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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.
Don't like the licensing terms? Don't use H.265...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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.
This is the disadvantage of software patents.
Also change the rules so that if something becomes a standard you can't charge a royalty for it.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
At least for physical media, this paves the way for 4K video on something not much larger than current media. Sure, physical media is dead and all that. But I still buy it. It also makes streaming 4K more feasible.
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.
Can't we just wait 20 years, and then use the codec?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
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).
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 ]
$6.5M is the cap. At $0.20 per device, that is a lot of devices for a small company to be selling without growing into a big company.
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
WMA was invented because of the patent demands surrounding MP3, not to kill off Vorbis. Microsoft licenses WMA out to hardware vendors at 0.10 per decoder, compared with 1.35 for a stereo MP3 decoder, and 0.98 for AAC. Probably we have Microsoft to thank for the more reasonable licensing fee structure adopted by MPEG-LA for their patent pools for H.264 and H.265.
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?
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 ]
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 ]