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ITU Approves H.264 Video Standard Successor H.265

Posted by timothy on from the looks-so-much-like-his-brother dept.

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."

5 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. time to transcode again by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:time to transcode again by sidthegeek · · Score: 5, Funny

      Whoooosh...

    2. Re:time to transcode again by bmo · · Score: 5, Funny

      This is the Slashdot QC and calibration department. Your yearly sarcasm and humor detector calibrations are due. Please leave the detectors in the tray by the door at the end of your shift.

      Thank you.

      --
      BMO

  2. Mp3 by bstrobl · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:Amazing how you twisted that. by peppepz · · Score: 5, Insightful
    You don't choose to "use" standards. You are forced to implement them either by government regulation or interoperability needs. See what happens with the FAT file system: it's the result of an insignificant research effort, it is itself extremely poor technology, yet every device manufacturer is currently forced to implement it, and therefore needs to pay money to Microsoft.

    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.