51–60 of 81 posts
Trying to milk the last drop before the patents expire? H.264 patents have already expired in most of the world and the remaining ones, which might not even be necessary for the vast majority of H.264 use, are also approaching expiry very soon: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Insane in absolute terms, but not per user. Take look at the actual fee schedule [1]. The most costly is the license for cable TV, which costs 50¢ per year per subscriber. The least costly is social media, which goes up to whopping 4.5¢ per MAU per user. I very much understand how the licensing alliance likely was bothered by the fact that they are leaving money on the table, when TikTok's revenue per user is $50 a y…
Is it insane at all? The biggest fees are charged to the biggest providers. With short form video now the dominant form of addictive social media content, it doesn’t seem insane at all that large media companies ought to compensate inventors/owners of patented video technology. A company with 100 million or more subscribers is not a company I feel a lot of empathy for if they’re trying to avoid paying licensing fees.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that open codecs can still be encumbered by patents and the holders will sue. VP9 and AV1 have their own patent pool for that very reason. Google may have open sourced its codecs but if they don’t indemnify users people who think they’re safe might be in for a bad time.
Looks like that isn't stopping Dolby. https://www.techspot.com/news/111865-dolby-sues-snap-over-vi...
Aren't VP9 and AV1 supposed to be "royalty free formats" ?
They are supposed to be, but Disney doesn't think so: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/av1s-open-royalty-fr... Also, let's not forget that the majority of devices still don't have AV1 hardware decoding support. For example, Apple only recently (2023) added support with iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs.
As a side note this isn't always superior - recently discovered my desktop uses way more power with hardware decode than software. Counterintuitive but issue isn't per pixel efficiency but that it keeps the GPU in a higher power state
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are supposed to be, but Disney doesn't think so: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/av1s-open-royalty-fr... Also, let's not forget that the majority of devices still don't have AV1 hardware decoding support. For example, Apple only recently (2023) added support with iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs.
> For example, Apple only recently (2023) added support [for AV1]. Apple has been actively obstructing open video formats for a long long time—Apple is the reason there isn’t a baseline format for in the HTML5 spec, for instance. (Or at least there wasn’t when the spec was still a well-defined document with a version number; I see no merit in keeping track of the “living” one.) Incidentally, Apple is a member of MPEG…
That's an insane amount. That makes me feel even more strongly about throwing proprietary and predatory codecs in the trash and opting to use AV1 et al wherever possible, it's better anyways and surely close to a decade after coming out, we'd expect devices to support it well enough.
That's an insane amount. That makes me feel even more strongly about throwing proprietary and predatory codecs in the trash and opting to use AV1 et al wherever possible, it's better anyways and surely close to a decade after coming out, we'd expect devices to support it well enough.
Insane in absolute terms, but not per user. Take look at the actual fee schedule [1]. The most costly is the license for cable TV, which costs 50¢ per year per subscriber. The least costly is social media, which goes up to whopping 4.5¢ per MAU per user. I very much understand how the licensing alliance likely was bothered by the fact that they are leaving money on the table, when TikTok's revenue per user is $50 a y…
Trying to milk the last drop before the patents expire? H.264 patents have already expired in most of the world and the remaining ones, which might not even be necessary for the vast majority of H.264 use, are also approaching expiry very soon: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...