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Apple's Adoption Of HEVC Will Drive A Massive Increase In Encoding Costs Requiring Cloud Hardware Acceleration (streamingmedia.com)

Posted by msmash on from the growing-concern dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report: For the last 10 years, H.264/AVC has been the dominant video codec used for streaming but with Apple adopting H.265/HEVC in iOS 11 and Google heavily supporting VP9 in Android, a change is on the horizon. Next year the Alliance for Open Media will release their AV1 codec which will again improve video compression efficiency even further. But the end result is that the codec market is about to get very fragmented, with content owners soon having to decide if they need to support three codecs (H.264, H.265, and VP9) instead of just H.264 and with AV1 expected to be released in 2019. As a result of what's take place in the codec market, and with better quality video being demanded by consumers, content owners, broadcasters and OTT providers are starting to see a massive increase in encoding costs. New codecs like H.265 and VP9 need 5x the servers costs because of their complexity. Currently, AV1 needs over 20x the server costs. The mix of SD, HD and UHD continues to move to better quality: e.g. HDR, 10-bit and higher frame rates. Server encoding cost to move from 1080p SDR to 4K HDR is 5x. 360 and Facebook's 6DoF video are also growing in consumption by consumers which again increases encoding costs by at least 4x. If you add up all these variables, it's not hard to do the math and see that for some, encoding costs could increase by 500x over the next few years as new codecs, higher quality video, 360 video and general demand increases.

8 of 203 comments (clear)

  1. Server side optimization. by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Isn't that kind of the point? You optimize once and you save more on the other end since each playback device isn't wasting battery and bandwidth playing the less efficient version.

    1. Re:Server side optimization. by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Informative

      Indeed. You encode once when the video is created or uploaded. Then you save bandwidth and decompression costs every time the video is downloaded, which may be thousands or even millions of times. I would expect this to put less load on the server hardware, rather than more.

  2. Gonna need a source check on that. by Jahoda · · Score: 3, Informative

    New codecs like H.265 and VP9 need 5x the servers costs because of their complexity.

    H.265 encode and decode is baked into all hardware produced by the big three video card manufacturers.

    1. Re:Gonna need a source check on that. by Jahoda · · Score: 3, Informative

      While you are correct about quality vs. software encoding, 95% of the people watching these streams would never be able to tell.

  3. Re:Why mess with h.265 by jonsmirl · · Score: 4, Informative

    What a mess now there is a third licensing pool for h.265...
    http://blog.streamingmedia.com...

  4. Re:Why mess with h.265 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    So is every major hardware vendor that deals with video... what's your point?

    ( http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Licensors.aspx)

  5. The 00's are calling and want your servers back. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Most manufacturers now make barebones servers specifically designed to cram in GPUs. Amazon AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure all offer virtual servers with multiple dedicated GPU's as well. Yes, your run of the mill server is still headless with an ASpeed IPMI but you can get absolutely crazy with GPU server platforms.

  6. Re:Why mess with h.265 by theweatherelectric · · Score: 4, Informative

    I suspect Google will support h.265 in addition to their own codecs

    No. They use VP9 on YouTube and have been for two years. They dropped support for 4K video in H.264 on YouTube a while back. YouTube will start encoding video with AV1 around six months after the bitstream is finalized.

    H.265 is futureless for web video. Major streaming services are members of the Alliance for Open Media (Google, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon) because they want to use AV1 on their service. They recognize correctly that H.265's licensing mess makes it a poor option.