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.

Comments

Server side optimization.

[0100010001010011]

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.

Re:Server side optimization.

[mysidia]

Not to mention VP9 and AV1 are royalty-free, so you can imagine hardware encoders being built into future devices and server GPU/CPUs for both of these.

Re:Server side optimization.

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:Server side optimization.

[TheFakeTimCook]

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.

Apple

[DontBeAMoran]

Apple means paying customers, so they have a huge weight on CODEC decision for the market.

But there is one company much bigger than Apple when talking about video and that is of course Netflix. Whatever Netflix decides, companies will have to follow.

Re:Apple

[93 Escort Wagon]

But there is one company much bigger than Apple when talking about video and that is of course Netflix. Whatever Netflix decides, companies will have to follow.

I suspect that decision has already been made... indications are Netflix is going with h.265.

Re:Apple

[DontBeAMoran]

If both Netflix and Apple are going with H.265 then we don't have a choice.

The fate of the alternatives is already decided and will join other relics like HD-DVD, miniDisc, etc.

Re:Apple

[theweatherelectric]

Yet the hardware decoding adoption for consumers for VP9 stands precisely at 0%

Intel has been shipping VP9 hardware decoding for years. By default Microsoft Edge enables VP9 when hardware decoding is present (though you can override that to enable VP9 in software). VP9 is a standard video format on Android and many Android phones have VP9 hardware decoding.

Gonna need a source check on that.

[Jahoda]

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.

Re:Gonna need a source check on that.

[Jahoda]

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

Re:Gonna need a source check on that.

[Anubis IV]

As a tendency hardware H.264 encoding is inferior in terms of quality and bitrate compared to software encoding

While you're technically correct, that's a rather poor way of phrasing the actual situation: that the algorithms implemented in hardware are generally worse than the ones implemented in software. The way you've phrased things, it makes it sound like there's something inherently wrong with hardware that makes it produce worse results, but that isn't the case in the slightest. Rather, the problem is that hardware implementations will nearly always lag behind software implementations by anywhere from a few months to a few years, and that's why the "tendency" you're talking about holds true.

But for any given algorithm, it's worth pointing out that you'll get the same results regardless of where it's implemented, though you'll be able to do so far more efficiently in hardware.

Re:Why mess with h.265

[jonsmirl]

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

Re:Why mess with h.265

[plague911]

Because the company is run by fucking cunts.

DEMAND better quality!

[ichthus]

..and with better quality video being demanded by consumers...

Yeah, remember that meeting we all had last Spring? We all got together with our pitchforks and torches, rammed down the door to the codec people's house, and said, "Enough with H.264, already! Give us something better, dammit." That was a helluva time.

Re:Why mess with h.265

[Kjella]

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?

People have bad experience on the iPhone because of poor battery life because of a poorly supported codec so people buy less iPhones. So Apple says only these codecs, providers comply because they have to, users get a good experience, everybody happy? Not sure if it passes a reality check, but I'm pretty sure that's the line of reasoning.

Re:Why mess with h.265

[TigerTime]

How much do you pay in patent fees?

Re:Why mess with h.265

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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

Re:Why mess with h.265

[TheFakeTimCook]

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.

The 00's are calling and want your servers back.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Encoding costs

[knightghost]

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.

Cost times Number of Uses

[Roger W Moore]

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.

Not really a good way to gauge future costs

[Solandri]

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.

I just want it to work.

[pubwvj]

This Balkanization of codecs is a mess. Consumers, and developers, just want it to work. Let's see... I've got enough old DVDs and VHSs to watch for a decade... Maybe time to sit out this fight.

Re:Why mess with h.265

[theweatherelectric]

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.

So

[BitztreamNotARealNam]

How's life in the hypocrite lane?

Re: Encoding costs

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile, in their latest bold move, Apple has abandoned multiple frames per second in favor of 1 frame per second for all content.

When asked about this disruptive move, an apple representatives stated that: "Eliminating frames in favor of the best one provides a substantial benefit for all of those involved, there is less bandwidth involved for the streaming companies, and our customers get the predetermined best movie at the best resolution with more time to enjoy each frame."