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

However you are right that for comparing different compression methods and for deciding which is the best method of several alternative methods having the same compression ratio, it is far better to do experiments with humans, instead of relying on some mathematical criterion, e.g. the distance between the original signal and the decompressed signal, according to some simple metric.

So I agree that a new video or audio compression algorithm may incorporate some new knowledge about a physical system, i.e. about the perceptual abilities of humans.

However that would justify patenting only some features of the algorithm that have the clear purpose of taking advantage of some characteristics of the human vision which have been newly discovered and described by the patent authors.

The valid claims cannot cover any mathematical tricks to improve the efficiency of the algorithm or any characteristics of the human vision that have already been exploited in the patents for older video compression algorithms.

I am pretty sure that no patent for video compression algorithms restricts itself to such reasonable patent claims.

Regarding software, the main problem is what makes you think that the fact that you happened to be the first to write a program that solves a certain problem, gives you any right to forbid to everybody else to solve the same problem.

It is guaranteed that there are thousands of other programmers who would solve the same programming problem as well as you or even better, without knowing anything about your solution, but they just happened to not face that problem before you.

Any kind of software is a combination of known elements, which have been used for the first time in the early times of the computer industry. Those early algorithms were much more innovative in comparison to the existing practice, than those that are patented now. Had they been patented, no software company, e.g. Microsoft, could have ever appeared and grown.

All those who have patented software in recent years stand on the shoulders of the early programmers who have not patented much more valuable ideas, which are now freely incorporated in the patented software.

Google already pay for it via their hardware business.

And the used codec also isn't even limited. H265 10bit + flac 96khz? Fine. You can pack it as long as you want. And it's your own problem to play it. And that is basically why you see youtube-dl merges best audio + best video into MKV. Because it is the one only format that allow you to merge something like vp9+opus into playable single file.

It is basically a 'one format rule them all' format. The browser is unlikely to actually properly implement all of them. (In fact, there are only a few players actually implement all of them outside of players on windows) And even browser does want to implement everything, there isn't proper API for browser to expose these capabilities to the DOM and JavaScript to properly control them. (I think we are unlikely to see browser support native multi audio track video)

I honestly can’t fathom why software engineers think that they are unique every patent, every invention is built on prior knowledge this is why every patent has a whole section of prior art we all stand on the shoulders of giants.

But again video encoding patents have rarely anything to do with software they are far more generic than that and also predate software by decades.

Here is one of the earliest examples of a video encoding patent I could find https://www.freepatentsonline.com/3679821.html

What exactly do you find here not to be worthy granting a patent for?