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ITU Approves H.264 Video Standard Successor H.265
An anonymous reader writes "The H.265 codec standard, the successor of H.264, has been approved, promising support for 8k UHD and lower bandwidth, but the patent issues plaguing H.264 remain." Here's the announcement from the ITU. From the article: "Patents remain an important issue as it was with H.264, Google proposing WebM, a new codec standard based on VP8, back in 2010, one that would be royalties free. They also included it in Chrome, with the intent to replace H.264, but this attempt never materialized. Mozilla and Opera also included WebM in their browsers with the same purpose, but they never discarded H.264 because most of the video out there is coded with it.
MPEG LA, the owner of a patent pool covering H.264, promised that H.264 internet videos delivered for free will be forever royalty free, but who knows what will happen with H.265? Will they request royalties for free content or not? It remains to be seen. In the meantime, H.264 remains the only codec with wide adoption, and H.265 will probably follow on its steps."
Several companies made proposals for what would eventually become H.265.
Who won?
Mozilla and Opera also included WebM in their browsers with the same purpose, but they never discarded H.264 because most of the video out there is coded with it.
What? Firefox didn't have H.264 support until late 2012.
Being a videophile, first I encoded everything to divx, then I transcoded to h.264. Now I suppose I'll turn them all into h.265 - it'll be the best quality yet.
I want to be excited about this but people keep reminding me that software patents suck.
Nothing more than H.264 had. DRM is implemented at the container level, not the bitstream level.
Once a standard becomes good enough, people will hang on to it for a long long time. Why bother re-encoding a complete music library from mp3 even if vorbis/aac is clearly the superior codec? Apple has enough difficulties pushing aac through, and not many hardware producers are including vorbis support. I guess the same could be said for windows xp and desktop hardware.
Apart from the awful English, WebM has been quite successful, too: a lot of software packages use WebM because they don't need to license H.264, and not just open source software.
Video standards aren't replaced overnight, and in fact, in a lot of places can't be replaced at all. The best way of dealing with these kinds of compatibility issues is to offer an alternative when people need to upgrade and change hardware/software anyway. So, let's hope that WebM can compete with H.265, because then we have a real chance of largely getting rid of proprietary video standards.
The answer is some variant of "follow the money", I'm sure, but why doesn't the standards body in question require that the standard be truly open?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Given how widespread H.264 hardware implementations are and the fact that blu-ray does not have H.265 I'd expect to see adoption first in the video conferencing world (SIP, H.323....CISCO/Tandberg, Polycom, etc)
For real time encoding H.265 can provide 30% reduction of bandwidth at the same bitrate. Transcoded content like what you might do at home will get some benefit but not as much as the real time stuff (streaming will benefit a lot too)
This adds a sunk cost to the barriers to entry into the device market, in favour of the established market dominators (which is what patents are all about), and to the detriment of free market, consumers and technological progress.
The point is that there is not much choice if it is part of an interoperability standard. You simply cannot view a H.264 video on the web with a browser that only supports WebM, just as you'll have no luck to watch NTSC broadcasts with a PAL-only TV. Of course you are free to try to sell that PAL-only TV in the US, but you won't succeed, not because it is bad (the same TV may sell like crazy in Europe), but because it doesn't work with US broadcasts.
You only have a choice if there are two options that both work.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
BD+ in Blu-ray Disc muddies this a bit, as it allows transforming the decompressed image based on whether or not other authenticity checks pass.
Although "transform the audio and video output" is listed as an option of BD+, it doesn't work the same way as most humans would parse that description. Based on this, it's just another way to encrypt the full .m2ts stream.
If it actually altered the video after decompression but before output, it would be impossible to rip a Blu-Ray losslessly with that protection, as you would need to decode the H.264 stream, apply the BD+ operations, then re-encode those frames to put back into the ripped stream. Note that you could never fully protect audio this way, as although you could apply the same sort of transformation, the audio stream isn't always decoded by the Blu-Ray player.
In addition, in order to alter the uncompressed data, it would require that every Blu-Ray player use exactly the same H.264 decoder with exactly the same options and only apply video alterations after BD+ is done with the data. This is a problem, because there are parts of H.264 decoding that are optional because they take CPU power and may not hurt video quality enough to require them.
The 'H' video encoding standards have NOTHING to do with free-to-use codecs. They are a COMMERCIAL industrial standard, designed to be reasonable and safe to license, because of the patent pool.
Complaining that H265 will include some royalty mechanisms is like complaining that the sky is blue! Even the document that will detail the final H265 standard will NOT be free, just as today you have to pay to get a copy of the H264 standard.
The open-source movement is not the same as demanding "death to capitalism" or the end of profit, as some very stupid people here seem to think. The 'H' standards have nothing to do with open-source. However, because the 'H' standards are not industrial secrets, open-source developers can and will develop open-source encoders and decoders.
Talk of WebM is pure garbage, since the key developers of x264 looked at the source Google released, and discovered that VP8 had illegally ripped off the H264 standard (badly), taking advantage of the fact that VP8 was originally closed-source. In other words, Google was conned (actually, this isn't true- Google knew full well that VP8 infringed hundreds of patents, but simply wanted to transfer millions to the owners of the company).
If people want to be activists over the royalty situation, it should be with this goal. Encoders, and encoded video (including streamed) should be royalty free. Only the decoders (hardware or software) should pay a royalty. This way, once you own your tablet, laptop, phone, or Windows, you have already paid for the licence to decode H265, allowing all apps to use this format freely.
The advantage of H265 (and H264) to end users is clear. Tiny, extremely energy efficient, hardware circuits can handle the video decoding, providing first quality video services on devices of all kinds. The standards allow software teams (like those behind x264) to produce insanely efficient, ultra-high-quality encoding solutions, and also allow work to progress on very fast (although low quality or very high bandwidth) hardware encoders.
H265 promises (if the encoding efficiency shown by x264 is possible for H265) 4K films on existing Bluray technology- which is essential since the collapsing market for disks means that it is most unlikely a new disk standard will ever replace Bluray.
To conclude. Standards are good, and some standards will involve royalties.
If it's all about Apple, then how do you explain Google quietly backing down from their earlier promises to ditch H.264 support in Chrome?