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H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

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

#261

Post by pxf »

crazygringo wrote: post #238
pxf wrote: post #223

Will it be used? Probably the last one that does not use some sort of AI Compression.See this for image compression https://hific.github.io/ In the next 10 years AI Compression will be everywhere. The problem will be standartisation. Classic compression algoritms can't beat AI ones.

AI compression is super, super cool... but while standardization is certainly a major issue, isn't the model size a much larger one? Given that model sizes for decoding seem like they'll be on the order of many gigabytes, it will be impossible to run AI decompression in software, but will need chips, and chips that are a lot more complex (expensive?) than today's. I think AI compression has a good chance of coming ev…

"Isn't the model size a much larger one?" yap It will probably be different, and systems will have to download the weights and network model, as new models come in, I don't think that we will have a fixed model with fixed weights, the evolution is too fast. Decoding will take place using the AI chip on the device aka "AI accelerator"

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

#262

Post by Ace17 »

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.

In practice, EU does allow software patents. The software invention just needs to be disguised as a machine. Industrial property lawyers know very well how to do that, and it's unfortunately very common.

> Edited because I didn't know that some European countries accept software patents.

European patents are granted at the European Patent Office (individual european countries also have their own patent offices, whose patents can only be enforced in their home country).

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

#263

Post by dfox »

jariel wrote: post #166
p_l wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In theory you can do such kind of search. Problem is that doing that is impractically expensive (and at least in some jurisdictions doing that can actually raise your liability in case of patent infringement).

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

#264

Post by giantrobot »

Unklejoe wrote: post #14

It's interesting that they are able to continue improving video compression. You'd think that it would have all been figured out by now. Is this continued improvement related to the improvement of technology? Or just coincidental? Like, why couldn't have H.266 been invented 30 years ago? Is it because the computers back in the day wouldn't have been fast enough to realistically use it? Do we have algorithms today tha…

Video compression is a calculus of IO capacity, memory, and algorithmic complexity. Take the MPEG-1 codec for instance, it was new about 30 years ago. While today most people think of MPEG-1 videos as low quality the spec provides the ability to handle bit rates up to 100Mb/s and resolutions up to 4095x4095. That was way higher than the hardware of the time supported.

One of MPEG-1's design goals was to get VHS-quality video at a bitrate that could stream over T1/E1 lines or 1x CD-ROMs. The limit on bitrate led to increased algorithmic complexity. It was well into the Pentium/PowerPC era until desktop systems could play back VCD quality MPEG-1 video in software.

Later MPEG codecs increased their algorithmic complexity to squeeze better quality video into low bit rates. A lot of those features existed on paper 20-30 years ago but weren't practical on hardware of the time, even custom ASICs. Even within a spec features are bound to profiles so a file/stream can be handled by less capable decoders/hardware.

There's plenty of video codecs or settings for them that can choke modern hardware. It also depends on what you mean by "modern hardware". There's codecs/configurations a Threadripper with 64GB of RAM in a mains powered jet engine sounding desktop could handle in software that would kill a Snapdragon with 6GB of RAM in a phone. There's also codecs/configurations the Snapdragon in the phone could play using hardware acceleration that would choke a low powered Celeron or Atom decoding in software.

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

#265

Post by Ace17 »

vertex-four wrote: post #170
jcranmer wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Software patents can exist, but are almost always unenforceable

Wanna take the risk? You might end-up winning the lawsuit, but at this moment, there's a good chance for you to be already out-of-business.

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

#266

Post by em500 »

jonpurdy wrote: post #226

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…

Your 2012 Mac Mini's video output doesn't go higher than 2560x1600 anyway, so just staying at 1080p doesn't seem like a huge sacrifice.

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

#267

Post by giantrobot »

pedrovhb wrote: post #126
sp332 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know much about H.266, but some of the advances in H.265 depended on players having enough RAM to hold a bunch of previous decoded frames, so they could be referred to by later compressed data. Newer codecs tend to have a lot more options for the encoder to tune, so they need a combination of faster CPUs and smarter heuristics to explore the space of possible encodings quickly.

I wonder if instead of heuristics, machine learning could be used to figure out the best parameters.

That's already done today. Most modern codecs support variable bitrate encoding so more of the data budget can be given to high complexity scenes. Source video can also be processed multiple times with varied parameters and that output then compared structurally to the source to find the parameters that best encode the scene. This is beyond the more typical multi pass encoding where a first pass over the source just provides some encoding hints for the second pass. It takes several times longer to encode (though is embarrassingly parallel) but the output ends up higher quality for a given data rate than a more naïve approach.

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

#268

Post by mda »

freeone3000 wrote: post #171
zionic wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AV1 beats h.265 by 20-30%, h.266 beats h.265 by 50%. Honestly for that little of an improvement I'll go with AV1.

Really? Because by that metric, H.266 is as far ahead of AV1 as AV1 is ahead of h.265.

well depends, if x is 30% better than y and z is 50% better than y then z is ~15% better than x.

Also this kind of performance claims are 100% hot air. Real world benchmarks talk.

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

#269

Post by dfox »

lukifer wrote: post #222
milansuk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 predictin…

MPEG 4 (taken as a the whole body of standards, not as two particular video codecs) actually has provisions for text content, vector video layers and even rudimentary 3D objects. On the other hand I'm almost sure that there are no practical implementations of any of that.

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

#270

Post by jitendrac »

cheeze wrote: post #203
jitendrac wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yup, from the example I remember(I read it through link on HN but cannot find it in quick search, I wish I could link it), if you film(still film no movement) the macbook pro top to bottom in h264/MP4 at 1024 p resolution and again you take a picture from your camera. the results will be shocking, the video of 5-10 seconds will have lower storage size than the size of single Image. but when you inspect video carefull…

You're thinking of "h264 is magic" https://sidbala.com/h-264-is-magic/ GREAT article

yes,that is the article I was referring.
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