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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.
For those who bashed Firefox and those who supported Ogg Vorbis and vp9 or whatever the hell that other codec was called ... all I can say is TOLD YA SO!
Notice how they waited until Flash was dying before this announcement?
Pretty soon they will go after Mozilla for royalities fees and if you do not want to spied upon by Google or use IE you will need to install flash back. Flash is the only recourse as horrible as this sounds agaisn't this as it is a defacto standard now to use this patented technology which will require DRM I am sure too and perhaps an anti open source license agreement too forcing developers like those who make Konqueror to either violate the GPL or not work on many websites.
So part of an open standard is owned by a monopoly and the great internet which was owned by the people is now licensed under Hollywood. Incredible!
http://saveie6.com/
It's a better, more efficient format / encoding standard, producing similar quality at somewhere between 50-70% of the size of H.264, according to some benchmarks I've seen. Given how much bandwidth video takes, that's not a small gain in efficiency. The additional efficiency is certainly useful for reducing streaming bandwidth requirements for HD and 4K resolutions, which is growing rapidly in popularity.
However, it seems as if the patent pool group has gotten a bit too emboldened by the relative success of H.264. Using the old "the first one's... well, not free, but cheap" model, they're hoping now to cash in by jacking the price up significantly, and broadening the scope of who has to pay as well.
This may end up killing or at least severely delaying 4K TV and HEVC (H.265) adoption. It's pretty costly, and businesses may just stick with the older format. It's hard to see companies willing to give that much of a percentage, especially since they're now targeting *content providers* and not just hardware manufacturers. Then again, maybe there's enough money being made that they won't care. Smartphone manufacturers pay a huge amount in patent licensing fees.
Difficult to say what will happen here. If they do suck it up and pay, it will basically mean higher costs passed along to consumers for nearly all new digital video content. Personally, I hope this blows up in their faces and everyone refuses to use the codec until more reasonable terms are presented.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
For lossy still images, JPEG2000, the successor to JPEG, is not widely used. JPEG is good enough.
For lossless still images, PNG was created to provide a free and superior replacement for the proprietary GIF format. The only reason GIF hung on was that it could do simple animations. MNG and APNG provide animations for PNG. APNG appears to have beat out MNG, but neither was soon enough to push GIF into complete oblivion. Still, PNG has mostly supplanted GIF.
Despite being the oldest and by far the worst quality of the major lossy audio formats, MP3 is still king, though Ogg Vorbis has claimed some niches. For instance, Vorbis is a popular format for sounds for computer games. One of the big problems Vorbis suffered was purely political. Microsoft went to war against the format, in part because it didn't have DRM. They would have also killed mp3 if it wasn't so popular. MS managed to squash Vorbis in the US so that it is very hard to find a music player that supports the format. For some players, I installed Rockbox to get support for Vorbis. For another, I learned that the same device was sold in the US and Europe, just with different ROMs. 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.
So, yeah, H 265 could easily fail to gain widespread adoption if the licensing terms are too onerous and greedy, no matter how much better it is compared to H.264. H.262 (MPEG-2) is still kicking around, as it's the format used for DVD video.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
IANAL, but that's essentially the idea behind FRAND patents (i.e., those which the inventors have agreed to license for "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory" terms). When you chooses to license using that model, it basically means that you can get a nominal reimbursement (because, after all, you did have to do some work to develop it) for each license, but that is pretty much it. Also, what is considered "nominal" is pretty low (as far as intellectual property goes, anyway) and strongly enforced by the courts. Furthermore, once you go FRAND with a patent, you usually can't really go back, so licensees have a guarantee that they aren't going to get it at a reasonable rate today during the adoption phase, but then see the price go up 500% when some contract runs out.
HEVC, however, is not a FRAND patent, though they would likely see much higher adoption if they were (probably similar to H.264, since they essentially used a de facto FRAND approach).