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H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

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

#31

Post by p_l »

hirako2000 wrote: post #4
KitDuncan wrote: post #2

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

How does x264 etc get away with it?

They are compliant with MPEG patent licenses - they distribute source code you have to compile yourself and for non-commercial use.

If you build x264 or other open source implementation of h.264/h.265, and embed it for example in commercial video conferencing software/appliance, you have to pay patent licensing fees for that product.

It's also why Firefox downloads a blob from Cisco to handle MPEG-4 video - Cisco covers the licensing for distribution et al.

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

#32

Post by sph »

p_l wrote: post #22
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…

The dirty secret of video codecs is that you can't make a modern video codec that isn't patent encumbered, which in turn makes it so that even if they wanted to be open, they go for defensive patents, which in turn perpetuate the situation. At least the patent licenses usually used with MPEG mean that private use of open source implementations is free.

> The dirty secret of video codecs is that you can't make a modern video codec that isn't patent encumbered

Why is that?

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

#33

Post by vbezhenar »

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…

Patents and open\close source are independent things. OpenH264 is BSD-licensed H.264 implementation, for example.

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

#34

Post by inscionent »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #16
otterley wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

A captive market is a happy market, no?

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

#35

Post by spuz »

cagenut wrote: post #5

that sounds great, but this is a press release with no real technical details. can anyone in the know add some context? for instance, whats the tradeoff? I assume more CPU? webrtc based video chats are all still using h264, did they not adopt 265 yet for technical or licensing reasons? what is the likelihood of broad browser support for h266 anytime soon?

Not sure why this was downvoted. These all seem like very reasonable questions that others here might be able to answer.

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

#36

Post by corty »

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.

The market is rather unhappy. E.g. Win10 doesn't ship an H265 codec because it's too expensive.

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

#37

Post by jacobush »

CJefferson wrote: post #23
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…

GPL would seem like a very weird choice -- that would mean it couldn't be put into any closed source product?

It could still serve as a reference implementation.

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

#38

Post by MikusR »

p_l wrote: post #22
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…

The dirty secret of video codecs is that you can't make a modern video codec that isn't patent encumbered, which in turn makes it so that even if they wanted to be open, they go for defensive patents, which in turn perpetuate the situation. At least the patent licenses usually used with MPEG mean that private use of open source implementations is free.

That's what AV1 is.

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

#39

Post by syshum »

ajross wrote: post #13
eigenvalue wrote: post #6

Can anyone verify if this is a real number? It’s possible sometimes to make surprising claims (such as 50% lower size) by relying on unusual or unrealistic situations. I would rather if they use a standard set of test videos with different content and resolutions, and some objective measure of fidelity to the original, when quoting these percentages. But if the 50% number is real, then that is truly remarkable. I won…

If one trusted numbers like this, and followed a chain of en vogue codecs back through history, you'd expect that a modern codec would produce files sizes like 3% of MPEG-2 on the same input data. It's all spin. I'm sure it does better, but I'm equally sure it'll turn out to be an incremental benefit in practice. > I wonder how many more CPU instructions are required per second of decoded video compared to HEVC. CPU…

The video codec battle is not about file size, it is about streaming bandwidth.
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