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Apple's Adoption Of HEVC Will Drive A Massive Increase In Encoding Costs Requiring Cloud Hardware Acceleration (streamingmedia.com)
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.
Because the company is run by fucking cunts.
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.
Exactly.
IMHO, this article is scaremongering, or at the very least, written by someone who hasn't thought (or costed) the whole chain through.
Actually, my question is: why does an OS have to make that choice for people? Is it not possible to provide more than one video codec on mobile devices? I could perhaps see the point of Google choosing NOT to support a format in which you need pay royalties, but why would Apple NOT choose to support a free format in addition?
Because when you are designing an SoC, and want to design-in a video codec subsystem, you generally only have the real-estate/budget to design-in ONE.
I'm sure they support more formats for DECODE, but ENCODE is where the rubber meets the road, and Apple really DOESN'T "need" to support more than one ENCODING format on their PHONE.
And a quick trip to Google allays my fears. Multiple formats are still supported for encode and decode; but the hardware preference is moving toward HEVC/H.265, which everything from the A8-forward for iOS/TVOS, and everything from 6th Gen. Intel-forward supports HEVC encode/decode in hardware.
Don't the compressions just need to run once per show? Not every time you stream. Yea, up to 500x more, but only once. Seems like there really isn't much of a problem.
Very good summation.
At some point, it must be easier to upgrade everyone to fibre and just stream the content natively.
Unlikely. What both you and the OP has forgotten about is that the increased cost of the servers needed to encode the video once is going to be offset by the reduced storage and bandwidth requirements. The video will be streamed thousands, if not millions, of times which not only requires huge amount of bandwidth but also means the file will be stored in multiple locations on multiple disks. This means that the savings in bandwidth and storage are magnified by the number of uses and will almost certainly offset the increase in cost of one encoding.
I remember in the 1990s when this new picture format called JPEG was being tested. I downloaded it and tried it out. It took a minute to decode a 640x480 picture in 24-bit color on my PC, compared to about 2 seconds for a GIF of the same resolution (albeit 8-bit). It took way too long on computers at the time, but the picture was beautiful and I knew computers would become fast enough that this was the future.
Same thing with encryption. Old encryption standards typically aren't retired because they've been cracked. They're retired because a brute force attack against them used to take centuries or millenia, but computers have become fast enough that a brute force attack now takes only days or hours.
MPEG2 with its horrible compression ratio became the standard for DVDs because at the time MPEG4 took too much processing power to be economically added to every DVD player. The same is going to be true for these newer video codecs. Initially they'll be computationally expensive, but within a few years they'll be tolerable. And after a decade it'll be trivial and we'll be looking towards replacing them with a new codec which takes advantage of more powerful modern hardware.