7 ms·

Interesting but not very useful given that the patent situation at the moment makes HEVC unusable for many users. For those who are unaware, there are currentl

by Veratyr 11y ago

Interesting but not very useful given that the patent situation at the moment makes HEVC unusable for many users. For those who are unaware, there are currently two HEVC license pools (HEVC Advance and MPEG LA). HEVC Advance is particularly problematic as it contains necessary patents that MPEG LA lacks and it charges a fee for _distribution_ of HEVC content, not just encoders/decoders like MPEG LA did in the past. Many potential HEVC users are quite put off by that and it's a main motivator for the Alliance for Open Media.

amluto 11y ago
Can anyone explain how any possible patent could cover distribution?
- sitharus 11y ago
  The patent doesn't, but the license does. Patent licenses can contain pretty much any legal conditions the licensor likes, much like software licenses. In this case the condition of the HVEC license is that you pay them a fee for every copy you serve.
  - clouddrover 11y ago
    Depending on what we mean by "distribution", patents could soon cover distribution with a new license to go with them. The MPEG LA is attempting to form a patent pool for MPEG-DASH: http://www.mpegla.com/main/pid/MPEG-DASH/default.aspx http://www.mpegla.com/main/pid/MPEG-DASH/default.aspx
- TD-Linux 11y ago
  Well, one could argue that just sending bits cannot be in violation of any patents, though I'm not aware of any cases where this has been tested in court. If you have any encoding / decoding anywhere in your company though, then you need a patent license and the licensor can pretty much ask for any terms, including those that include content fees. Note that content / distribution fees have been pretty much a norm in the video and audio codec space. MPEG-2 had per-DVD costs, for example. H.264 was the odd one out with MPEG-LA's "free internet video" exception. While it's officially denied, many suspect that exception was added due to competition with WebM VP8, which was released about the same time.
clouddrover 11y ago
I think it's useful just to see where VP9 is relative to the HEVC implementations. To me the report says VP9 is close enough to the leading HEVC codecs to make HEVC not worth bothering with, particularly because VP9 doesn't have the licensing issues HEVC does. And Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and (soon) Edge support VP9 whereas no browser I'm aware of supports HEVC at this time.
- TD-Linux 11y ago
  VP9 software decoder implementations are also far ahead. Both ffvp9 and libvpx are faster than current hevc implementations with one core, and ffvp9 also scales well to multiple cores. https://blogs.gnome.org/rbultje/2015/09/28/vp9-encodingdecoding-performance-vs-hevch-264/ https://blogs.gnome.org/rbultje/2015/09/28/vp9-encodingdecod...
ZeroGravitas 11y ago
Minor nitpick: MPEG-LA did charge for distribution of H.264 content, though only certain classes, e.g. pay-per-view content above 10 minutes length was one of them I think, as was broadcast TV. They did reserve the right to start charging for any online distribution, right up until VP8 was released, whereupon they announced that they definitely would never charge for distribution over the internet.

by Veratyr 11y ago

amluto 11y ago

Can anyone explain how any possible patent could cover distribution?

sitharus 11y ago
The patent doesn't, but the license does. Patent licenses can contain pretty much any legal conditions the licensor likes, much like software licenses. In this case the condition of the HVEC license is that you pay them a fee for every copy you serve.
- clouddrover 11y ago
  Depending on what we mean by "distribution", patents could soon cover distribution with a new license to go with them. The MPEG LA is attempting to form a patent pool for MPEG-DASH: http://www.mpegla.com/main/pid/MPEG-DASH/default.aspx http://www.mpegla.com/main/pid/MPEG-DASH/default.aspx
TD-Linux 11y ago
Well, one could argue that just sending bits cannot be in violation of any patents, though I'm not aware of any cases where this has been tested in court. If you have any encoding / decoding anywhere in your company though, then you need a patent license and the licensor can pretty much ask for any terms, including those that include content fees. Note that content / distribution fees have been pretty much a norm in the video and audio codec space. MPEG-2 had per-DVD costs, for example. H.264 was the odd one out with MPEG-LA's "free internet video" exception. While it's officially denied, many suspect that exception was added due to competition with WebM VP8, which was released about the same time.

clouddrover 11y ago

I think it's useful just to see where VP9 is relative to the HEVC implementations. To me the report says VP9 is close enough to the leading HEVC codecs to make HEVC not worth bothering with, particularly because VP9 doesn't have the licensing issues HEVC does. And Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and (soon) Edge support VP9 whereas no browser I'm aware of supports HEVC at this time.

TD-Linux 11y ago
VP9 software decoder implementations are also far ahead. Both ffvp9 and libvpx are faster than current hevc implementations with one core, and ffvp9 also scales well to multiple cores. https://blogs.gnome.org/rbultje/2015/09/28/vp9-encodingdecoding-performance-vs-hevch-264/ https://blogs.gnome.org/rbultje/2015/09/28/vp9-encodingdecod...

ZeroGravitas 11y ago

Minor nitpick: MPEG-LA did charge for distribution of H.264 content, though only certain classes, e.g. pay-per-view content above 10 minutes length was one of them I think, as was broadcast TV. They did reserve the right to start charging for any online distribution, right up until VP8 was released, whereupon they announced that they definitely would never charge for distribution over the internet.