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H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

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

#271

Post by pkulak »

restalis wrote: post #243
pkulak wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are we assuming H.266 is better than AV1? Or at least better enough to warrant all the trouble and cost of licensing?

I am not a fan of patent encumbered technologies, but here the assumption of being better has merit. There isn't much sense from a business prospective for a research team to publish a commercial solution that would exhibit inferior or even comparable performance to an existing free solution. As for the problem of convincing people to swallow the cost, just organize a show off campaign and leave the rest to sellers.…

I dunno, there are a lot of reasons companies choose technologies. If Fraunhofer gets this thing into hardware (by whatever means it takes), that could be the end of the debate. There's also probably a bit of "no one ever got fired for choosing Fraunhofer" going on as well.

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

#272

Post by jitendrac »

dylan604 wrote: post #173
jitendrac wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yup, from the example I remember(I read it through link on HN but cannot find it in quick search, I wish I could link it), if you film(still film no movement) the macbook pro top to bottom in h264/MP4 at 1024 p resolution and again you take a picture from your camera. the results will be shocking, the video of 5-10 seconds will have lower storage size than the size of single Image. but when you inspect video carefull…

Let's also be clear, the still image will be the full resolution of the sensor. The video taken on the same camera is usually a cropped section of the sensor. You're also comparing a spatial compression (still image) vs a temporal compression (video), and at what compression levels are each image taken?

see more details, https://sidbala.com/h-264-is-magic/

I know that's not fair comparison, but imaging clever compressions were not invented and you would download terabytes of data to view a small movie.

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

#273

Post by jcranmer »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #255
jcranmer wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> It is not the patent offices job to test the validity of patents.

Actually, it is (at least in the US). USPTO can deny patents on the basis on nonpatentability, and its general refusal to do so post-State St. decision is often cited as one of the problems of the modern patent system.

Broadly speaking, however, if the argument is that software patents are invalid in Europe because they'll be found so by the courts, it should be noted that SCOTUS is actually pretty likely to rule software unpatentable were it to hear a software patent case. A little background is in order:

In Parker v Flook (1978), SCOTUS said that mathematical algorithms (i.e., basically software) is unpatentable. In Diamond v Diehr (1981), they said that part of the patent being software doesn't make the entire thing invalid. The big decision is State St (1998), which is a CAFC decision holding that anything was patentable so long as it produced a "useful, concrete, tangible" result and basically broke the patent office. When SCOTUS decided Bilski v Kappos (2008), they emphatically (and unanimously!) called out State St as wrong, but declined to endorse any guidelines as to what the limits of patentability should be. Later Mayo (2012) and Alice (2014) decisions again unanimously and unambiguously laid out what wasn't patentable: natural processes, and "do it on a computer" steps.

A few years ago, we had a patent attorney at work tell us (paraphrasing somewhat) that Alice made it really hard to figure out how to write a software patent that wouldn't be invalidated. Their continued existence (and pretense to their enforceability) is less because it's secure and more because no one wants to spend the money to litigate it to the highest level (see also the Google v Oracle case, which is exactly the sort of thing a software patent case history would entail).

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

#274

Post by Cu3PO42 »

osrec wrote: post #254
Cu3PO42 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're right, but I'm not aware of any egregious salaries or bonuses. Both the president and all the chairmen are all professors, which generally means they are paid by their University, not Fraunhofer. The same applies to many directors of the individual institutes. The salaries for employees are based on "Tarifvertrag öffentlicher Dienst" ("labor agreement for public service",). Unless there's straight up fraud somewhere, there shouldn't be too much lining of pockets.

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

#275

Post by jariel »

dfox wrote: post #263
jariel wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"make an exhaustive patent search to get a verifiable claim that you don't infringe on any patent" Is there even such a thing? Isn't the problem that one has to actually go to court to get the answer to this question?

In theory you can do such kind of search. Problem is that doing that is impractically expensive (and at least in some jurisdictions doing that can actually raise your liability in case of patent infringement).

Does such a search indemnify one of liability though, is the big question?

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

#276

Post by amluto »

kindall wrote: post #251
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'…

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 reac…

Do you really want to try to get individual licenses from every single person who worked on video codecs from in the last 20 years so you can legally compress video?

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

#277

Post by zanny »

k_bx wrote: post #30
Unklejoe wrote: post #14

It's interesting that they are able to continue improving video compression. You'd think that it would have all been figured out by now. Is this continued improvement related to the improvement of technology? Or just coincidental? Like, why couldn't have H.266 been invented 30 years ago? Is it because the computers back in the day wouldn't have been fast enough to realistically use it? Do we have algorithms today tha…

From what I've heard (would love to hear more expertise on this), it's incredibly hard to invent a new video compression algorithm without breaking an existing set of patents, and there's also no easy way to even know whether you're breaking anything as you develop the algo. Thus the situation we're in is not that it's too hard to develop better codecs, but that you've very disincentivized to do so.

Which then begs the question - why are video compression standards developed in the US at all? MPEG is obviously US based but Xiph is also a US nonprofit. The software patents should be hugely crippling the ability for Americans to develop competitive video codecs when every other nation doesn't have such nonsense. Why hasn't Europe invested in and developed better codecs that combine the techniques impossible to mix in the states?

Is it just basically the same mechanism that leads to so much drug development happening in the US despite how backwards its medical system is, because those regressive institutions create profit incentives not available elsewhere (to develop drugs or video codecs for profit) and thus the US already has capitalists throwing money at what could be profitable whereas everyone else would look at it as an investment cost for basically research infrastructure.

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

#278

Post by throw0101a »

otterley wrote: post #12
KitDuncan wrote: post #2

Can we all just agree on using AV1 instead of another patent encumbered format?

No, because the market is more than happy to pay a few cents or dollars per device to get better compression and lower transmission bandwidth. This observation has held true consistently in the 3 decades since compressed digital media was invented.

> No, because the market is more than happy to pay [...]

Is it? Because Google/YouTube, Amazon/Twitch, Netflix, Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, Facebook, Intel, AMD, ARM, Nvidia, Cisco, etc, are all part of AO Media:

* https://aomedia.org/membership/members/

The main major tech player I don't see is Qualcomm.

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

#279

Post by zanny »

ksec wrote: post #200
nickik wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now audio uses open codecs for the part and new video will to.

That is because Audio Encoding hasn't seen much improvement as compared to video. Nearly 30 years after MP3, the only audio codec that could rivals mp3 at the standard rate of 128kbps at a significant lower bitrate was Opus at 96Kbps. And MP3 is still by far the most popular codec due to compatibility reason. This is similar to JPEG, although things are about to change.

I don't have the Netflix / Disney+ / etc containers to analyze but Youtube has pretty much totally purged mp3 from every video on the site. Billions of watch hours a day of Opus audio there at least.

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

#280

Post by giantrobot »

lukifer wrote: post #222
milansuk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

End-credits are just text. So it should be possible to put it through OCR and save only text, positions, and fonts. And the text is also possible to compress with a dictionary.

Credits also contain logos/symbols (near the end), and often have stylistic flairs as well. Video compression is based on making predictions and then adding information (per Shannon's definition) for the deltas from those predictions. The pattern of credits statically sliding at a consistent rate is exactly the sort of prediction codecs are optimized for; for instance, the same algorithms will save space by predictin…

Text with video is difficult to do correctly for a few different reasons. Just rendering text well is a complicated task that's often done poorly. Allowing arbitrary text styling leads to more complexity. However for the sake of accessibility (and/or regulations) you need some level of styling ability.

This is all besides complexity like video/audio content synced text or handling multiple simultaneous speakers. Even that is besides workflow/tooling issues that you mentioned.

The MPEG-4 spec kind of punted on text and supports fairly basic timed text subtitles. Text essentially has timestamp where it appears and a duration. There's minimal ability to style the text and there's limits on the availability of fonts though it does allow for Unicode so most languages are covered. It's possible to do tricks where you style words at time stamps to give a karaoke effect or identify speakers but that's all on the creation side and is very tricky.

The Matroska spec has a lot more robust support for text but it's more of just preserving the original subtitle/text encoding in the file and letting the player software figure out what to do with that particular format and then displaying it as an overlay on the video.

It's unfortunate text doesn't get more first class love from multimedia specs. There's a lot that could be done, titles and credits as you mention, but also better integration of descriptive or reference text or hyperlink-able anchors.

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