Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Nobody "won". Companies weren't making proposals for complete replacements for h.264. They were making proposals for incremental improvements on h.264. h.265 is a collection of those different improvements. Each one is small in itself, but they add up.
Nothing more than H.264 had. DRM is implemented at the container level, not the bitstream level.
Good thing software patents don't exist in most of the civilized world then.
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
"Company does a bunch of research work, and then says "hey, you can use the research work we did if you pay us"."
Translation
"Somebody does some research then a company patents it and every little incremental change every few years to keep old patents alive and to stop anyone else trying to enter the market" ...
"It's almost like the people there are normal human beings who want to live and eat!"
Sorry, I couldn't translate that with a straight face. Its even more laughable and insulting than when the RIAA says it.
I also think that H.265 could find its way to satellite TV broadcasting, because its lower bandwidth requirements for 720p/1080i resolution video means they can add in more channels per satellite.
First adaptation, as usual, will be by HQ rip groups and anime fansubbers. These people pride themselves in being on the cutting edge and implementing stuff that isn't implemented anywhere in hardware yet. They were the guys who moved from h.264 high profile to h.264 10 bit high profile when h.264 hardware support started to become prevalent. They were the ones who moved to h.264 when divx hardware support became prevalent. Etc.
Funnily enough, it was the same for h.264, divx/xvid and so on. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if many of the guys encoding that stuff actually work in the industry and use their "hobby" as a testbed for new encoding techniques and methods before they go to mass production.
Yeah, it's funny. Almost like there's more than one commenter.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
Then whose patents have now become gold mines and/or roadblocks?
The H.264 patent pool has 30 licencors and the list of patents is 59 pages long, so the short answer is: Most of the industry. Apart from Google with WebM and previously Microsoft with VC-1, there is surprising unity. My predictions are as follows: HEVC is as dominant in hardware as H.264, there will be an open source encoder like xvid/x264 and those who can't or won't use that will use WebM despite the somewhat larger size because Google will probably fight to back it as a free codec. Anything else will be never go anywhere outside geek circles like Vorbis or Theora.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
You're being very kind by saying WebM is "less effective" compared to H.264. I'd put it closer to "why in the hell would I want crummy looking compression unless I use at least twice the data rate?" This from someone who's livelihood partially comes from putting compressed streams on the Internet. WebM isn't good enough and just got lapped again.
Most of the stuff on
Anything else will be never go anywhere outside geek circles like Vorbis or Theora.
Please watch those overly broad claims. Vorbis is now well established in a number of niches, notably video game sound content.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Google is already working on VP9, so they aren't giving up quite yet. Whether they'll manage to be competitive is another matter, but at least they're trying.