H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC) • Hacker News Board

Re: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

#231

Post by mlyle » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 5:04 PM UTC

grishka wrote: post #136

balls187 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's Fraunhofer for you. In the early days of MP3, all MP3 rippers and players were built off of their implementation. Hardware and software companies had to license in order to play MP3 files. As such there was not native support for MP3's for quite some time. In the late 90's right around the explosion of MP3's on the internet, Fraunhofer was going after companies for doing so. In my humble opinion, that license…

> In my humble opinion, that license mess set back innovation in the portable audio space by a good 5 years. Seeing all this, I'm convinced that copyright in general and patent system in particular does more harm than good by slowing down the technical progress of the humanity as a whole for the sake of some already rich people becoming a bit richer. The initial idea behind patent system was sensible, but the way it'…

> I mean, it could work in today's world as intended if patents lasted a year or two, not what is effectively eternity.

This needs to vary based on field. Some areas, like drugs, take forever to get to market and have exorbitant development costs to recover. (Though, there, other abuses need to get fixed, like renewing patent lifetime with slightly different applications or formulation.

Re: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

#232

Post by crazygringo » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

jonpurdy wrote: post #226

My 2012 Mac Mini has quickly become much less useful since YouTube switched from H.264 (AVC) to VP9 for videos larger than 1080p a couple of years ago (Apple devices have hardware decoders). I've tested 4K h.264 videos and they play wonderfully thanks to the hardware. My internet connection speeds and hard drive space have increased much faster than my CPU speeds (internet being basically a free upgrade). So I don't…

Honestly, the expectation that a 2012 computer will play 4K video seems a little unreasonable, no? 4K video virtually didn't even exist back then. I'm actually amazed it even handles it in h.264.

This isn't about saving companies a few cents on bandwidth. It's about halving internet traffic, about doubling the number of videos you can store on your phone. That's pretty huge. You can still get h.264 video in 1080p on YouTube so your computer is still meeting the expectations it was manufactured for.

Re: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

#233

Post by prvc » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

zionic wrote: post #138

ch_sm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just found av1 is about 20 to 30% more efficient than h265 > […] but h265 is now significantly more efficient than av1. What did you mean?

AV1 beats h.265 by 20-30%, h.266 beats h.265 by 50%. Honestly for that little of an improvement I'll go with AV1.

So they themselves claim. Will wait for empirical tests with available codecs to really evaluate this. Also note that for a given bitstream specification, there will be "room to grow" for encoder implementations (AV1 is designed to be flexible in this way). I am not aware of any precise method for evaluating how much room exactly there theoretically could be ex ante.

Re: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

#234

Post by Const-me » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

f00_ wrote: post #219

Const-me wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why? Even Raspberry Pi has a hardware decoder: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/tree/master/VrmacVideo Linux Kernel support for HEVC is WIP but I’m pretty sure they’ll integrate eventually.

buying vc1/mpeg licenses to use hardware decoding on raspberry pi's pre-4 was annoying https://codecs.raspberrypi.org/license-keys/ is this because of licensing/copyright?

Right, now I remember these keys.

But the very first Pi already had hardware h264 decoder (and even encoder!) which didn’t need any extra keys to work. No idea how they did it, maybe the license was included in the $25 price. Pi 1 was launched in 2013, at that time h264 has been already widespread, while mpeg-2 use was declining.

I think that’s why they did not include the license. It increases price for all users but only useful for very few of them, who connected a USB DVD or BluRay drives to their Pi-s.

Re: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

#235

Post by makotech222 » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

balls187 wrote: post #107

DrBazza wrote: post #9

Naively hoped I'd read 'this will be released to the community under a GPL license' or similar. Instead found the words 'patent' and 'transparent licensing model'. I appreciate that it costs money and time to develop these algorithms, but when you're backed by multi-billion dollar "partners from industry including Apple, Ericsson, Intel, Huawei, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Sony" perhaps they could swallow the costs? It…

That's Fraunhofer for you. In the early days of MP3, all MP3 rippers and players were built off of their implementation. Hardware and software companies had to license in order to play MP3 files. As such there was not native support for MP3's for quite some time. In the late 90's right around the explosion of MP3's on the internet, Fraunhofer was going after companies for doing so. In my humble opinion, that license…

[dead]

Re: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

#236

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 5:06 PM UTC

epanchin wrote: post #213

Cu3PO42 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I work at a Fraunhofer institute, though not Fraunhofer HHI, which developed this codec, and I have no intimate knowledge on the financing of that institute or this project in particular. But some basic principles apply to all institutes the same. Fraunhofer gets roughly 30% of its funding from public sources, the remainder is raised on a per-project basis. It's a fair assumption that those industry partn…

Public sources as in the taxpayer? Why would the taxpayer fund anything that isn’t open and free. Crazy.

[deleted]

Re: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

#237

Post by rahimnathwani » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 5:08 PM UTC

jonpurdy wrote: post #226

My 2012 Mac Mini has quickly become much less useful since YouTube switched from H.264 (AVC) to VP9 for videos larger than 1080p a couple of years ago (Apple devices have hardware decoders). I've tested 4K h.264 videos and they play wonderfully thanks to the hardware. My internet connection speeds and hard drive space have increased much faster than my CPU speeds (internet being basically a free upgrade). So I don't…

Maybe you can force the YouTube web app to use the H.264 version?

https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify

Or is there no longer an H.264 4k version?

Re: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

#238

Post by crazygringo » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 5:09 PM UTC

pxf wrote: post #223

Will it be used? Probably the last one that does not use some sort of AI Compression.See this for image compression https://hific.github.io/ In the next 10 years AI Compression will be everywhere. The problem will be standartisation. Classic compression algoritms can't beat AI ones.

AI compression is super, super cool... but while standardization is certainly a major issue, isn't the model size a much larger one?

Given that model sizes for decoding seem like they'll be on the order of many gigabytes, it will be impossible to run AI decompression in software, but will need chips, and chips that are a lot more complex (expensive?) than today's.

I think AI compression has a good chance of coming eventually, but in 10 years it will still be in research labs. There is absolutely no way it will have made it into consumer chips by then.

Re: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

#239

Post by cure » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 5:10 PM UTC

trentnix wrote: post #150

grishka wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In my humble opinion, that license mess set back innovation in the portable audio space by a good 5 years. Seeing all this, I'm convinced that copyright in general and patent system in particular does more harm than good by slowing down the technical progress of the humanity as a whole for the sake of some already rich people becoming a bit richer. The initial idea behind patent system was sensible, but the way it'…

Seeing all this, I'm convinced that copyright in general and patent system in particular does more harm than good by slowing down the technical progress of the humanity as a whole for the sake of some already rich people becoming a bit richer There are plenty of societies that don't respect intellectual property and copyright. And those societies don't innovate at the rate as those who do. There are certainly abuses…

> There are certainly abuses in the copyright, trademark, and patent systems. But throwing out the baby with the bathwater is not the answer. Identifying the abuses and improving the system is the answer.

That sounds nice and reasonable, in theory.

In practice, all the money is behind expanding the copyright and patent systems. When is the last time the duration of copyright terms was shortened? When is the last time the patent system was adapted to be less draconian and less protective of those poor, poor multinational corporations that somehow end up holding all those patents?

Spoiler alert - that has happened exactly never. Instead, all we get is 'harmonization' which always means extending terms and giving those laws more teeth, to match the strictest law implemented anywhere in the world.

Steamboat Willy's copyright expires January 1st, 2024. How much do you want to bet that Disney will be pushing for another copyright term extension before then?

> Perhaps that progress won't happen at the rate you'd prefer, but it's significantly better than burning the whole thing to the ground.

The current systems only ever get stricter. Where are the much shorter terms? Where is the recognition that cooperation and remixing fosters innovation and progress and as such should be encouraged, not punished? Where is the PTO following the actual law that says math and logic (i.e. software) are not patentable? Etc, etc, etc.

The abuses have been very well documented over the past several decades. There has been zero progress on incremental improvements. Tell me again how you propose we improve the system without a drastic overhaul?

Re: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

#240

Post by crazygringo » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 5:12 PM UTC

They talk about saving 50% of bits over h.265, but also talk about it being designed especially for 4K/8K video.

Are normal 1080p videos going to see this fabled 50% savings over h.265? Or is the 50% only for 4K/8K, while 1080p gets maybe only 10-20% savings?

The press release unfortunately seems rather ambiguous about this.