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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

#71

Post by deskamess »

jurschreuder wrote: post #67
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...

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.

For a long time I thought my RTX-2060 was just not capable and the other day I did a ffmpeg GPU transcode and was surprised by how well it did. So now I am thinking about putting on some of Google's new Gemma edge models (probably the smallest will work with my 6GB VRAM + 2 GB) setup. I am not a 100% sure what that 2GB is but I think it is borrowing from the system in some manner.

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

#72

Post by cwillu »

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.

If my 10 year old card can't encode in hardware, it's a nonstarter.

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

#73

Post by cwillu »

deskamess wrote: post #71
jurschreuder wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For a long time I thought my RTX-2060 was just not capable and the other day I did a ffmpeg GPU transcode and was surprised by how well it did. So now I am thinking about putting on some of Google's new Gemma edge models (probably the smallest will work with my 6GB VRAM + 2 GB) setup. I am not a 100% sure what that 2GB is but I think it is borrowing from the system in some manner.

Video encoding uses dedicated silicon, it's not using the card's compute.

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

#74

Post by ksec »

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...

>Trying to milk the last drop before the patents expire?

Old licenses are grandfathered in previous pricing. So this isn't about milking, but likely a tactic specifically aiming at certain companies. But I am wondering why they bother to do this at this stage of the game.

I am hoping we could further innovate on top of H.264 to have a better patent free video codec.

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

#75

Post by xiphmont »

dmitrygr wrote: post #35
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.

AV1 might not be as patent-free as we had hoped: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/av1s-open-royalty-fr...

It's more another example of 'you can sue for anything on a whim'.

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

#76

Post by breve »

xiphmont wrote: post #75
dmitrygr wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AV1 might not be as patent-free as we had hoped: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/av1s-open-royalty-fr...

It's more another example of 'you can sue for anything on a whim'.

What's the likelihood Dolby succeeds?

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

#77

Post by dabinat »

jordand wrote: post #61
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.

The big problem is that Apple disables AV1 support in Safari on devices that do not have hardware decoders, even if those devices are powerful enough to decode in software. I can understand it for a phone, but it seems unreasonable for an M2 Ultra Mac Studio.

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

#78

Post by bytecode36 »

Veliladon wrote: post #38
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.

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.

100%. Just because AOM/Google says that wont charge a royalty doesn't mean AV1 isn't covered by patents owned by others. Since everyone and their brother saw how they can milk the patent system for money, they got patents that cover all "next-gen" video technologies (AV1, HEVC, VCC) a long time ago and will sue anyone that uses them. Ironically, since there are so many patent holders, each of which want a larger piece of the "licensing pie", it's making the new video technologies impossible to license. You may license HEVC or AV1 from one patent pool, but the other two and hundreds of other individual patent holders could also sue you. This is why many brands like Synology, Dell and HP have just started to simply remove these codecs from their products. I wouldn't treat any video codec as "patent free" until AT LEAST 20 years after the spec was release (AV1 = March 2038). This kind of infighting will guarantee that HEVC or AV1 will never become a ubiquitous standard for at least 20 years the way AVC/h.264 did.

I, for one, am happy about this. Nothing makes me happier than to see patent trolls eat themselves alive. Also, being an open source advocate, I appreciate when propriety technologies that are "good enough" can finally be used by open source applications. Unless you are pushing a ton of video, or working with high resolution (4K, 8K)/ high bit-rate videos, AVC/h.264 is perfectly fine.

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

#79

Post by bytecode36 »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #2

what are the open source alternatives?

Just because AOM/Google says that wont charge a royalty doesn't mean AV1 isn't covered by patents owned by others. Since everyone and their brother saw how they can milk the patent system for money, they got patents that cover all "next-gen" video technologies (AV1, HEVC, VCC) a long time ago and will sue anyone that uses them. Ironically, since there are so many patent holders, each of which want a larger piece of the "licensing pie", it's making the new video technologies impossible to license. You may license HEVC or AV1 from one patent pool, but the other two and hundreds of other individual patent holders could also sue you. This is why many brands like Synology, Dell and HP have just started to simply remove these codecs from their products. I wouldn't treat any video codec as "patent free" until AT LEAST 20 years after the spec was release (AV1 = March 2038). This kind of infighting will guarantee that HEVC or AV1 will never become a ubiquitous standard for at least 20 years the way AVC/h.264 did.

I, for one, am happy about this. Nothing makes me happier than to see patent trolls eat themselves alive. Also, being an open source advocate, I appreciate when propriety technologies that are "good enough" can finally be used by open source applications with broad support. Unless you are pushing a ton of video, or working with high resolution (4K, 8K)/ high bit-rate videos, AVC/h.264 is perfectly fine.

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

#80

Post by AlexeyBelov »

helterskelter wrote: post #57
mananaysiempre wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Don't forget their lack of support for FLAC. It's completely mind-numbingly, brain-damagingly stupid.

They support ALAC though, which is also known as "totally not FLAC".
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