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A Future Without MPEG

blog.chiariglione.org

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Re: A Future Without MPEG

#51

Post by ksec »

unlord wrote: post #17
ksec wrote: post #12

I am not sure where to begin. But let's start with EVC. EVC Baseline is expected to be 20% better than AVC High Profile , and EVC Main Profile is expected to be 30% better than HEVC. The Codec is backed by Huawei, Samsung and Qualcomm. If you are unfamiliar with the Smartphone market, The three would represent roughly 80% of marketshare excluding Apple. Now on to VVC. I am surprised by the sentence MC-IF has 31 membe…

> It really is the state of the art Video Codec, at a decoding complexity that is quite manageable. ( Lower than AV1 ) I am afraid this has not been substantiated by any of the public decoder demonstrations I've seen. Please see the most recent VVC technical update presented at the MC-IF meeting on March 2nd of this year: https://a7dce6fd-e8f0-45f7-b0b0-255c5c9a28e1.filesusr.com/ug... On slide 10 is a graph of VVC pe…

Yes. But I think it should be noted the HM and VTM are reference encoder and decoder, they are not meant to be used for production nor in any way optimised.

But dav1d is a truly amazing pieces of work!

Re: A Future Without MPEG

#52

Post by ksec »

fmajid wrote: post #25
ksec wrote: post #12

I am not sure where to begin. But let's start with EVC. EVC Baseline is expected to be 20% better than AVC High Profile , and EVC Main Profile is expected to be 30% better than HEVC. The Codec is backed by Huawei, Samsung and Qualcomm. If you are unfamiliar with the Smartphone market, The three would represent roughly 80% of marketshare excluding Apple. Now on to VVC. I am surprised by the sentence MC-IF has 31 membe…

> “Covered most or all of the industry” I think that is a very partial reading of the forces at play. Apple may be 20% of unit sales, but an overwhelming majority of industry profits and has a lock on the best demographics (the rich and the young). AFAIK they haven’t decided, even if historically they tended to prefer ITU/MPEG standards (but boycotted Blu-Ray). AV1 has Netflix and Google/YouTube behind it. Not sure a…

>AFAIK they haven’t decided

They want VVC. After all MC-IF was co-founded by Apple. But that doesn't mean MC-IF will succeed. Having everyone on the table does not necessarily mean positive results will come.

VVC will finalise in July. So we will know soon.

Re: A Future Without MPEG

#53

Post by fmajid »

SahAssar wrote: post #36
fmajid wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chariglione was the charismatic leader behind the MPEG standards, including those behind DVD (MPEG-2). The biggest challenge wasn’t technical but political: getting a bunch of companies to agree to pool their patents so licensing them could be streamlined. For next-generation video beyond H.264 (AVC) and H.265 (HEVC), that consensus has broken-down and his prediction seems to be that open-source standards like Allian…

The point of AV1 is that it is royalty-free, not that it is open source, right? x265 for example is a open source implementation of HVEC among others.

You're right, of course, the two notions are orthogonal, but in practice an open-source project like Mozilla cannot use royalty-encumbered codecs.

As for the royalty-free nature of AV1, it will only be known once all the patent lawsuits are litigated. The AOM patent litigation fund in itself is no guarantee, given the capricious nature of common-law courts.

Re: A Future Without MPEG

#54

Post by thrilleratplay »

danbmil99 wrote: post #31

This is really a story of Open Source and shared intellectual property finally winning out over expensive, proprietary standards that tried to present themselves as something else. Disclaimer: I was founder of on2 Technologies, acquired by Google and the basis for av1. There really Is quite a bit to this story, starting in the early 90s and leading up to the situation today.

I used to work in the same building as on2 in Clifton Park. You could still make out the company name on the sign next to the main entrance. Many people are amazed to find out that the technology behind a lot of internet video has roots in this area. The building also housed many of the developers for company called Kitware, which are probably best known for cmake.

Re: A Future Without MPEG

#55

Post by dwheeler »

Silhouette wrote: post #34
amelius wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess a problem is that most hardware, SoCs etc, still use MPEG.

This is the classic chicken and egg problem with any multimedia encoding standards. As someone who mostly uses video in the context of online systems, MP4 (H.264) is the closest we have to a universally supported format on the user's end and it has been for years. However, it's complicated, patent encumbered and very inefficient by modern standards. And even MP4 isn't 100% universally supported. Once encoding and dec…

Yes, while the future is hard to predict, right now it looks like AV1 is on its way to fixing the world. If anyone can freely create and view videos without paying the endless tolls for permission, that would be a vast improvement.

Re: A Future Without MPEG

#56

Post by danbmil99 »

thrilleratplay wrote: post #54
danbmil99 wrote: post #31

This is really a story of Open Source and shared intellectual property finally winning out over expensive, proprietary standards that tried to present themselves as something else. Disclaimer: I was founder of on2 Technologies, acquired by Google and the basis for av1. There really Is quite a bit to this story, starting in the early 90s and leading up to the situation today.

I used to work in the same building as on2 in Clifton Park. You could still make out the company name on the sign next to the main entrance. Many people are amazed to find out that the technology behind a lot of internet video has roots in this area. The building also housed many of the developers for company called Kitware, which are probably best known for cmake.

I remember that building well!

Our team in Clifton Park was the engine that built the VPx line of codecs. Many of the engineers who worked there are now at Google in Mountain View.

Re: A Future Without MPEG

#57

Post by thrilleratplay »

danbmil99 wrote: post #56
thrilleratplay wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work in the same building as on2 in Clifton Park. You could still make out the company name on the sign next to the main entrance. Many people are amazed to find out that the technology behind a lot of internet video has roots in this area. The building also housed many of the developers for company called Kitware, which are probably best known for cmake.

I remember that building well! Our team in Clifton Park was the engine that built the VPx line of codecs. Many of the engineers who worked there are now at Google in Mountain View.

I always wondered happened to the people after Google purchased on2. It would make sense that Google would want to keep that knowledge and not just buy it for the patents and source. Thank you for clearing that up.

Re: A Future Without MPEG

#58

Post by SahAssar »

fmajid wrote: post #53
SahAssar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of AV1 is that it is royalty-free, not that it is open source, right? x265 for example is a open source implementation of HVEC among others.

You're right, of course, the two notions are orthogonal, but in practice an open-source project like Mozilla cannot use royalty-encumbered codecs. As for the royalty-free nature of AV1, it will only be known once all the patent lawsuits are litigated. The AOM patent litigation fund in itself is no guarantee, given the capricious nature of common-law courts.

I think the specifics matter here and I'm not in any way versed well enough in law to know so correct me if if I'm wrong but:

Mozilla could absolutely use and distribute x265 but that would also require them to have a license for the patents required for HVEC and would also require the users to have a license (which is of course unrealistic).

The only reason firefox can play h264 is because Cisco paid for an unlimited license with subdistribution and assigned it to mozilla.

So as h265/HVEC is concerned the problem for mozilla is that even if someone wanted to pay the bill like cisco did they would not be able to get a straight answer who and what they needed to pay for a license, right?

Re: A Future Without MPEG

#59

Post by danbmil99 »

SahAssar wrote: post #58
fmajid wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, of course, the two notions are orthogonal, but in practice an open-source project like Mozilla cannot use royalty-encumbered codecs. As for the royalty-free nature of AV1, it will only be known once all the patent lawsuits are litigated. The AOM patent litigation fund in itself is no guarantee, given the capricious nature of common-law courts.

I think the specifics matter here and I'm not in any way versed well enough in law to know so correct me if if I'm wrong but: Mozilla could absolutely use and distribute x265 but that would also require them to have a license for the patents required for HVEC and would also require the users to have a license (which is of course unrealistic). The only reason firefox can play h264 is because Cisco paid for an unlimite…

That's exactly right. While it is impossible to absolutely prove a negative (that no one will make a credible patent claim against AV1) -- it's worth noting that the line of codecs starting with VP3 that led up to AV1 go back to research done in the early 90's, and there has never been a serious patent claim against any of them.

This is at least partly by design: On2 had an explicit mission to create competitive codecs that avoided conflict with the MPEG patents. I'm pretty sure this was a major factor in their appeal to Google.

(Disclaimer: I was CTO &/or CEO of On2 up until 2003)

Re: A Future Without MPEG

#60

Post by tandr »

drmpeg wrote: post #29
loeg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean H.264, H.265, or the older MPEG codecs? I think H.264 hardware is pretty widespread. H.265 less-so. Anything older than H.264 has been dead in the water for years.

Comcast VOD content sent to QAM set top boxes is still MPEG-2.

Doesn't it has "channels" which are using more advanced encoding?
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