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https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...
At which point, the continued march towards higher resolution and bandwidth video will probably limit their utility
Note that MPEG-4 part 2 is H.263/DivX/XviD, not H.264.
Yeah. I think h264 is coming soon, too, though. Most of the remaining known h264 patents expire next year, with only one patent extending out further. I do believe that more modern codecs like h265 and AV1 have a lot to offer us, but having h264 be fully unencumbered by patents will be nice. By modern standards it is very well-supported in both hardware and software, computationally cheap to encode and decode, and st…
Well I'm not sure about decode, but as of a few years ago weren't h.265 and AV1 able to do much better compression than h.264 at almost all levels of compute? https://people.videolan.org/~unlord/SVT-AV1_BD-rate.png And h.266 encoders can probably go faster now too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. I think h264 is coming soon, too, though. Most of the remaining known h264 patents expire next year, with only one patent extending out further. I do believe that more modern codecs like h265 and AV1 have a lot to offer us, but having h264 be fully unencumbered by patents will be nice. By modern standards it is very well-supported in both hardware and software, computationally cheap to encode and decode, and st…
> computationally cheap to encode and decode Well I'm not sure about decode, but as of a few years ago weren't h.265 and AV1 able to do much better compression than h.264 at almost all levels of compute? https://people.videolan.org/~unlord/SVT-AV1_BD-rate.png And h.266 encoders can probably go faster now too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. I think h264 is coming soon, too, though. Most of the remaining known h264 patents expire next year, with only one patent extending out further. I do believe that more modern codecs like h265 and AV1 have a lot to offer us, but having h264 be fully unencumbered by patents will be nice. By modern standards it is very well-supported in both hardware and software, computationally cheap to encode and decode, and st…
> computationally cheap to encode and decode Well I'm not sure about decode, but as of a few years ago weren't h.265 and AV1 able to do much better compression than h.264 at almost all levels of compute? https://people.videolan.org/~unlord/SVT-AV1_BD-rate.png And h.266 encoders can probably go faster now too.
However, at the same time, h265, h266 and AV1 are all vastly more complicated, and will have less broad hardware acceleration support than h264, which, again, even if it is not optimally efficient use of compute, just doesn't require a whole lot by modern standards.
So I'd argue there is really no reason to be rushing away from h264 unless you have a compelling reason. There are some obvious compelling reasons in some cases; nobody is going to be terribly surprised that an entity like Netflix is eager to switch to codecs that will save bandwidth, because at their scale saving bytes definitely adds up, bonus points if it can increase the quality at the same time.
On the other hand, though, unless you are absolutely sure you can switch to only new codecs, you will probably want to keep some h264 encodings around to act as a fallback baseline for legacy devices. And thus, you also have to take into account the complexity brought on by needing to store and maintain multiple encodings - in many use cases, like simple s thrown into website backgrounds, I can see just eating the extra bandwidth costs and keeping it all h264 as a valid strategy.
And, yes, I remember w32codecs until MPlayer's bundled set superseded them. And mencoder for sure ;)
Note that MPEG-4 part 2 is H.263/DivX/XviD, not H.264.
(Source: have written a H.263 decoder as a learning exercise.)
Note that MPEG-4 part 2 is H.263/DivX/XviD, not H.264.
Yeah. I think h264 is coming soon, too, though. Most of the remaining known h264 patents expire next year, with only one patent extending out further. I do believe that more modern codecs like h265 and AV1 have a lot to offer us, but having h264 be fully unencumbered by patents will be nice. By modern standards it is very well-supported in both hardware and software, computationally cheap to encode and decode, and st…
I think MPEG-1 and 2 (from which MP3 comes) might be even longer.
Note that MPEG-4 part 2 is H.263/DivX/XviD, not H.264.
DivX/XviD yes, but not H.263. Patents for H.263 expired long ago. This is MPEG-4 ASP, which is a superset of H.263. (Source: have written a H.263 decoder as a learning exercise.)
Moving in the right direction, but unfortunately it's still quite a few years before H264 is off patent, globally: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M... At which point, the continued march towards higher resolution and bandwidth video will probably limit their utility
Just as the patent system intended: maximum extraction was enabled while the product was useful.
