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HEVC Advance Announces H.265 Royalty Rates, Raises Some Hackles
An anonymous reader writes: The HEVC Advance patent pool has announced the royalty rates for their patent license for HEVC (aka H.265) video. HEVC users must pay these fees in addition to the license fees payable to the competing MPEG LA HEVC patent pool. With HEVC Advance's fees targeting 0.5% of content owner revenue which could translate to licensing costs of over $100M a year for companies like Facebook and Netflix, Dan Rayburn from Streaming Media advocates that "content owners band together and agree not to license from HEVC Advance" in the hope that "HEVC Advance will fail in the market and be forced to change strategy, or change their terms to be fair and reasonable." John Carmack, Oculus VR CTO, has cited the new patent license as a reason to end his efforts to encode VR video with H.265.
No. HEVC provides similar image-quality at half the bitrates as H.264, so that'd automatically make it much more appealing for e.g. streaming-services -- think of Netflix, YouTube, Twitch, Justin.tv and so on and so forth. On the other hand, HEVC would provide much higher image-quality if you used the same bitrates as for H.264, which would make such content much more appealing to end-users. I, for example, am often annoyed by the banding and compression-artifacting with e.g. Netflix, but if they switched over to HEVC and just used otherwise the same bitrates I'd be getting much clearer picture. Basically, HEVC allows you to save in bandwidth or storage or allows you to improve quality. All of these are very good reasons to upgrade from H.264.
Now, VP9 is similar to HEVC in that that it'd also allow for saving in bandwidth or storage or to improve quality of video, but support for VP9 is pretty much non-existent.
create a competing standard that is designed specifically to avoid patents, and license it royalty-free.
I'll just leave this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
That's exactly what Xiph does with the Daala project. They're trying to implement lapped transforms for video (more or less the same principle as Opus does for audio) and since it's not based on traditional block encoding, Daala should avoid most patents. Their demos are already pretty impressive.
Better: Work together with like-minded companies to create a competing standard that is designed specifically to avoid patents, and license it royalty-free.
And better yet, do that work in the IETF's Internet Video Codec working group, which is what Xiph and Cisco are doing.
I can understand why the patent holders are upset with the MPEG-LA - because the MPEG-LA mandated that patent licensees will be paid for every use up to a cap (approx $6.5M/year), streaming is free (as long as viewers can watch the stream for free), and all sorts of other things. So companies like Apple, Cisco, Netflix, etc., they pay the $6.5M license fee and go about their merry way (incidentally, Cisco's fee also pays for Firefox's license).
Which is why h.264 is the predominant codec in use today - it's relatively cheap to use, sites like YouTube and Vimeo pay $0 to host videos that anyone can watch for free (they will have to pay for those subscriber/paid videos, though, since those cannot be viewed for free) - yes, "for free" means you the viewer pays $0 to watch, not that you don't pay some other way (e.g., watching ads).
MPEG-LA, to ensure adoption of HEVC wants similar licensing terms - a cap, free streaming for free to view, etc., But some patent holders (including the likes of GE and others) balked - hence forming the HEVC alliance and getting rid of the "thorns" - no cap to the amount you pay, streams also cost money, etc.
There was a lot of derision about MPEG-LA's free stream policy, but they know that widespread adoption is a good thing, and there's a reason why everything's in h.264 format.
Sadly, the greed of a few is probably going to kill HEVC - at a time when HEVC is just coming out, the last thing you want is to stifle it. I'm sure the patent holders of h.264 will probably make way more money because people will stick with what works and is well established over moving over to something that requires paying a lot of money for continually. At the very least, big companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Netflix, Vimeo etc, who probably just pay the cap every year will stick with h.264 than be subject to huge licensing fees of an unlimited cap. Either that, or HEVC will remain a niche for paid subscribers.
I'll just leave this here: https://wiki.xiph.org/Daala
Except, the quality of VP9 still can't compete with aging h.264 unless the baseline profile is used. Not to mention the encoder is slow as a snail on tar. I love it when people who know nothing about encoding video get into a discussion on codecs.
You're mostly right, but JPEG2000 is the format specified for digital cinema encoding. Look inside that big MXF file, and it's a bunch of JPEG2000 stills. Been to the cinema lately? You're watching x frames per second of JPEG2000.
Widely used, just not widely known.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Like that ever stopped patent lawyers.
Total number of lawsuits lost by Xiph for Vorbis, Opus, FLAC, Tarkin, Theora, etc.: 0
Yes, lawyer won't stop simply because it's different. They would dream to lawsuit Xiph into the ground. But so far they haven't found anything on any of the other technologies developed or taken over by Xiph.
The people at Xiph know their shit and if they say that a codec is using a non patented alternative technique, it is non patented.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You'll be surprised what can be done with a codec like MPEG-1 if you have unlimited computational power. Much of the point of better codecs is to reduce the computational power needed to achieve a substantial reduction in bandwidth for a given level of quality. So while it'll likely increase, the amount is unlikely to be substantial, not even a doubling of processing power.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Flash the US device with the European ROM (which involved tricking the ROM installation program by switching ROM files after it did its check and before it did the install) and just like that the US device could play Vorbis. How MS bullied or bribed the manufacturer to omit Vorbis from the US ROM I don't know.
The bullying was done as part of the PlaysForSure program.
That was microsoft's attempt to counter music stores like iTunes and co. They had a platform for selling DRM-ed music in WMA format. OEMs had to undergo a certification to be able to advertise "Microsoft PlaysForSure". That mandated certain formats (support for DRM, support for WMA). It was worded in such a way that it basically forbid manufacturer to put any other codec on the device (see the "Criticisms" section. According to MS that was due to a junior employee who wrote it. Yeah. Sure.). It think the controversy was talked about back then here on /.
My opinion is that this probably started as an attempt to initially close loop-hole to avoid consumer playing non DRM-ed / unlicensed music (i.e.: pirated), but at the hand of MS executive quickly evolved as a way to attempt crushing competition.
That severly limited the spreading of non-WMA formats (free like Vorbis or FLAC. Or alternative licenses like Sony's ATRAC, etc.) because OEMs probably feared that including extra formats would exclude them from WMA certification and they would lose market share to manufacturer who didn't.
(Specially since back then, Vorbis didn't have any markets, it was mostly used for higher quality home rips. Whereas WMA had Microsoft's store and OEMs were hoping to have something against the iTunes behemoth).
Or mostly so in the US.
The rest of the world didn't give a damn fuck about microsoft's market (was is even available outside US ?) nor play for sure. People wanted mainly MP3 because that was the most widespread format, and adding extra formats was a way for OEM to put more tick box on their feature list. As such adding Vorbis was a win-win: it doesn't cost anything (and even had a BSD licensed integer implementation for embed available for free) and was one extra feature that they'll advertise to gain attraction. Every single asian no-name manufacturer did add it.
In Europe nearly every player I've seen in store did have Vorbis support.
That explains the dual ROM:
- one ROM to placate microsoft to get access to PlaysForSure in the US market.
- one ROM with as many features as possible cramed in to gain visibility everywhere else.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]