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HEVC Advance Announces H.265 Royalty Rates, Raises Some Hackles

Posted by timothy on from the but-it's-only-wafer-thin dept.

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.

4 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. How about this... by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Don't like the licensing terms? Don't use H.265...

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    1. Re:How about this... by dgatwood · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Don't like the licensing terms? Don't use H.265...

      Better: Work together with like-minded companies to create a competing standard that is designed specifically to avoid patents, and license it royalty-free.

      Obligatory xkcd.

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    2. Re:How about this... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Honestly, for video codecs, people probably will just stop. At least for the big ones. I really don't see why they are needed, human eyes are only so good, we will NEVER have a need for 2D video that's much better. A 4K monitor is already near the visual limit of our eyes, and things like H.264 handle it just fine. If someone develops a new one in a few years how much better will it really be? We are compressing the video to fit on our computers, and the computers are getting to the point where they can deal with less compression, so why do we spend so much getting more compression that we don't actually need? I think in the future more and more people will just say H.264 with low compression and high quality is just fine, in the same way they did it with JPG, JPG and PNG are good enough, there are plenty of other formats that are better in many ways, but people want support first, and if the thing with the best support works in your application you use it.

    3. Re:How about this... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      create a competing standard that is designed specifically to avoid patents, and license it royalty-free

      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.

      I do hope they have learned from Google's mistakes with VP9 and and come out early with a good specification and stable hardware reference implementation.

      I work for a fairly large video oriented service, and we would love to start supporting alternative codecs (and eventually leave H264/5) but lack of full hardware support in mobile devices is an absolute blocker. Everything needs to be working well, with battery efficiency, on mobile devices at this point. I know a lot of other services currently on the fence about VP9 have similar views.

      Google have been approaching video codecs as they approach online services - betas in production, frequent revisions, not a stable spec (or spec at all). Not a good approach to get the chip makers onboard.