Live data from Hacker News

Google added HEVC support in Chrome

bitmovin.com

111–120 of 225 posts

Re: Google added HEVC support in Chrome

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fr…

[deleted]

Re: Google added HEVC support in Chrome

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 decry…

I don't buy these rationalizations at all. As was previously said, HLSe has been using fragment level encryption for many years, with AVC and MP4 , so we know its possible. This is not theoretical. https://paramountplus.com and https://cbc.ca and others use HLSe on some streams currently. You don't need box level encryption, and requiring it just add pointless MP4 parsing and overhead.

They're not rationalizations. They're implementation choices under legal, engineering and product constraints. In particular, Paramount and CBC allow themselves to use HLS encryption forbidden under typical content protection contracts.

Re: Google added HEVC support in Chrome

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, HandBrak…

I agree with your assessment. The reference to “box” makes me think it was definitely the container. I also don’t see the codec called MP4, it’s usually spelled out MPEG-4.

Re: Google added HEVC support in Chrome

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PS5, XBox One, Chromecast, iPhone, iPad, AppleTV support HEVC but not AV1. And they represent a significant proportion of video consumption devices.

> PS5, XBox One From https://netflixtechblog.com/bringing-av1-streaming-to-netfli... : "Netflix has also partnered with YouTube to develop an open-source solution for an AV1 decoder on game consoles that utilizes the additional power of GPUs."

Which is one part of the problem.

But still today you can take an HEVC iPhone or GoPro video and watch it on your PS5 with full hardware encoding. This open source solution doesn't help with that.

Re: Google added HEVC support in Chrome

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Because HEVC has hardware support, right now, so it's faster. Most new hardware supports hardware decode for AV1 too. There were 1-2 generations prior to the current one that had HECV but not AV1, but that sample size will become irrelevant over time. >People don't much. Well, clearly people who make decisions do. If you ask an average person on the street if they care about HEVC or AV1, they don't. If you ask Netfl…

PS5, XBox One, Chromecast, iPhone, iPad, AppleTV support HEVC but not AV1. And they represent a significant proportion of video consumption devices.

Chrome runs on a fraction of those platforms...

Re: Google added HEVC support in Chrome

#117
post #53
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:…

SVT-AV1 is as fast or faster than x265 for me on my 10+ year old CPU, at least when using high (fast) presets.

Here's a guide with some various options for using it with ffmpeg: https://gitlab.com/AOMediaCodec/SVT-AV1/-/blob/master/Docs/F...

Re: Google added HEVC support in Chrome

#118
post #107
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Oh "great". Software patents were such a mistake.

Surely that depends - is this a bunch of generic and vague detail-less patents, or do they provide the actual information required to implement the thing it purports to describe.

The core problem with “software patents” in the US sense is that the patent office appear to grant them by default if they are vague, only accepts specific types of pre-existing evidence that they are not new or novel, and once a patent is granted makes it as hard and expensive as possible to challenge the granted patents, and doesn’t allow you to recover costs if you are sued for a patent that is eventually revoked.

All of those thing mean that the specifics of us patent law remain BS, but at the same time I think that everyone on HN does believe that IP should exist, and people should have rights to what they create.

Re: Google added HEVC support in Chrome

#119
post #98
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, Google invades our privacy. Google holds its users hostages to money. I am glad that HN is doing its job to stop Google.

Re: Google added HEVC support in Chrome

#120
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?

LAME is a really great example of why patents exist: the need to avoid the mp3 patents resulted in the development of technology that was superior to that covered by the mp3 patents. Do people really think LAME would have been developed if people were just reimplementing the existing mp3 encoder?
Post reply on HN