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Gah, Look, the digital video world exploded, 90% of it using MPEG's standards(MPEG1/2 to start with, h.264 now. HVEC/av1 is just a blip) they were all patent e

Gah, Look, the digital video world exploded, 90% of it using MPEG's standards(MPEG1/2 to start with, h.264 now. HVEC/av1 is just a blip) they were all patent encumbered FFMPEG runs 60% of the digital media world. _if_ patents were to be called in, places like disney, netflix & fox would have to spend literally billions swapping out FFMPEG or licensing it. Your phone/computer pays a h264 tax, in the same way that they pay ARM/intel, qualcomm, wifi alliance, HDMI alliance et al. HVEC gives you more efficient 4k, and HDR, but for most people that just isn't important. Streaming services still use h.264, because there is not hardware/software support upstream. Now, the thing that will decide it is the speed/quality/cost tradeoff. If the hardware doesn't support a codec, it won't be used. AV1 has a really slow encoder, so until that has changed it's not going to be used for on-the-fly encoding (live or just in time delivery from mezzanine codec) for industry noise, see https://www.ibc.org/delivery/codec-wars-the-battle-between-hevc-and-av1/2710.article https://www.ibc.org/delivery/codec-wars-the-battle-between-h...

foepys 8y ago
I don't know where you get your sources. Netflix switched to HVEC for 4K and YouTube is using VP9 whereever possible. Those are the biggest players on the market.
- snaky 8y ago
  On the US market. Which is not only market in existence, nor even biggest one. Take China for example - where neither Netflix nor YouTube are present. > Compared with the US, China still has plenty of room to grow in a country with a population of about 1.4 billion and 751 million internet users. The proportion of internet users who pay for video content has increased more than 10 times in four years, rising to 13.2 per cent in 2016, and is expected to further increase to 40 per cent in 2022, iResearch said. By comparison, Netflix’s US-based paying members represented around 28.1 per cent of total internet video users in the country as of the end of 2016. https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/2137870/chinas-consumers-are-paying-watch-movies-online-foreign-streaming-giants-are https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/2137870/chinas-consumers-a...
  - ksec 8y ago
    >On the US market It doesn't matter, when people or any English media speaks of the world, what they really meant was mostly English speaking World. Ignoring China most of the time. Not the first time I have seen something like World First, World biggest etc when it is not true.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - icebraining 8y ago
    So they have 13.2% of 751M ~= 99.1M (and that's all subscribers, of all services in China). Meanwhile, Netflix alone has 130M users worldwide. How are they not the biggest service?
    - snaky 8y ago
      You are comparing 2016 China numbers with 2018 Netflix numbers. Talking about paying users only, maybe Netflix is still on the top - not for long, of course. > According to research firm IHS Markit, video streaming in China will more than quadruple from $3.5 billion in 2015, to $17.6 billion in 2020. Membership payment will take up a bigger share of the pie, increasing over 500% to $2.6 billion, with the rest coming from advertising revenue. But talking about active users, iQiyi now have more than 500 million active users. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ywang/2018/03/07/the-billion-dollar-race-to-become-the-netflix-of-china/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/ywang/2018/03/07/the-billion-do...
      - icebraining 8y ago
        You are comparing 2016 China numbers with 2018 Netflix numbers Yes, but it's all Chinese services combined, not just their top 1st. Unless every of those Chinese subscribers pay for the same service, Netflix is still probably the 1st worldwide paying video service. But talking about active users, iQiyi now have more than 500 million active users. Which is small compared to YouTube's 1.8 billion. But fair enough, maybe YouTube and iQiyi are the biggest players; foepys was still at least half-right. It does seem that iQiyi is using HEVC for high-res content as well, so the point still stands :)
- KaiserPro 8y ago
  VP9/10 is a whole 'nother story..... 4k on netflix is still only a small amount, as the people that have either a 4k TV, the bandwidth and device to play it on are still quite rare.
BurningCycles 8y ago
Yeah, I cringed when reading this. The whole 'good guys' routine with Cisco, Google, Mozilla stepping up to fight the evil 'malcorp' for justice was pretty embarrassing. I'm all for a 'de facto' standardisation around a royalty free codec, which is what we get with AV1, but lets not pretend that these companies are doing this for any altruistic reasons. Everything is moving to streaming, and video usage will only keep growing, so for these huge companies, having what is increasingly a core part of their business in the financial hands of third parties is an extremely unattractive position. Google was already dead set on leaving this dependency, and now when they started work on their third generation codec (VP10) many other companies started to get the message, prompted in a large part no doubt by the HEVC patent fiasco, which now has resulted in AV1. >AV1 has a really slow encoder, so until that has changed Well, optimization has likely only recently started in earnest, given that the bitstream was frozen this summer. Personally I'm more interested in the RAV1e AV1 encoder in the works from Xiph than I am in the 'official' one.
- lewiscollard 8y ago
  > The whole 'good guys' routine with Cisco, Google, Mozilla stepping up to fight the evil 'malcorp' for justice was pretty embarrassing. Yep. If anyone wants to know what Google and Mozilla would do in the face of corporations closing off the Internet, you can look at what they _actually did_ with Encrypted Media Extensions.
  - shawnz 8y ago
    EME was made to discourage the creation of proprietary systems for adding DRM, not to appease corporations.
    - beaconstudios 8y ago
      so DRM is OK as long as it's enclosed within a standardised protocol?
      - detaro 8y ago
ferongr 8y ago
fwiw I've been starting to get HEVC streams from time to time on Windows desktop Chrome when watching Youtube.
- BurningCycles 8y ago
  Are you sure it's HEVC, because that would be news indeed. I've never heard of Youtube serving anything but h264 or VP8/VP9.
  - ferongr 8y ago
    Yes, I saw the CPU usage icon in the taskbar fill more than usual and instantly enabled the "Stats for Nerds" overlay and the codec was shown there.

foepys 8y ago

I don't know where you get your sources. Netflix switched to HVEC for 4K and YouTube is using VP9 whereever possible. Those are the biggest players on the market.

snaky 8y ago
On the US market. Which is not only market in existence, nor even biggest one. Take China for example - where neither Netflix nor YouTube are present. > Compared with the US, China still has plenty of room to grow in a country with a population of about 1.4 billion and 751 million internet users. The proportion of internet users who pay for video content has increased more than 10 times in four years, rising to 13.2 per cent in 2016, and is expected to further increase to 40 per cent in 2022, iResearch said. By comparison, Netflix’s US-based paying members represented around 28.1 per cent of total internet video users in the country as of the end of 2016. https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/2137870/chinas-consumers-are-paying-watch-movies-online-foreign-streaming-giants-are https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/2137870/chinas-consumers-a...
- ksec 8y ago
  >On the US market It doesn't matter, when people or any English media speaks of the world, what they really meant was mostly English speaking World. Ignoring China most of the time. Not the first time I have seen something like World First, World biggest etc when it is not true.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- icebraining 8y ago
  So they have 13.2% of 751M ~= 99.1M (and that's all subscribers, of all services in China). Meanwhile, Netflix alone has 130M users worldwide. How are they not the biggest service?
  - snaky 8y ago
    You are comparing 2016 China numbers with 2018 Netflix numbers. Talking about paying users only, maybe Netflix is still on the top - not for long, of course. > According to research firm IHS Markit, video streaming in China will more than quadruple from $3.5 billion in 2015, to $17.6 billion in 2020. Membership payment will take up a bigger share of the pie, increasing over 500% to $2.6 billion, with the rest coming from advertising revenue. But talking about active users, iQiyi now have more than 500 million active users. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ywang/2018/03/07/the-billion-dollar-race-to-become-the-netflix-of-china/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/ywang/2018/03/07/the-billion-do...
    - icebraining 8y ago
      You are comparing 2016 China numbers with 2018 Netflix numbers Yes, but it's all Chinese services combined, not just their top 1st. Unless every of those Chinese subscribers pay for the same service, Netflix is still probably the 1st worldwide paying video service. But talking about active users, iQiyi now have more than 500 million active users. Which is small compared to YouTube's 1.8 billion. But fair enough, maybe YouTube and iQiyi are the biggest players; foepys was still at least half-right. It does seem that iQiyi is using HEVC for high-res content as well, so the point still stands :)
KaiserPro 8y ago
VP9/10 is a whole 'nother story..... 4k on netflix is still only a small amount, as the people that have either a 4k TV, the bandwidth and device to play it on are still quite rare.

BurningCycles 8y ago

Yeah, I cringed when reading this. The whole 'good guys' routine with Cisco, Google, Mozilla stepping up to fight the evil 'malcorp' for justice was pretty embarrassing. I'm all for a 'de facto' standardisation around a royalty free codec, which is what we get with AV1, but lets not pretend that these companies are doing this for any altruistic reasons. Everything is moving to streaming, and video usage will only keep growing, so for these huge companies, having what is increasingly a core part of their business in the financial hands of third parties is an extremely unattractive position. Google was already dead set on leaving this dependency, and now when they started work on their third generation codec (VP10) many other companies started to get the message, prompted in a large part no doubt by the HEVC patent fiasco, which now has resulted in AV1. >AV1 has a really slow encoder, so until that has changed Well, optimization has likely only recently started in earnest, given that the bitstream was frozen this summer. Personally I'm more interested in the RAV1e AV1 encoder in the works from Xiph than I am in the 'official' one.

lewiscollard 8y ago
> The whole 'good guys' routine with Cisco, Google, Mozilla stepping up to fight the evil 'malcorp' for justice was pretty embarrassing. Yep. If anyone wants to know what Google and Mozilla would do in the face of corporations closing off the Internet, you can look at what they _actually did_ with Encrypted Media Extensions.
- shawnz 8y ago
  EME was made to discourage the creation of proprietary systems for adding DRM, not to appease corporations.
  - beaconstudios 8y ago
    so DRM is OK as long as it's enclosed within a standardised protocol?
    - detaro 8y ago

ferongr 8y ago

fwiw I've been starting to get HEVC streams from time to time on Windows desktop Chrome when watching Youtube.

BurningCycles 8y ago
Are you sure it's HEVC, because that would be news indeed. I've never heard of Youtube serving anything but h264 or VP8/VP9.
- ferongr 8y ago
  Yes, I saw the CPU usage icon in the taskbar fill more than usual and instantly enabled the "Stats for Nerds" overlay and the codec was shown there.