are obviously invalid.
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