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Ask HN: Why does nobody support h.265/HEVC anymore?

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Re: Ask HN: Why does nobody support h.265/HEVC anymore?

#81

Post by Beltalowda »

akersten wrote: post #49
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am well aware of the foundations of CS and the lambda calculus, but this is more than a bit reductionist, like saying "everything is made of subatomic particles." Patents on processes and methods are pretty common. Dismissing it as "they just patented some math" and then falling back to saying "oh, lambda calculus" -- I think you can do better :-) But, yes, I'm sure the patents suck.

Why should Free software advocates need to "do better" than to argue from literal first principles? Fourier could call his transform a "process" all he wants, but that does not make it patentable. So yes, "oh, math."

Almost all inventions can be reduced to "just math", because after all, that's what we use to describe the physical world, and oh also computer software things.

I'm not in favour of patents at all, but the entire "it's math" argument has always seemed exceedingly weak to me.

Re: Ask HN: Why does nobody support h.265/HEVC anymore?

#82

Post by Spooky23 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #42
akersten wrote: post #40

Because the US endorses the concept of "essential patents," meaning you need to pay a licensing fee to be lawfully allowed to perform the math that transforms data into A/V content. Never to mention the two blatant issues with this, being: 1) video codecs are the exemplary "we'll patent math and there's nothing you can do about it" scam, since that's literally all a video codec is 2) a process being "essential" to a…

I mean, is a video codec really just "math"? There's a binary payload description and algorithms involved for applying said math as well. I'm no expert in the field, so I'm actually asking in good faith here...

If you’re against patents, yes.

If you’re gainfully employed doing math things that turn into codecs, no.

Patents suck, but they also serve a purpose.

Re: Ask HN: Why does nobody support h.265/HEVC anymore?

#84

Post by Razengan »

akersten wrote: post #40

Because the US endorses the concept of "essential patents," meaning you need to pay a licensing fee to be lawfully allowed to perform the math that transforms data into A/V content. Never to mention the two blatant issues with this, being: 1) video codecs are the exemplary "we'll patent math and there's nothing you can do about it" scam, since that's literally all a video codec is 2) a process being "essential" to a…

> video codecs are the exemplary "we'll patent math and there's nothing you can do about it" scam, since that's literally all a video codec is

Most software is literally all math.

Re: Ask HN: Why does nobody support h.265/HEVC anymore?

#85

Post by PaulHoule »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #30
PaulHoule wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the DVD era there was a conscious attempt to converge between the PC industry and consumer electronics. Since then (when they decided that Blu-Ray drives weren't going to be standard in PC) there has been a decoupling. HEVC is a consumer electronics standard, the PC industry is going towards VP9, AV1 and other royalty free codecs. Up until HEVC most codecs had one patent pool you could pay a royalty to and be…

It also occurred with 4K Blu Ray, which was a real pain in the neck on PC requiring Intel SGX, Intel Secure Media Path, and a billion other DRM things. Then Intel removed SGX in 11th generation onward, and the Blu Ray developers have basically decided that being unable to play 4K Blu Ray on modern PCs is apparently just fine and haven't done anything to fix that. To this day, the only official way to play 4K Blu Ray…

To be fair USB sticks fill part of the removable media niche.

Re: Ask HN: Why does nobody support h.265/HEVC anymore?

#86

Post by AshamedCaptain »

formerly_proven wrote: post #4
theandrewbailey wrote: post #3

H.265 requires getting a license from at least 2 patent pools[0], and who knows how many other patents are out there waiting to get sued over. If you want a new cross platform video codec, check out AV1.[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#P... [1] https://aomedia.org/av1/

But if an application merely uses the graphic's drivers API to decode a stream, presumably the GPU vendor (and therefore the buyer) already paid for those licensing costs? Otherwise the hardware wouldn't support h265, right?

That's actually not entirely clear to me. Which is another reason to avoid H265 altogether....

I mean, even if say Chrome started using the hardware decoders, do you think someone from the MPEG-LA would _refrain_ from suing Google since "they're just using the Windows API"? It's already not rare to have to pay both for the hardware _and_ the software in this world.

Re: Ask HN: Why does nobody support h.265/HEVC anymore?

#87

Post by dylan604 »

jl6 wrote: post #74
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #15

HEVC has a long and complicated history. With H.264, it was easy - one patent pool. Any questions? Contact MPEG LA. How much did it cost? About $2 or so per device, no problem. Did you spend more than (IIRC) $14 million on licensing each year? It's free past that point. As for open-source software like Firefox, Cisco actually struck a deal to pay all the royalties if you used their OpenH264 decoder (they needed H.264…

> The only real place H.265 lives on … Surely Apple devices count as a real place? I expect there are a lot more iDevices than 4K Blu-Ray players.

VR took to HEVC from the get go just because they needed every savings in filesize that could be found. We were running HEVC videos on Android well before iPhones could do it. So it's beyond Apple devices too

Re: Ask HN: Why does nobody support h.265/HEVC anymore?

#88

Post by metalliqaz »

babypuncher wrote: post #44
dopa42365 wrote: post #14

New Edge supports it, if you have the h265 extension from the microsoft store (cmd "start ms-windows-store://pdp/?ProductId=9n4wgh0z6vhq"). It's also the only (?) browser that supports AC-3 audio. Thanks for nothing, Dolby. There's barely any content though (possibly premium VODs on Netflix etc). Bilibili (kinda like Chinese youtube) offers HEVC (and AV1) playback, if your browser supports it. Example: https://www.bi…

My problem with AV1 is that hardware support for it is far from ubiquitous. I can load up a file I encoded with x265 on any of my devices from the last 6 years and be sure that it will play back smoothly without eating battery. The only device in my house with hardware AV1 support is the RTX 3080 in my desktop. So for the time being, I encode all my blu-ray rips with x265.

My GTX980 did not support HEVC decoding in hardware, and as a result it played like crap on my system. The Nvidia cards have only supported it since the GTX 10 series. That isn't very old IMHO.

Re: Ask HN: Why does nobody support h.265/HEVC anymore?

#89

Post by karmakaze »

Another question is why don't browsers support MKV container format?

From an arbitrary search "The Matroska project is supported by a non-profit organization and is a fork of the Multimedia Container Format. It was first announced to the public at the end of 2002 and is a completely royalty-free open standard that's free for both private and commercial use."

Re: Ask HN: Why does nobody support h.265/HEVC anymore?

#90

Post by Conan_Kudo »

floatboth wrote: post #28
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #15

HEVC has a long and complicated history. With H.264, it was easy - one patent pool. Any questions? Contact MPEG LA. How much did it cost? About $2 or so per device, no problem. Did you spend more than (IIRC) $14 million on licensing each year? It's free past that point. As for open-source software like Firefox, Cisco actually struck a deal to pay all the royalties if you used their OpenH264 decoder (they needed H.264…

h.265 also lives on in open source software other than browsers. VideoLAN has been ignoring the whole licensing disaster because "Neither French law nor European conventions recognize software as patentable" for ages :P

The European Union almost certainly does, that's why it's allowed in countries like Germany and the United Kingdom (pre-Brexit and post-Brexit).
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