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.

Comments

Re:Why do we need H.265?

[bzipitidoo]

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.