Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

phoronix.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 80 posts

Re: The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

#21

Post by Dylan16807 »

jchw wrote: post #14
Dylan16807 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I would hope so! Otherwise the Pareto front wouldn't have moved in ~20 years which would be rather hard to believe. 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 reaso…

Well a lot of the improvements cost more computation. I wouldn't be surprised if low-computation video had only improved slightly, but it seems like it has improved a lot. The advantage of h264 is hardware adoption much more than actually being computationally cheap, it seems? Well, maybe. The thing is, I don't know how the decoders scale. Can you make a decoder for a constrained AV1/h.265 in the same hardware space or maximum CPU budget as an h.264 decoder and still see very big advantages?

Re: The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

#22

Post by dylan604 »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #3

> While the US and EU patents around MPEG-4 Part 2 expired in recent years, until today there remained one patent still active in Brazil. Since MPEG-this Part that is hard to keep straight, this is the MPEG standard backing Xvid and DivX codecs. So let's encode video and torrent like it's 2002!

> So let's encode video and torrent like it's 2002!

Let's have a meet up a Circuit City!!

Re: The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

#23

Post by xattt »

dylan604 wrote: post #22
theandrewbailey wrote: post #3

> While the US and EU patents around MPEG-4 Part 2 expired in recent years, until today there remained one patent still active in Brazil. Since MPEG-this Part that is hard to keep straight, this is the MPEG standard backing Xvid and DivX codecs. So let's encode video and torrent like it's 2002!

> So let's encode video and torrent like it's 2002! Let's have a meet up a Circuit City!!

I’m not sure how to get there. Do you have Microsoft Streets and Trips directions I can print off?

Re: The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

#24

Post by goalieca »

ronsor wrote: post #19
at1as wrote: post #11

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

> 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.

Now if only copyright didn't last forever..

Re: The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

#26

Post by userbinator »

anthk wrote: post #18
userbinator wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

H.263 was used as the former codec of Netmeeting (and maybe some other VoIP software too).

H.263 was definitely a standard in videoconferencing and low-bitrate video in general (YouTube and many other streaming sutes used FLV1, which was a variant of H.263) prior to H.264.

Re: The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

#27

Post by userbinator »

at1as wrote: post #11

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

I don't think video resolution will increase all that much in the future, except for niche uses, as the resolution of the human eye becomes a limiting factor.

Re: The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

#28

Post by userbinator »

nikanj wrote: post #20

It's so weird to look at the patents list for H.264 and see multiple patents granted after the H.264 specification was released. Was the situation similar for MPEG-4?

Those patents may not necessarily be required to encode or decode, if they're just a new way to implement some part of the specification.

Re: The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

#29

Post by ronsor »

goalieca wrote: post #24
ronsor wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Now if only copyright didn't last forever..

The Berne Convention has permanently burned us there

Re: The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

#30

Post by makeitdouble »

userbinator wrote: post #27
at1as wrote: post #11

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

I don't think video resolution will increase all that much in the future, except for niche uses, as the resolution of the human eye becomes a limiting factor.

I read "resolution" as pixel count more than DPI.

As it becomes cheaper to capture and process higher res content, we're bound to push it to bigger displays (VR included). I guess the human eye will be the limit when we're at retina levels of DPI on a sphere.

Post reply on HN