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

H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

newsletter.fraunhofer.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 435 posts

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

#251

Post by kindall »

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'…

US patent laws sensibly state that only individuals, not corporations, may be awarded patents.

Unfortunately, most companies require that any patent awarded to an engineer in their employ is automatically assigned to the company.

Get rid of that loophole and employees will be able to license their patents as they see fit. Of course this is fraught with practical difficulties, but some kind of compromise could be reached.

Never happen, obviously.

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

#252

Post by prvc »

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…

>So I don't appreciate new codecs coming out and obsoleting my hardware

You could say something similar about any other technological advance.

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

#253

Post by eqvinox »

mekster wrote: post #209
detaro wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I understand correctly, around 10 million USD per year (according to https://www.mpegla.com/wp-content/uploads/avcweb.pdf that's the cap, and from what I've heard Cisco is selling enough actual products to hit that cap, so providing their software for free to everyone else doesn't cost them any extra in licensing fees, just hosting and such)

Why is Cisco being nice about it? (Besides why not?)

Because it forces their competitors (in the video conferencing business) to take similar costs.

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

#254

Post by osrec »

Cu3PO42 wrote: post #228
epanchin wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, public sources as in the tax payer. It is worth pointing out that Fraunhofer is itself a non-profit organization. The argument that anything funded by tax money must be open is a very fair stance. Though the line gets very blurry when you mix various sources of funding like this. To the best of my recollection I have yet to be paid from any public funding (rather than project specific funding raised from the ind…

Unfortunately, non-profit does not necessarily mean that someone in the organisation isn't amply lining their pockets.

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

#255

Post by AnotherGoodName »

jcranmer wrote: post #169
speedgoose wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know for all contributors, but the creator is French and there is no software patents in France.

All of the French patents listed in this license pool care to disagree: https://www.mpegla.com/wp-content/uploads/avc-att1.pdf

Patents are almost always approved fwiw and the FR cases here seem to be linked to worldwide patents. It is not the patent offices job to test the validity of patents. That occurs in a court when someone challenges the patent. This is true of every country, France included. So whilst you have a list of software patents filed worldwide (including France) that's not really relevant to the enforceability of the patent in France.

This is also why you see articles from time to time highlight a stupid patent as if it's an outrage that the patent office allowed it. It's not the patent offices job to enforce patents. You can literally go ahead and patent swinging on a swing (1) and the patent office would approve it if the paper work is in order. The media would then likely pick up on this with outrage as if that's an enforceable patent. The truth is that it's simply not the patent offices job. Patents are meant to be enforced by courts.

1: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6368227B1/en

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

#256

Post by tomku »

donatj wrote: post #174
oefrha wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FFmpeg isn’t “always software encoding”, that statement doesn’t make much sense since FFmpeg/libavcodec is more of an interface and you can add support for any external encoder/decoder, hardware accelerated or not. However, FFmpeg’s builtin encoders and the most popular external encoders including x264 and x265 are all software encoders. There are hardware accelerated encoders from GPU vendors, e.g. the nvenc encoder…

I'm curious why hardware encoding is generally worse? All my experiments with it (h264/h265) have lead to significantly lower quality output to the point that I've avoided it for any final outputs, but I always assumed I was doing something wrong.

Hardware encoding cares about consistent real-time output above all else, with power usage as the runner-up. It can focus on that because software encoders are just flat-out better for use cases involving quality - they have access to more flexible/accurate math, they don't necessarily have a real-time/low-latency constraint, they can be updated when new encoding tricks are discovered, they can be massively more complex without ballooning the cost of a device, etc.

They're complementary options rather than competing. Each does something well, and it sounds like you want the thing that software encoding does.

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

#257

Post by vertex-four »

speedgoose wrote: post #230
AdrianB1 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The European Patent Organisation is an intergovernmental organisation ( https://www.epo.org/about-us/foundation.html ). Not a private organization.

Alright, I was wrong. Still strange that they issue patents that are obviously invalid.

The reasoning is that individual states have Opinions about the validity of software patents and they're going to keep issuing them until somebody with the proper authority clarifies that the law means what the law says, although as far as I can tell none have actually been successfully enforced.

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

#258

Post by jimktrains2 »

otterley wrote: post #142
inscionent wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A captive market is a happy market, no?

This is not a captive market. If someone were to invent a free codec that performed similarly and had both software and hardware reference implementations, the market would adopt it very quickly. This is a market that is voluntarily paying for perceived value.

Please show me where I can pick between similar consumer devices where there supported codecs are easy to find, or, better yet, I can pay extra for non free codecs.

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

#259

Post by jimktrains2 »

ksec wrote: post #202
jimktrains2 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that the market is happy to pay more, it's that there is essentially no choice.

The market has plenty of choices from VP8 to Theora.

Please show me where I can purchase a roku-style devices where I can easily chose between codec support or pay extra for non-free codecs.

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

#260

Post by sitkack »

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…

Download the format you need using youtube-dl
Post reply on HN