Slashdot Mirror
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.
Don't like the licensing terms? Don't use H.265...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Doesn't H.264 (aka MPEG4) which has much wider client support (browsers, hardware decoding, mobile etc) do a good enough job?
Because that's exactly what HEVC is going to get if they pursue this.
The big test is if the big MPAA studios using HEVC for UHD Blurays will pay this new patent pool or not. The quantity of money is large enough that they'll probably either negotiate a better deal or take it to court.
Unfortunately, if anyone pays, that'll fund them enough to be able to take everyone else to court, so the patent pool likely won't die unless there's some major court case striking down the patents. If anyone has enough sway with the US government to get software patents killed, it's the MAFIAA.
Smaller sites can use HEVC and noone will care to collect, larger sites will use VP9 or AVC.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Which is why this is pretty stupid. H.264 is "good enough" for most things. Particularly as bandwidth continues to grow. A more efficient encoding scheme would be nice, but it isn't necessary. We can already do 1080p60 video over most net connections with reasonable quality.
So H.265 will have to be appealing not only in terms of bandwidth saved, but in terms of cost. Companies won't move to use it if they have to pay a bunch extra for the privilege. They'll just keep using H.264 and more bandwidth.
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/
Can't we just wait 20 years, and then use the codec?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
OPUS is a lot better and free.
VR popularity grows substantially.
VR market is going to explode with tons of new products in Q1 2016 (an assumption based on actual product announcements) .
VR movies (360 x 180) take at least x6 more than regular ones (less than 120 x 90 ).
Some VR products and solutions will have to use 265, without major improvements of the infrastructures.
Hence 265 becomes an enabler, and the license price vs. storage volume & network price begins to sound like a reasonable trade-off.
Hence the draconian licensing terms.
Just because they can.
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 ]
The netvc Project (https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/netvc/charter/) aims to create a video codec that is royalty free and better than current codecs using technologies from multiple contributors.
:)
Current contributions include Daala(https://wiki.xiph.org/Daala) from Xiph and Thor(https://github.com/cisco/thor) from Cisco, both having good performance in different metrics(FastSSIM and PSNR respectively). Combined, both could achieve higher performance than a single one alone.
If the success of the Opus codec is any indication, this should work out quite nicely
More than one way to do thing with compression.
But when you're designing your codec with one hand tied behind your back, it's not going to work as efficiently.
Yup, your hand is tied behind your back, but just as you try to work anyway, standing in another corner there's this other guy with an hindu name asking you if you need a hand. or six.
It might not work as efficiently if you try to achieve the exact same thing but are restricted in the methods you use*. But you can obtain very efficient result if you try something completely different. Then the patents won't even matter.
The realm of DCT it a patent mine field? Try something else.
Dirac/Schroedinger by BBC has show that you can use wavelets instead.
Daala by Xiph is on the way of showing that lapped transforms + perceptual vectors + range coding work too.
----
*:And even then in that situation, there might be efficient way to do the same thing while doing it differently enough to not be patented.
On2/Google/Xiph have repeatedly shown that with the various VPn codecs being close to the MPEG/H26x, with the patended bit swapped out.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
From what I gather, H264 and H265 may be supported by hardware (HW) today, and their HW decoders can be pretty efficient on portable devices. If you look at recent Apple devices, their main chips do support both decoding and encoding of both video formats. VP9 HW support is championed by Google, as far as I can see from an advert / white paper on www.deepchip.com . I assume Google will try to make all Android phones VP9 friendly, but I am not so sure what is the status right now. I suppose that VP9 is probably used by YouTube when you use Chrome as a web browser.
Anyone else does know better than me?
On the Government is stupid enough to base your rates on "profit" which can be gamed to be zero or less.
No, this is revenue. The top line number. And it's a lot harder to game.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
...why any "standard" would include patented technology. Seems like a very stupid idea. About the same as copyrighting the spelling of words.
linquendum tondere
.
As we are beginning to see, once the codecs become an essential facility, patent fees will start to be extracted from the users.
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 ]
So...How many portable music players do you own with vorbis support?
Depends, if he lives in Europe: nearly every single last one of them, specially the asian no-name brands.
The practice of Microsoft regarding PlaysForSure in the US is an entirely different matter.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
This article is about video encoder, not audio encoders.
Okay then...
Daala is a lot better and free.
...fixed the original post.
Is it okay now ?
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
lets all use libvpx and be done with it
0.5% sounds fair. And it's especially fair, because it's gratis for non-commercial (possibly open source) products and sites.
The 4K h.265 file sill be half the size of the 1080p h.264 file
I'd like some of the drugs you are taking. An H.265 file will be 35-50% of the size of the same file encoded with H.264. The idea that a 4K file will be half the size of a 1080p with the two different files encoded with H.265/H.264 is absurd, and seriously outside of even the most optimistic goals of the organization at the outset. The original goal was that the same file encoded with the same visual quality would be half the size. I've never seen that happen, I've seen somewhere between 35 and 40% at best, but the implementations are still improving.
in what way has HEVC advanced any patents on h.265 that isn't already covered in the LAMPEG HEVC license for h.265? One problem though, the 'open source' VP9 (which still is being debated if it really isn't using any patented technology) isn't nearly as good as h.265 (unless you really don't give a damn about real quality)..
Now if you convinced Netflix, Google, Apple, Microsoft etc. to replace all their codecs with Xiph codecs, you would see patent lawsuits rolling in.
Because they are BSD licensed, various Xiph codecs like Vorbis are popular for storing soundtracks of video games.
FLAC is a popular audio codec in high-end HD-based digital autio players aimed at audiophiles.
Google did provide Thoera variants at some point in time (I don't know if they still do).
Nobody ever lost money following suit due on thr gound of these codecs.
---
The reason that Theora isn't that popular, is that currently H264 does provide a better image quality for a given bandwith and as most of the target audience already have a hardware chip supporting decoding (e.g.: in the tablet they use to watch Netflix) licensing doesn't matter much for them.
By asking for more money, H265 / HEVC is losing part of its attractiveness to H264. It compresses video better / gives more quality for the same compression. BUT costs more money.
On the long term all these are argument in favour of Daala : not only will it eventually produce even better compression (simply on the ground of being based on technology even more advanced), but is not covered by patents.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]