5 ms·

Right. AV1 is technically poor but the licensing is so egregious elsewhere that we should really be rooting on VP9/AV1 over the alternatives.

CharlesW 7y ago
AV1/VP9 will not be anywhere near royalty-free when all is said and done. https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=130840 https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?Art...
- quink 7y ago
  HEVC Advance lists 681 US patents in their patent list. It is completely unlikely that AV1 infringes on none of them or any other patents. However, there's a big giant gap between a valid patent and actually expecting to get royalties without even revealing which patents are supposedly being infringed on even now that AV1 is standardised and in production usage. So do I think that AV1 is patent-free when all is said and done from a legal standpoint? No. Do I think it'll be royalty-free anyway? Yes. Also: > 1.3. Defensive Termination. If any Licensee, its Affiliates, or its agents initiates patent litigation or files, maintains, or voluntarily participates in a lawsuit against another entity or any person asserting that any Implementation infringes Necessary Claims, any patent licenses granted under this License directly to the Licensee are immediately terminated as of the date of the initiation of action unless 1) that suit was in response to a corresponding suit regarding an Implementation first brought against an initiating entity, or 2) that suit was brought to enforce the terms of this License (including intervention in a third-party action by a Licensee). vs. * JVC Kenwood Corporation * Koninklijke Philips N.V. * Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation * Orange S.A. * Toshiba IPR Solutions, Inc. If they are intending to initiate any patent litigation (which is going to be a very long time yet not least of all because they won't even reveal which patents) I think they're going to be at a losing end very very quickly having waited this long for VP9/AV1 to establish themselves.
  - sjwright 7y ago
    It occurs to me that the easiest way to flush out the risk is for AV1 to launch a defamation case against any patent licensing pool which claims to hold a relevant patent. If it’s a lie, that is straight up defamation. (Or a similar tort/breach. In Australia it would constitute a case of misleading or deceptive conduct under the ACL.)
    - microcolonel 7y ago
      This particular form of suit may be difficult in the U.S, owing to a somewhat different set of tradeoffs. It might be simple commercial fraud, if you could prove that they had misrepresented their certainty that their pool contained patents which they reasonably believed to be essential to implementing an AV1/VP9 encoder/decoder; though I think it may be very very hard to prove something like that.
      - sjwright 7y ago
        It's not about winning the case, it's about forcing the other side to show their hand.
    - quink 7y ago
      And if it's not a lie, and they're going to find some judge in East Texas who'll see infer some infringement among one some detail in one of the bazillion patents in the pool, you're screwed. Patent cases of this sort seem to broadly favour the litigant so why stir the hornet's nest.
      - sjwright 7y ago
        It wouldn’t be a patent case, it would be a tort. Either you win and the problem goes away, or you lose and you know which patent you need to rewrite around. For the cost of some legal fees, a loss seems like a great value.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  > Unified Patents is a membership organization that has aggressively contested patent abuse and recently challenged the validity of 29% of the HEVC-related patents in the Velos Media HEVC pool. Commenting on the Sisvel announcement, Unified Patents CEO Kevin Jakel said, "We continue to be concerned with the lack of transparency in these licensing programs. Sisvel publishes its pricing for VP9 and AV1, but not how it came about with this price. They also have not provided a public list or even number of patents which they consider essential. It makes it very hard for anyone to ascertain how relevant the patents are and how to value them. This creates uncertainty for companies deploying technology which we think is negative for everyone." To my eyes, there's a pretty decent chance that the Sisvel pool is an HEVC industry ploy to propagate FUD around AV1 and VP9 (suspiciously both, the latter seeming to have been the subject of no lawsuits, despite being deployed widely for about six years), to stop the bleeding w.r.t. HEVC licensing (which is still an absolute steaming dump in the lap of your legal department). I'll believe it when I see the receipts, and even then, it'd probably be less of a minefield than HEVC. And to be fair Sisvel has not, in other industries, seemed to be a particularly insidious actor; but given the number of big fish who are obviously using VP9 encoders to do tens of billions of dollars of business without licensing anything from Sisvel, I can't see it as anything other than bluster.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
vbezhenar 7y ago
What's wrong with paying license fees? Those standards are real intellectual advancements after all.
- nine_k 7y ago
  How do you produce a legal open-source implementation?
  - vbezhenar 7y ago
    There are plenty of legal open source H.264, MP3, etc implementations. AFAIK source code license and patents are orthogonal concepts. You can use any source code, proprietary, open source or written by yourself, but you should have permission from patent owners, because you're likely using their patented algorithms.
    - nine_k 7y ago
      So, to produce a legal open-source (as in "free to reuse and fork") implementation, the implementor would need to obtain a permission from the patent holders, and make sure it covers all the possible derived work? Is this known to have ever been achieved?
      - vbezhenar 7y ago
        It's not about writing code, it's about using algorithms. If you're using MP3 algorithms to make money selling phones, you have to pay a fee. If you're using MP3 algorithms to make money selling your WinAMP player, you have to pay a fee. Whether you found implementation on github or read patents and implemented it yourself, does not matter. I don't think that you have to obtain a permission just to write implementation out of curiosity, but I may be wrong. And I have no idea about status of open source projects which include patented algorithms, but distributed free of charge. Probably they can't do that, because Linux distributions did not distribute mp3 codecs by default. Also all of this is applicable to countries where those patents are working, of course.
- 7y ago
yepguy 7y ago
I don't think it's exactly fair to call AV1 "technically poor". Even if HEVC is better (and I don't know enough to say if it is or not), that would be a bit like calling gzip technically poor because zstd exists.
- ZeroGravitas 7y ago
  The latest consensus seems to be that VP9 is roughly on par with HEVC, mostly being held back by the libvpx encoder's poor rate control. It's no surprise then that AV1 (which is basically VP10) uses more resources, but compresses more, and that Netflix and Intel are keen to replace the libvpx derived encoder with their own implementation of the standard.
- WAHa_06x36 7y ago
  gzip absolutely without doubt is technically poor in this day and age. It's an algorithm from 1993. That's 26 years of research into data compression it is missing out on.
motbob 7y ago
I would be careful about rooting for a codec that has strengths/weaknesses that are suspiciously tailored to extremely large media-serving companies. By which I mean, Netflix/Google don't care so much about encode time since their scale is so big, and they certainly don't care as much about decode time as users with their precious battery life do. Just because something is open does not mean it is meant to serve consumers' interests.
- clouddrover 7y ago
  > Netflix/Google don't care so much about encode time And yet Netflix is working on SVT-AV1 with Intel, which is one of the fastest AV1 encoders available: https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/introducing-svt-av1-a-scalable-open-source-av1-framework-c726cce3103a https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/introducing-svt-av1-a-sc... https://www.reddit.com/r/AV1/comments/bxn2uw/svtav1_encoding_1080p_at_74_fps/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AV1/comments/bxn2uw/svtav1_encoding... https://github.com/OpenVisualCloud/SVT-AV1 https://github.com/OpenVisualCloud/SVT-AV1 How does that fit with your narrative?
  - ZeroGravitas 7y ago
    Or Twitch and Google Stadia which live encode with VP9 now and will move to AV1 over the next few years
  - motbob 7y ago
    Netflix encodes and serves a lot of video. So obviously both encode time and low filesizes are important to them. That doesn't change my point that their priorities may be skewed towards lowering filesize moreso than other entities, since they serve more videos per encode.
- rossy 7y ago
  > and they certainly don't care as much about decode time as users with their precious battery life do. Of course they do. Google wouldn't sell many Pixels if you could only watch half as much YouTube or Netflix on a single charge compared to, say, an iPhone. Netflix wouldn't sell many subscriptions if you could only watch half as much on a single charge as Hulu or Prime Video either. Your point about encoding is valid, but Google and Netflix are definitely incentivised towards low decoding complexity on the client.
mda 7y ago
It is technically better and license wise infinitely better.

CharlesW 7y ago

AV1/VP9 will not be anywhere near royalty-free when all is said and done. https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=130840 https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?Art...

quink 7y ago
HEVC Advance lists 681 US patents in their patent list. It is completely unlikely that AV1 infringes on none of them or any other patents. However, there's a big giant gap between a valid patent and actually expecting to get royalties without even revealing which patents are supposedly being infringed on even now that AV1 is standardised and in production usage. So do I think that AV1 is patent-free when all is said and done from a legal standpoint? No. Do I think it'll be royalty-free anyway? Yes. Also: > 1.3. Defensive Termination. If any Licensee, its Affiliates, or its agents initiates patent litigation or files, maintains, or voluntarily participates in a lawsuit against another entity or any person asserting that any Implementation infringes Necessary Claims, any patent licenses granted under this License directly to the Licensee are immediately terminated as of the date of the initiation of action unless 1) that suit was in response to a corresponding suit regarding an Implementation first brought against an initiating entity, or 2) that suit was brought to enforce the terms of this License (including intervention in a third-party action by a Licensee). vs. * JVC Kenwood Corporation * Koninklijke Philips N.V. * Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation * Orange S.A. * Toshiba IPR Solutions, Inc. If they are intending to initiate any patent litigation (which is going to be a very long time yet not least of all because they won't even reveal which patents) I think they're going to be at a losing end very very quickly having waited this long for VP9/AV1 to establish themselves.
- sjwright 7y ago
  It occurs to me that the easiest way to flush out the risk is for AV1 to launch a defamation case against any patent licensing pool which claims to hold a relevant patent. If it’s a lie, that is straight up defamation. (Or a similar tort/breach. In Australia it would constitute a case of misleading or deceptive conduct under the ACL.)
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    This particular form of suit may be difficult in the U.S, owing to a somewhat different set of tradeoffs. It might be simple commercial fraud, if you could prove that they had misrepresented their certainty that their pool contained patents which they reasonably believed to be essential to implementing an AV1/VP9 encoder/decoder; though I think it may be very very hard to prove something like that.
    - sjwright 7y ago
      It's not about winning the case, it's about forcing the other side to show their hand.
  - quink 7y ago
    And if it's not a lie, and they're going to find some judge in East Texas who'll see infer some infringement among one some detail in one of the bazillion patents in the pool, you're screwed. Patent cases of this sort seem to broadly favour the litigant so why stir the hornet's nest.
    - sjwright 7y ago
      It wouldn’t be a patent case, it would be a tort. Either you win and the problem goes away, or you lose and you know which patent you need to rewrite around. For the cost of some legal fees, a loss seems like a great value.
microcolonel 7y ago
> Unified Patents is a membership organization that has aggressively contested patent abuse and recently challenged the validity of 29% of the HEVC-related patents in the Velos Media HEVC pool. Commenting on the Sisvel announcement, Unified Patents CEO Kevin Jakel said, "We continue to be concerned with the lack of transparency in these licensing programs. Sisvel publishes its pricing for VP9 and AV1, but not how it came about with this price. They also have not provided a public list or even number of patents which they consider essential. It makes it very hard for anyone to ascertain how relevant the patents are and how to value them. This creates uncertainty for companies deploying technology which we think is negative for everyone." To my eyes, there's a pretty decent chance that the Sisvel pool is an HEVC industry ploy to propagate FUD around AV1 and VP9 (suspiciously both, the latter seeming to have been the subject of no lawsuits, despite being deployed widely for about six years), to stop the bleeding w.r.t. HEVC licensing (which is still an absolute steaming dump in the lap of your legal department). I'll believe it when I see the receipts, and even then, it'd probably be less of a minefield than HEVC. And to be fair Sisvel has not, in other industries, seemed to be a particularly insidious actor; but given the number of big fish who are obviously using VP9 encoders to do tens of billions of dollars of business without licensing anything from Sisvel, I can't see it as anything other than bluster.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

vbezhenar 7y ago

What's wrong with paying license fees? Those standards are real intellectual advancements after all.

nine_k 7y ago
How do you produce a legal open-source implementation?
- vbezhenar 7y ago
  There are plenty of legal open source H.264, MP3, etc implementations. AFAIK source code license and patents are orthogonal concepts. You can use any source code, proprietary, open source or written by yourself, but you should have permission from patent owners, because you're likely using their patented algorithms.
  - nine_k 7y ago
    So, to produce a legal open-source (as in "free to reuse and fork") implementation, the implementor would need to obtain a permission from the patent holders, and make sure it covers all the possible derived work? Is this known to have ever been achieved?
    - vbezhenar 7y ago
      It's not about writing code, it's about using algorithms. If you're using MP3 algorithms to make money selling phones, you have to pay a fee. If you're using MP3 algorithms to make money selling your WinAMP player, you have to pay a fee. Whether you found implementation on github or read patents and implemented it yourself, does not matter. I don't think that you have to obtain a permission just to write implementation out of curiosity, but I may be wrong. And I have no idea about status of open source projects which include patented algorithms, but distributed free of charge. Probably they can't do that, because Linux distributions did not distribute mp3 codecs by default. Also all of this is applicable to countries where those patents are working, of course.
7y ago

yepguy 7y ago

I don't think it's exactly fair to call AV1 "technically poor". Even if HEVC is better (and I don't know enough to say if it is or not), that would be a bit like calling gzip technically poor because zstd exists.

ZeroGravitas 7y ago
The latest consensus seems to be that VP9 is roughly on par with HEVC, mostly being held back by the libvpx encoder's poor rate control. It's no surprise then that AV1 (which is basically VP10) uses more resources, but compresses more, and that Netflix and Intel are keen to replace the libvpx derived encoder with their own implementation of the standard.
WAHa_06x36 7y ago
gzip absolutely without doubt is technically poor in this day and age. It's an algorithm from 1993. That's 26 years of research into data compression it is missing out on.

motbob 7y ago

I would be careful about rooting for a codec that has strengths/weaknesses that are suspiciously tailored to extremely large media-serving companies. By which I mean, Netflix/Google don't care so much about encode time since their scale is so big, and they certainly don't care as much about decode time as users with their precious battery life do. Just because something is open does not mean it is meant to serve consumers' interests.

clouddrover 7y ago
> Netflix/Google don't care so much about encode time And yet Netflix is working on SVT-AV1 with Intel, which is one of the fastest AV1 encoders available: https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/introducing-svt-av1-a-scalable-open-source-av1-framework-c726cce3103a https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/introducing-svt-av1-a-sc... https://www.reddit.com/r/AV1/comments/bxn2uw/svtav1_encoding_1080p_at_74_fps/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AV1/comments/bxn2uw/svtav1_encoding... https://github.com/OpenVisualCloud/SVT-AV1 https://github.com/OpenVisualCloud/SVT-AV1 How does that fit with your narrative?
- ZeroGravitas 7y ago
  Or Twitch and Google Stadia which live encode with VP9 now and will move to AV1 over the next few years
- motbob 7y ago
  Netflix encodes and serves a lot of video. So obviously both encode time and low filesizes are important to them. That doesn't change my point that their priorities may be skewed towards lowering filesize moreso than other entities, since they serve more videos per encode.
rossy 7y ago
> and they certainly don't care as much about decode time as users with their precious battery life do. Of course they do. Google wouldn't sell many Pixels if you could only watch half as much YouTube or Netflix on a single charge compared to, say, an iPhone. Netflix wouldn't sell many subscriptions if you could only watch half as much on a single charge as Hulu or Prime Video either. Your point about encoding is valid, but Google and Netflix are definitely incentivised towards low decoding complexity on the client.

mda 7y ago

It is technically better and license wise infinitely better.