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At the outset, I just want to say how happy I am that AV1 has taken off, and how seriously it is viewed by so many technology companies as a way around H.264 and (even worse) HEVC. Particularly with respect to HEVC, there are three separate patent pools with different participants. HEVC is, in many ways, already set up to fail due to a large number of participants that participate in either none or one of the pools (see https://streaminglearningcente... for how chaotic it is). There are some other proprietary technologies such as Perseus that are out there that claim better performance than HEVC from a PSNR/SSIM perspective, but they will likely remain fringe.

What is of more concern to me is how carefully AV1 has been constructed in terms of its coding tools to avoid patent trolling and patent submarining (e.g. Rambus at JEDEC with DDR). This is a very serious and very technically complex issue, as any company could easily assert patents on AV1 if they feel there is infringement on their claims as pertains to any of the coding tools. There are increasingly limited ways of dealing with spatiotemporal entropy in non-infringing ways that do not involve exponential increases in gates or CPU cycles.

A recent and simple example of this is the MPEG-LA claiming they license patents related to the MPEG-DASH streaming framework. MPEG-DASH is, essentially, an XML schema for a streaming manifest combined with either MPEG-4 Part 12 (the MP4 container originally specified by Apple as the MOV format), or MPEG-2 Transport Streams encapsulating H.264 video. Nobody on the DASH Industry Forum really thought that MPEG-DASH would be subject to this type of activity, yet magically MPEG-LA began waiving it agreement around about two years ago.

As a result, many in the industry have held onto the virtually universally-supported HTTP Live Streaming, which is an M3U playlist with tag extensions and MPEG-2 Transport Stream container for the codecs. Even that standard developed by Apple has never become a fully ratified within the IETF, and nobody knows if the same thing will happen there either.

Incidentally, any time Google has presented VP8 or VP9 at previous conferences and is asked about patents, they avoid answering questions and the audience usually laughs. I've seen it personally, and I think it's the industry's cynicism for the various patent holders and some of their past actions. Where it becomes critical is for silicon suppliers, whose front-loaded costs are now in the neighborhood of nine figures to launch some SoCs, and for content distributors, who invest a tremendous amount of time and money encoding all of the required profiles for streaming to new codecs. Commitment to efficient hardware acceleration by them for the codec is risky, as they could easily be legally enjoined from selling their products if they didn't get their patent licenses in order, and this would also leave content holders scrambling to fall back to already-established codecs.

I will admit I'm cynical here too. While I'd love to see a patent-free open standard, I'm not optimistic that someone will not come out of the woodwork claiming infringement on a key coding tool. I wish Google and the rest of the AV1 participants luck. They'll need it.

the content producer needs to drive the adoption

So it's a good thing that content producers like Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix are members of AOMedia. Facebook in particular would benefit from an AV1 still image format.

We'll see wide spread use of 12bit HEVC

Not for web video. VP9, for example, has twice the installed base of HEVC. The royalty-free licensing of AV1 (and HEVC's patent licensing mess) will encourage quick adoption of AV1. The fact that AV1 also out-performs HEVC is a nice bonus.

HEVC has no future on the web. That future belongs to AV1, and it's not too far away. Netflix wants to start encoding to AV1 in the second quarter of this year.

Any platform can support H.264 with a small fee which is probably less than the price of a cup of McDonald's coffee.

Really? Citation?

Because I was under the impression that it costs significantly more for some applications.

I remember the comparisons of Theora Vs "H.264" and the only one even remotely favorable for Theora was actually underhandedly using H.263 for most of the comparisons. If you need a citation beyond the one I just gave, notice how this page never mentions the fact that that is H.263, but instead propagandizes that it is H.264 in their comparison images (directly copied from the first citation, which does at least honestly note that it is H.263)

Sorry. H.264 is miles ahead of Theora, *especially* at low bit rates, as you can see here, take note of the 486Kbit still images halfway down. On the left is 1Mbit Theora, on the right is 486Kbit Theora, and in the middle are the best images... 486Kbit H.264

"Perhaps you meant non-commercial streamed video does not require significant License fees."

No, I meant that the streaming of free (non-commercial, whatever) content requires no fees:

"(DENVER, CO, US - 26 August 2010) - MPEG LA announced today that its AVC Patent Portfolio License will continue not to charge royalties for Internet Video that is free to end users (known as "Internet Broadcast AVC Video") during the entire life of this License."

also:

http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/blogs/mpeg-la-announces-no-royalties-on-free-internet-videos---ever.html

A.

What, like this:

mp3 is not free..
http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/emd.html

h.264 is not free:
http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/h264-royalties-what-you-need-to-know.html

mpeg2 is not free:
http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/M2/Pages/Agreement.aspx

(how do I make a proper link here - without the whole url showing up?)

If the small company is not charging the end user for the video (this applies to all YouTube-like services) then they don't have to pay anything until 2016. At that point the licensing may be revisited and they may have to pay under some new structure or one similar to free TV.

The Free TV license goes like this:

Either a one-time payment of $2,500 “per AVC transmission encoder” or an annual fee based on the following brackets:

• $2,500 per calendar year per Broadcast Markets of at least 100,000 but no more than 499,999 television households
• $5,000 per calendar year per Broadcast Market which includes at least 500,000 but no more than 999,999 television households
• $10,000 per calendar year per Broadcast Market which includes at 1,000,000 or more television households.

If you think your company is so small it can't even afford the 2500 fee, then you are better off simply hosting your video in an existing site like Youtube or Vimeo.

We do have to keep in mind this is a likely case, not a sure one, and again something that is a non-issue until 2016.

The biggest issue we have now with the abandonment of H.264 is with mobile devices. All iOS and [for what i know] all Android devices currently have hardware H.264 decoding but not WebM. If they want to decode WebM they have to go pure soft-decoder. This means playing simple videos may drain the battery of your device rather fast.

At the end of the day, the ones that suffer the most are Android users. iOS may eventually support the format (if Apple is convinced the world adopts it as HTML5 and everyone uses it.) The iPad's battery life is something that borders insanity, and future iDevices can simply add the format in. However, we all know how slow most Android manufacturers are at pushing out software updates, and some of these devices (notably the HTC Evo) just gobble up the battery as it is, imagine if it had to run software decoded video.

That link has been superseded, in that free H.264 on the Internet is free in perpetuity, not until 2014:

http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/blogs/mpeg-la-announces-no-royalties-on-free-internet-videos---ever.html

A.

Because then you'd have to pay money to use Firefox in 2014 with h264 support, and Firefox would violate the GPL unless you paid. It would also segregate those that paid and those that did not.

Remember the time when you had to pay money to buy a browser? 15ish years ago?

Citation:
http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/h264-royalties-what-you-need-to-know.html

According to the “Summary of AVC/H.264 License Terms,” which you can download from the MPEG LA site (www.mpegla.com/ avc/avc-agreement.cfm), there are no royalties for free internet broadcast (there are, however, royalties for pay-per-view or subscription video) until Dec. 31, 2010 [extended to 2014]. After that, “the royalty shall be no more than the economic equivalent of royalties payable during the same time for free television.”This makes royalties payable for “free television” the best predictor of where internet royalties will stand in 2011. Under the terms of the agreement, you have two options: a one-time payment of $2,500 “per AVC transmission encoder” or an annual fee starting at “$2,500 per calendar year per Broadcast Markets of at least 100,000 but no more than 499,999 television households, $5,000 per calendar year per Broadcast Market which includes at least 500,000 but no more than 999,999 television households, and $10,000 per calendar year per Broadcast Market which includes at 1,000,000 or more television households.”

This isn't just free as in beer, it's free as in free of cost.

http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/flash-player-cpu-hog-or-hot-tamale-it-depends-.html

"Overall, it's inaccurate to conclude that Flash is inherently inefficient. Rather, Flash is efficient on platforms where it can access hardware acceleration and less efficient where it can't."

yes, h.264 is significantly more efficient than flash, BUT ONLY ON MAC SAFARAI, where the browser uses hardware acceleration for h.264 and denies hardware acceleration to flash.

big surprise. OSX cripples flash, and guess what? it performs poorly.

That's actually a pretty good point. However, those stats came from this benchmark test, which has a good explanation of how those results came to be.

I wouldn't quote Jan Ozer. See comments 69 and 70 at http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=292 (a x264 developer's blog). Choice quote: "We talked about that on IRC, both with x264 and Theora people: all considered it one of the worst articles they had ever seen."

Jan Ozer routinely qualifies everything he does with words to the effect of "I'm not a technical person". StreamingMedia.com bills him as a "video codec expert" but it's rather clear that he isn't.

That's actually a pretty good point. However, those stats came from this benchmark test, which has a good explanation of how those results came to be.

In short, HTML5 under OS X Safari uses less CPU than Flash because of Safari's built-in acceleration. Notice that HTML5 under OS X Chrome barely fares better than its Flash counterpart, and neither browser plays HTML5 video as efficiently under Windows. Firefox 4 will be getting hardware graphics acceleration too, but it (ironically) only works on Windows at this point. (I guess I can understand why now, since Mac users at least have Safari if they want hardware-accelerated video whereas Windows users have no options.)

http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/flash-player-cpu-hog-or-hot-tamale-it-depends-.html - I think its been proven that Flash performance isn't that bad - once hardware acceleration has been finished for Mac OS its performance will be on par with Windows and it performs better than HTML 5.

http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2010/02/adobe_cto_talks_flash_performance_on_macs.html - I think its been proven that Flash reliability isn't that bad either. I personally can't remember the last time Flash crashed.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/ - I think its also been proven its an open spec.

Stop repeating the words of the all mighty turtleneck and come up with your own ideas.

Benchmark on html5 vs flash video? Right here. Conclusion? "... Flash is efficient on platforms where it can access hardware acceleration and less efficient where it can't."

Flash is a performance hog, HTML5 isn't.

FUD. In practice, they are equally efficient on platforms where Flash has ability to use hardware acceleration.

Though saying "HTML5" is pretty pointless, as it's just a spec, with multiple implementations - and any particular one may be slower or faster.

Ars has a good article summarizing a comparison study between Theora and h.264. Basically, Theora produces much lower quality videos with larger filesizes and higher CPU utilization when compared to h.264 videos with identical bitrates.

It's a poor article. The Streaming Learning Center study is deeply flawed. See the comments accompanying it. The method Jan Ozer used to encode his videos was woeful.

Let's use a far more practical standard of measurement. Let's compare how H.264 is used by YouTube today to deliver web video:

http://people.xiph.org/~maikmerten/youtube/

Perhaps Ogg Theora has something more going for it than just an open licence.

If it were true that only the manufacturer had a license, you wouldn't have the right to create an H264 video at all. In theory every use of the patent; both manufacturing and actual video creation; requires an explicit license from the patent owner. In practice, normally, the manufacturer gets a license which covers all possible use of the equipment and covers you too.

However; at the present moment the MPEG-LA isn't really making much money out of H264. They are just growing the market. So they are giving out very cheap and very limited licenses for now and planning for worse later.

Think of this as being like GIF, where Unysis let the format become popular and then later started charging royalties. Except this time around, you don't get the chance to claim you didn't know about the patents because you've already accepted their free time limited license offer.

The obvious reason Microsoft has standardized on h.264 is its support for DRM. However, Ogg Theora is inferior to h.264 by any standard of measurement except for licensing.

Ars has a good article summarizing a comparison study between Theora and h.264. Basically, Theora produces much lower quality videos with larger filesizes and higher CPU utilization when compared to h.264 videos with identical bitrates.

I've heard Theora advocates say "just jack up the bitrates until it looks good - we're in the age of Hulu so no big deal." I find that unacceptable. Theora will have to up its game if it wants to be a true competitor to h.264. All it has going right now is an open license.

Well the parent hasn't replied, so I will. Here is your first comparison to look at, and here is your second. Both found H.264 to be superior.

Oh, and here's some crow for you to snack on while you're reading.

Jan has a lot of worthwhile detail and commenting in his article: http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/flash-player-cpu-hog-or-hot-tamale-it-depends-.html

Don't worry. No matter how much astroturfing takes place the fact won't change that any video service who fails to support Firefox would lose a share too large to be underestimated.

As for the argument against h.264, it's valid. But the full effect of it will be understood after Dec 31 2010