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Google added HEVC support in Chrome

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Re: Google added HEVC support in Chrome

#91

Post by kevingadd »

colinsane wrote: post #79
wmf wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, "we" cannot just ignore patents by implementing them in software. Maybe you can but that doesn't scale.

tell that to every Linux user who was doing anything with mp3's before the patents expired just a couple years ago. i'm pretty sure even the Windows version of Audacity -- a tool with over 100 million downloads -- integrated with it. are you claiming the LAME approach wasn't successful? or that its success was a fluke, context-dependent, or for some other reason is a bad analogue?

I'm not sure how you think for-profit companies like Mozilla, Google or Apple would get away with shipping 'ha ha I tricked you!' patent circumventions to a billion people. It's not like Audacity.

Keep in mind that Firefox AFAIK still relies on OS codecs for h264 because shipping it themselves is such a difficult proposition due to patents. And on Windows, if you want native HEVC or AV1 playback you have to buy it from the store, it doesn't ship with the OS.

Re: Google added HEVC support in Chrome

#92

Post by [deleted] »

chrisseaton wrote: post #41
shmerl wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Submarine patent lawsuits have the same probability for both of them. But guaranteed patent leeching applies only to HEVC. So HEVC has only downsides, no upsides in comparison.

If you've paid for HEVC you can say 'hey, I tried to do the right thing'. If you don't pay for AV1 it looks like you were trying to avoid doing the right thing.

[deleted]

Re: Google added HEVC support in Chrome

#93

Post by Maursault »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #68
svnpenn wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HEVC with Widevine DRM is not supported This isn't true at all. True, HEVC doesn't support Box level encryption like MP4 does, but nothing is stopping anyone from just AES encrypting an entire fragment, as has been used for years with HLSe. The fact that MP4 uses box level encryption is one of the stupidest tech-related things I have ever seen. It forces anyone who wants to decrypt (or encrypt) to write a full MP4…

> True, HEVC doesn't support Box level encryption like MP4 does I’m not sure why you’re comparing a codec to a container format?

Based on the Quicktime File Format, MP4 is most usually only a container these days. Moving Pictures Experts Group developed the MPEG-4 standard with many parts[1] including a codec called MPEG-4 aka MP4V or just MP4, which was still popular for SD video encoding only a few years ago, though not exclusively, and it is still available to encode video in Apple Quicktime (MPEG-4 Basic, MPEG-4 Advanced), ffmpeg, HandBrake, etc., but I doubt that's what GP meant, at least, I'm not aware of any codec supporting encryption, but I really hardly know anything, so there's that. At any rate, "MP4" alone is ambiguous because it can be either the container and/or the codec.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4

Re: Google added HEVC support in Chrome

#94

Post by girvo »

mroche wrote: post #10

On one hand, that's great for anyone watching HEVC content in Chrome. On the other, I'd prefer to not see further adoption of HEVC and instead see increased deployment of VP9 and AV1 wherever possible. Let MPEG-LA and the other HEVC patent pools+holders... well I'll leave the rest to your imagination. Future looking, no one should even touch VVC/H.266. Unfortunately the above rant does not address the gap in hardware…

I hope that AV1 doesn't get the same treatment as Opus though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33158475

Royalty-free matters less when it turns out these bad actors can punish people for it. It's a little worrying frankly.

Re: Google added HEVC support in Chrome

#95

Post by bubblethink »

threeseed wrote: post #78
bubblethink wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The patent situation surrounding AV1 is complex. It claims to be a free format but multiple entities claim patents that cover it. A submarine patent lawsuit seems likely. This can be said about anything. Sounds like FUD. There hasn't been a successful lawsuit yet, right ?

> There hasn't been a successful lawsuit yet Why would it come to a lawsuit ? Companies would simply just pay the royalty. That's how it has been for previous codecs.

Previous codes have been designed and sold as patented codecs. AV1 is meant to be royalty free by design. The claimants of the alleged patents can ask for money, but eventually somebody will refuse due to the very explicit royalty-free promise in AV1, and there should be a lawsuit. We have not seen that yet. As a practical matter, even if people are paying money silently, it would get on the grapevine. We haven't even seen any evidence of that either.

Re: Google added HEVC support in Chrome

#96

Post by dkh »

Thaxll wrote: post #53
mroche wrote: post #10

On one hand, that's great for anyone watching HEVC content in Chrome. On the other, I'd prefer to not see further adoption of HEVC and instead see increased deployment of VP9 and AV1 wherever possible. Let MPEG-LA and the other HEVC patent pools+holders... well I'll leave the rest to your imagination. Future looking, no one should even touch VVC/H.266. Unfortunately the above rant does not address the gap in hardware…

Did you tried to encode anything with av1? Even with a high end CPU it's just not feasible, I tried with ffmpeg and it was encoding a single digit fps per seconds. A video of just 10min would take many hours, on the other end h265 encoding is slow but doable. Edit: just retried on my laptop: 0.6fps with a 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1135G7 @ 2.40GHz Using the lastest version of ffmpeg with the sample from the wiki:…

This was also true of H.265 in its early days before there was widespread support. I once had to wrangle a few workstations to act as a renderfarm overnight in order to transcode a couple hours of footage by the next morning having not been aware that we were dealing with H.265 until the day before it had to be done.

But also yes, as others are pointing out, this is a problem rapidly being addressed and is not atypical for new media formats.

Re: Google added HEVC support in Chrome

#97

Post by rogers12 »

svnpenn wrote: post #28
freedomben wrote: post #8

> Does is(sic) also work with DRM? > That’s where the catch is, unfortunately. The biggest drawback is that HEVC with Widevine DRM is not supported at this point, only clear, unprotected content. It’s unclear whether Google has plans to add support for this in the future or not. That was my first question. I hoped against hope that it wasn't a trojan horse for some new DRM. Surely they are going to add Widevine suppo…

> HEVC with Widevine DRM is not supported This isn't true at all. True, HEVC doesn't support Box level encryption like MP4 does, but nothing is stopping anyone from just AES encrypting an entire fragment, as has been used for years with HLSe. The fact that MP4 uses box level encryption is one of the stupidest tech-related things I have ever seen. It forces anyone who wants to decrypt (or encrypt) to write a full MP4…

That's an interesting perspective. Some corrections are in order.

MP4 encryption, specifically Common Encryption addition to ISO BMFF has two levels of partial encryption.

- Each frame's media bytes are encrypted independently of other frames. MP4 boxes themselves are not encrypted. This is done so that applications can parse container metadata such as codec params and timestamps without depending on the secure decrypt and decode layer.

- Each frame consists of codec protocol messages such as NAL Units for H.264 and HEVC, OBUs for AV1, and uncompressed and compressed headers and tile headers for VP9. Subsample encryption leaves message headers unencrypted, but encrypts their contents. This is done for efficiency of the secure decode hardware. Clear and encrypted byte ranges are stored in MP4 boxes.

MP4 encryption of course fully supports HEVC using both mechanisms.

Widevine in general supports HEVC. The Widevine module in Chrome has to include a decoder for each supported codec. They probably skipped HEVC to avoid increasing download size for users.

Re: Google added HEVC support in Chrome

#98

Post by Xorlev »

ISL wrote: post #85
bscphil wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ironic, not one week ago there were a bunch of complaints on this site saying that Google was abusing their position of power (controlling YouTube, Chrome, Android TV, etc) by pushing AV1. Now they bring HEVC support to Chrome and the top comment is another complaint! (That said, I agree with you. I think a codec being royalty free is a very good reason to prefer it to other codecs.)

There may be more than one person posting on HN.

While true, I think it was illustrating the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" approach HN takes to Google in general.

Re: Google added HEVC support in Chrome

#99

Post by fomine3 »

girvo wrote: post #94
mroche wrote: post #10

On one hand, that's great for anyone watching HEVC content in Chrome. On the other, I'd prefer to not see further adoption of HEVC and instead see increased deployment of VP9 and AV1 wherever possible. Let MPEG-LA and the other HEVC patent pools+holders... well I'll leave the rest to your imagination. Future looking, no one should even touch VVC/H.266. Unfortunately the above rant does not address the gap in hardware…

I hope that AV1 doesn't get the same treatment as Opus though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33158475 Royalty-free matters less when it turns out these bad actors can punish people for it. It's a little worrying frankly.

It already exists https://www.sisvel.com/licensing-programs/audio-and-video-co...

Re: Google added HEVC support in Chrome

#100

Post by NelsonMinar »

mroche wrote: post #10

On one hand, that's great for anyone watching HEVC content in Chrome. On the other, I'd prefer to not see further adoption of HEVC and instead see increased deployment of VP9 and AV1 wherever possible. Let MPEG-LA and the other HEVC patent pools+holders... well I'll leave the rest to your imagination. Future looking, no one should even touch VVC/H.266. Unfortunately the above rant does not address the gap in hardware…

I think it's remarkable that the pirate scene has barely touched VP9 or AV1. We discussed this 2.5 years ago, nothing really has changed except there's more H.265 than before. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19362098
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