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H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

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

#421
post #297

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…

Ten-year software video compression engineer here: TL;DR: it's partly because we're using higher video resolutions. A non-negligible part of the improvement stems from adapting existing algorithms to the now-doubled-resolution. Almost all video compression standards split the input frame into fixed-size square blocks, aka "macroblocks". To put it simply, the macroblock is the coarsest granularity level at which compr…

I hope next target is VR optimized codec.

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

#422
post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any indication that rav1e is so inefficient as to have substantive double digit percentage speedup left to be realized? Because even if you cut encode times in half, they already take hours per minute of video on a quad core. AV1 is unlikely to ever be practical for "muggle" encode use, at least in this decade. It will only be worth committing that much compute workload to making a smaller file if the recipi…

HEVC encoder on 20 series nvidia cards is actually really good

Ice Lake's also great

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

#423
post #286
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.

The audience of h266 and whom will "win" the codec war isn't individual consumers, even powerusers that know what a codec is. H266 will be adopted by broadcasting and archival and will make mpeg tankers of money. Whatever the next generation of physical home media is after blu-ray will use it, the player for it will read it, and your TV cable box will take h266 signals in to decode. The costs of paying mpeg will be i…

I expect H.266 patent fee is not so much expensive like you worried.

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

#424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.engadget.com/2019-06-19-upscaled-uhd-4k-digital-... is one easily found example but it wasn't where I had read it. I'm pretty sure I've seen it on HN itself. edit : here's another https://old.reddit.com/r/cordcutters/comments/9x3v4e/just_le...

OK, so by 2K you mean 1080p. That's a very unusual nomenclature but I see what you mean, thanks. The top link in the reddit thread disproves what you're saying though: https://4kmedia.org/real-or-fake-4k/ Somewhere between a third and a half of films are listed as "real 4K". So there is actually tons of real 4K content. (And the list is just films -- there are plenty of streaming TV shows in real 4K too, like Mrs Mai…

BTW: I really dislike calling horizontal 2660px as "2K" resolution. It's even close to 3K than 2K. It should be called as 2.5K.

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

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, because the market is more than happy to pay [...] Is it? Because Google/YouTube, Amazon/Twitch, Netflix, Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, Facebook, Intel, AMD, ARM, Nvidia, Cisco, etc, are all part of AO Media: * https://aomedia.org/membership/members/ The main major tech player I don't see is Qualcomm.

The use cases for video is significantly larger than a few tech companies e.g broadcast. And most of those companies are also part of MPEG as well.

What would be a list of non-tech companies prevalent in the broadcast space?

They're part of MPEG because of legacy reasons in having to deal with H.264.

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

#426
post #262

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.

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…

enforceability of EPO patents varies, that's why there was a big fight on software patents in EU parliament not so long ago, not sure however on current status - that needs to be checked I guess.

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

#427
post #275
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Does such a search indemnify one of liability though, is the big question?

No.

In fact, I heard more than once that current advice is to explicitly avoid searching :/

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

#428
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ten-year software video compression engineer here: TL;DR: it's partly because we're using higher video resolutions. A non-negligible part of the improvement stems from adapting existing algorithms to the now-doubled-resolution. Almost all video compression standards split the input frame into fixed-size square blocks, aka "macroblocks". To put it simply, the macroblock is the coarsest granularity level at which compr…

I hope next target is VR optimized codec.

H.266 VVC includes tools specifically for VR use cases like doing a motion vector wrap around at the boundaries of 360 equirectangular video or better support for independently coded tiles (subpictures in VVC lingo) which are used in viewport-dependent streaming of 360 content.

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

#429

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…

Good compression is quite complex and can go wrong in an unimaginable variety of ways. Remember when Xerox copiers would copy numbers incorrectly due to compression? The numbers would look clear, they just wouldn't always be the same numbers that you started with. https://www.theregister.com/2013/08/06/xerox_copier_flaw_mea...

Xerox problem stemmed from simple replacement of "recognized" numbers with learned dictionary. Good implementation would use learned alphabet atlas as a supplement, encoding difference between guess and source image. That way even predicted 0 instead of 8 wouldnt be catastrophic with encoder filling in missing detail.

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

#430
post #324
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The constantly growing list of H265 patent pool organizations with various licensing plans made even Apple to join AV1 bandwagon.

that's not why Apply joined AV1. They joined AV1 because they were forced to. Netflix, Google, Amazon are all on the AV1 bandwagon. If Youtube, Netflix and Prime Video all use AV1 for future higher quality streams, Apple cannot avoid supporting it.

Youtube has been vp9 only above 1080p for a long time, but Apple is adding support for VP9 only in the upcoming OS releases.
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