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Firm boosts H.264 streaming license fees from $100k up to staggering $4.5M

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Re: Firm boosts H.264 streaming license fees from $100k up to staggering $4.5M

#61

Post by jordand »

KronisLV wrote: post #26

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.

There's sadly loads of older Apple and Android devices out there holding back AV1 adoption for years to come. Hardware AV1 decoding only just arrived in the Apple M3+ and A17 Pro onwards, and software decoding has its own big trade offs regardless of the OS.

Re: Firm boosts H.264 streaming license fees from $100k up to staggering $4.5M

#63

Post by nine_k »

sheepscreek wrote: post #52
adriand wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It goes to $2.5m for 5 million users/subscribers and tops out at $4.5m for 100 million subscribers. It’s not staggered evenly at all IMO. So I worry mainly for the small players. This shouldn’t have any meaningful effect on any big player.

But for small players nothing apparently changed, they keep paying the $100k as usual.

Re: Firm boosts H.264 streaming license fees from $100k up to staggering $4.5M

#64

Post by panny »

adrian_b wrote: post #15
VladVladikoff wrote: post #14

I’m confused about this. If I have video on my website that is encoded in x264 am I obligated to pay fees?

Not if you are in Europe or in any other place where the H.264 patents have expired. The patents are still valid in USA, Brazil and a few other places.

How are these software patents still valid after Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International precedent? Or is this a case where companies just pay the fee because it's cheaper than fighting it in court?

Re: Firm boosts H.264 streaming license fees from $100k up to staggering $4.5M

#65

Post by fhn »

notatoad wrote: post #60
userbinator wrote: post #44

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...

Milk the last drop, or raise the prices so high that people transition to a more reasonably priced option with a patent that isn’t expiring soon?

you mean AV1?

Re: Firm boosts H.264 streaming license fees from $100k up to staggering $4.5M

#66

Post by throwawaytea »

craftkiller wrote: post #36
Figs wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's better anyways and surely close to a decade after coming out, we'd expect devices to support it well enough. A lot of people, myself included, are still using quite old hardware. The GPU in my daily driver is ~10 years old at this point. Between crypto, COVID, and this AI craze raising GPU costs by insane amounts, it hasn't made sense to replace it with something newer. I know I'm not alone on that...

For legacy devices, VP8/VP9 is a good option. Intel Added VP8 hardware decoding to Broadwell which was 12 years ago. Nvidia had hardware VP9 decoding 10 years ago on the Geforce 10 series. AMD had hardware VP9 decode support 9 years ago on the Radeon 400 series.

I still happily use my 2012 27" iMac for all my work. So I'm with the parent comment.

Re: Firm boosts H.264 streaming license fees from $100k up to staggering $4.5M

#67

Post by jurschreuder »

Figs wrote: post #32
KronisLV wrote: post #26

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.

> it's better anyways and surely close to a decade after coming out, we'd expect devices to support it well enough. A lot of people, myself included, are still using quite old hardware. The GPU in my daily driver is ~10 years old at this point. Between crypto, COVID, and this AI craze raising GPU costs by insane amounts, it hasn't made sense to replace it with something newer. I know I'm not alone on that...

I work in AI and I'm surrounded by RTX-4090 and H100 servers but for much of the day to day AI training I use my RTX-970 in the desktop on my desk for convenience and it works just fine for most cases.

Literally 2 meters from my desk is a 2x RTX-4090 server and many times I just use my 8 year old GPU anyway so you don't need it.

Re: Firm boosts H.264 streaming license fees from $100k up to staggering $4.5M

#68

Post by sysguest »

skrrtww wrote: post #31
adrian_b wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The claims made by Dolby that some H.265 patent claims that are formulated very vaguely also apply to AV1 are probably bogus. Like many other such frivolous patent lawsuits, Dolby hopes to either scare the other company into making a deal in order to avoid bigger legal expenses, or to establish a legal precedent if their cunning lawyers can convince a technically incompetent jury that the H.265 patents are applicable…

Is a panel of 'neutral' experts even possible to field in this area? I feel like anyone with sufficiently in depth knowledge of both the AV1 and HEVC specs has almost certainly derived a big paycheck for years from stakeholders on one side or the other of these lawsuits. I'm no expert, but Google having designed AV1, I can certainly imagine a world where the codec infringes upon HEVC just enough that the lawsuit fees…

hmm if you know how patents work, "Google having designed AV1" isn't same as "Google 100% sure AV1 doesn't have patent infringes"

even if you're google, you can't be 100% sure if there's some obscure patent lurking around the corner

Re: Firm boosts H.264 streaming license fees from $100k up to staggering $4.5M

#69

Post by sheepscreek »

nine_k wrote: post #63
sheepscreek wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes to $2.5m for 5 million users/subscribers and tops out at $4.5m for 100 million subscribers. It’s not staggered evenly at all IMO. So I worry mainly for the small players. This shouldn’t have any meaningful effect on any big player.

But for small players nothing apparently changed, they keep paying the $100k as usual.

5 million users isn’t a lot unless we’re talking paid subscribers. Their license likely does not make a distinction. For a (free/ad supported) service like a niche YT clone, this could be fatal.

Re: Firm boosts H.264 streaming license fees from $100k up to staggering $4.5M

#70

Post by MaxBarraclough »

notatoad wrote: post #60
userbinator wrote: post #44

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...

Milk the last drop, or raise the prices so high that people transition to a more reasonably priced option with a patent that isn’t expiring soon?

Seems unlikely, migrating away from an entrenched codec like H264 isn't like a routine software update. It has widespread hardware support, and there's an enormous body of H264 video out there.

As fhn points out, there are now truly open video codecs available (open specification, royalty free, unencumbered by patent terms) that are able to compete with the patent-encumbered ones on technical merit. Seems curious that the patent-holders would want to hike prices in this way and validate the motivation behind the truly open codecs.

Also, the article mentions the licensing fees for H265 were also increased recently. It doesn't seem to give a figure, a quick web search turns up 25% [0] or perhaps 20% [1]. Perhaps I'm missing something obvious but I'm not clear on how the change in price relates to the patent dispute between Nokia and certain laptop manufacturers.

(It seems the H264 fee increase affects streaming providers only, whereas the H265 fee increase did not, as it affected laptop manufacturers.)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46004129

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46003285

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