4 ms·
Closing the Chapter on OpenH264
- robert_foss 2y agoIt really is too bad AV1 hasn't had a successor yet. x264 and x265 are patent ridden scourges and should be avoided wherever possible.
- ddtaylor 2y agoI encode a lot of my media as h264 because it makes it easy for my kids to stream it from Jellyfin without transcoding.
- mvanbaak 2y agounless the content is 4k. Then you want h265 ;P
- godzillabrennus 2y agoWhy?
- mvanbaak 2y ago2160p content in h264 will be too big to normally manage. h265 is way better at it. file sizes stay within normal limits.
- Dylan16807 2y agoCan you be more specific? I can't really tell what you mean by "normal" here. And while I do like smaller files, if I compare with a few years ago my connection is faster and my drives are bigger so presumably the limit for "normal" has gone up...
- daneel_w 2y agoH.264 does just fine with 4K. If you know what you're doing you really don't need to throw 10 Mbit/s at it to get crisp quality. (p.s. I'm fully onboard with H.265 being fantastic, it's amazing to see what e.g. x265 can do for it, being able to provide practically identical output at 30-50% lower bitrate. I'm just saying that H.264 isn't in any way incapable.)
- Sunspark 2y agoThe trick is knowing what the optimum settings are to use.. with h.265 as you lower the bitrate it smooths more and more and you lose detail. h.264 does blocking instead, so there is an image quality difference.
- daneel_w 2y agoAt the lower end of useful bitrate there's absolutely a difference. Video encoding is complex territory and there's no way around knowing and understanding "optimum settings" when wanting to keep bitrate down, no matter MPEG-4 ASP, H.264, H.265, AV1, what-have-you.
- Dylan16807 2y agoMy experience is that CRF by itself works well down to very low bitrates.
- daneel_w 2y agoCompared to other modes of operation, CRF doesn't work better or worse at any arbitrary bitrate. In itself it doesn't do anything fundamentally different about how changes between frames are analyzed or how the changes are encoded. It's a "constant quality" mode of operation, and it will use as much data as it deems necessary in order to meet the quality target. That is, CRF produces a varying bitrate product and you have no actual control over the final bitrate requirement.
- 2y ago
- i80and 2y agoDoes AV1 need a successor right now? At least as of some years ago SVT-AV1 was stronger than x265 on both software encoding speed and quality/bitrate[1], and a successor would reset the timer on getting hardware decoders rolled out. [1] https://medium.com/@ewoutterhoeven/av1-is-ready-for-prime-time-svt-av1-beats-x265-and-libvpx-in-quality-bitrate-and-speed-31c1960703db https://medium.com/@ewoutterhoeven/av1-is-ready-for-prime-ti...
- sp1rit 2y agoIt looks like VVC (H.266) will be significantly better compared to HVEC and AV1. But due to the patent issues it'll bound to have, I suspect common usage will practically be nonexistent, just like HVEC.
- adzm 2y agoReally? Last I checked it seemed to be similar to AV1
- Dylan16807 2y agoI'd love to see a well-done comparison between quality and encoding time that isn't this increasingly old graph: https://people.videolan.org/~unlord/SVT-AV1_BD-rate.png https://people.videolan.org/~unlord/SVT-AV1_BD-rate.png I've seen some strong claims for VVC but not with a lot of detail on encoding settings.
- ksec 2y ago> I suspect common usage will practically be nonexistent, just like HVEC HEVC is used in all TV broadcast station. FaceTime and other Cameras, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and many other large streaming services outside US. The only one that doesn't have any usage of HEVC is Youtube.
- whizzter 2y agoSeems like the last h264 patents expires in about 5 months, silly to start moving around to options that might have submarine patents when we'll have something functional that's patent free in quite a short time.
- ZeroGravitas 2y agoThey've been working on it for years but I'm not sure there's any great need for it right now. The various MPEG alternatives seem to be eating themselves with patent infighting and fragmentation.
- daneel_w 2y agoThe problem with the patents are largely misunderstood. Most importantly the patents do not directly apply to the individual consumer downloading and decoding such audio/video content. The patents only apply to commercial settings - the sales of software that can encode or decode audio and video in the MPEG formats, and sales of audio and video content encoded in those formats. This is why Mozilla made a big fuss over not wanting to include H.264 decoding in Firefox years ago, because they feared they'd have to spend a bit of their money since they are after all a commercial endeavour. No, really, it was never about wanting to "protect" users, it was always about their earnings. You can happily encode AAC audio and H.264 video and share it free of charge with everyone, and they can always listen to and watch that content, without any worries. And pardon the nitpick but it's H.264 and H.265, not x264 and x265.
- unethical_ban 2y agoedit: Got confused by Wikipedia. It says AV1 is open source and royalty free, and all modern hardware seems to have hardware decode for it. It doesn't seem any of the big players are realistically worried about bogus patent claims.
- ksec 2y agoAV2 from what I heard is aiming to be released this year.
- hcfman 2y agoIt is possible to do something like webrtc without using one of h264 or h265 and have it work on all browser versions ? Normally, apple quicktime containers with h264 payloads are playable everywhere. If you drop h264 or h265 there is no such play anywhere container available anymore right ?
- daneel_w 2y agoCorrect. The most supported container and codec families are those coming out of the MPEG - .mp3, .m4a, .mp4, H.264, H.265 etc. - because they are the products of a giant standards effort. A lot of modern TVs and set-top boxes will accept content in e.g. the Matroska container, and VP/AV video content, but unfortunately support still isn't at the level of the MPEGs.
- cbhl 2y agoVP8 should be required by the base WebRTC spec, but some devices only have hardware acceleration for H.264 so you should test the actual performance before changing codecs. Also consider using VP9 / AV1 if you know all the devices in a call support it and are fast enough to encode/decode it. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Guides/Formats/WebRTC_codecs#supported_video_codecs https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Guides/Fo...
- ZeroGravitas 2y ago> Which codecs can be within those tracks is not mandated by the WebRTC specification. However, RFC 7742 specifies that all WebRTC-compatible browsers must support VP8 and H.264's Constrained Baseline profile for video, and RFC 7874 specifies that browsers must support at least the Opus codec as well as G.711's PCMA and PCMU formats. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Guides/Formats/WebRTC_codecs https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Guides/Fo...
- ksec 2y agoSo apart from US, H.264 High Profile will be patent free by this August!
- userbinator 2y agoThe binary would be downloaded on the end user’s machine, inside a sandbox and then the “recipe” would be executed to create a working extension. This avoids various “redistribution” restrictions entirely since we aren’t shipping the binary itself. That makes me wonder, why not just download the source code and compile it. You're definitely not distributing any binaries that way.
- prosody 2y agoAs I understand it, Cisco licenses the relevant patents and sublicenses them gratis to every user who uses Cisco’s binaries obtained from Cisco directly and not redistributed (thus also the difficulties in the article with working with Cisco’s unmaintained web server). The sublicense doesn’t apply to binaries built independently from source. I suppose this was imposed by the patent holders.
- boricj 2y agoCan that library be rebuilt in a reproducible manner? If so, what's the difference between the library hosted by Cisco and a locally built one that is identical bit-for-bit? Is there any mechanism to ensure that the library was genuinely downloaded from Cisco rather than procured through alternative channels? If the Cisco server is turned off tomorrow, how can one tell if a copy of the library wasn't downloaded from the Cisco server while it was available? I'm most likely missing a lot of crucial context, but it appears to me that this peculiar licensing scheme was a compromise made between lawyers that makes little practical sense on a technical level. That, or I'm far too chaotic for such nonsense.
- mod50ack 2y agoThe difference is legal, not technical. You don't have the right to redistribute copyrighted material with permission, except according to exceptions to copyright law (which are narrow enough to not apply here). Cisco gives permission for users to use the software only if downloaded directly from Cisco, and doesn't grant anybody permission to mirror and redistribute it. Can you tell if a copy was downloaded from Cisco directly? No. Does it make a technical difference? No. But those are the rules Cisco chose, and so there it is. One potential reason I can think of for this happening is Cisco being required to count the number of downloads of the software (or something like that). But, in the end, there's no requirement that there be logical sense to a rule like this.
- mastax 2y agoSo they decided to just ignore the patent problem? Fair, I guess, that’s what other open source projects do. Why hasn’t canonical been sued by MPEG-LA et.al? Are they no redistributing compiled FFMPEG for commercial purpose?
- jsiepkes 2y agoIsn't it already patent free in Europe? You can't patent algorithms in Europe. For example MP3 was royalty free in Europe because there was no patent on it.
- WhyNotHugo 2y agoToo often the organisation behind projects is in the US, so is restricted to only what is legal in the US. I suspect that’s the case here. IIRC, the Freedesktop servers are hosted in the US, so are also affected by what’s legal there too. And in this case, they were shipping a userspace for their sandboxes, which is a dependency for many others. If it contains code that cannot be distributed in the US, then anyone in the US will have to pick an alternative.
- NooneAtAll3 2y agoseems like another reason to hop onto "move your servers to Europe" bandwagon
- NekkoDroid 2y agoWell, they recently did (Hetzner specifically) although for different reasons. It was down most of last week and there is still this banner up on the GitLab instance: > The migration is almost done, at least the rest should happen in the background. There are still a few technical difference between the old cluster and the new ones, and they are summarized in this issue. Please pay attention to the TL:DR at the end of the comment. Link: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/freedesktop/freedesktop/-/issues/2076#note_2831847 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/freedesktop/freedesktop/-/iss...
- ChocolateGod 2y ago> the Freedesktop servers Think they just moved to Hetzner.
- FuriouslyAdrift 2y agoWeird considering a ton of codec patents are held by Fraunhofer, which is based in Germany. https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/amm.html https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/amm.html Formerly MP3 (expired 2017), MPEG-H Audio, xHE-AAC, EVS, LC3/LC3plus, Symphoria, Sonamic and upHear
- ray023 2y agoI hope the future is bright with AV1. But even scene groups heavily release in 265 instead of AV1. Hardware support is going to get better over the years and hopefully everyone will just use AV1 and leave this license BS behind.
- alabastervlog 2y agoI avoid AV1 sources for anything I care about, because of film grain synthesis.
- Latty 2y agoWhy? It's a feature you have to explicitly turn on when encoding, and I've not seen people using it for most stuff.
- alabastervlog 2y agoI can't know if it was used in advance, so favor h265. Which is far more common (and so's h264) so it's not much trouble to avoid AV1.
- p1mrx 2y agoDoes AV1 just emulate the film grain from the source video, or are people adding/customizing the grain when encoding?
- alabastervlog 2y agoEmulates it, which strikes me as extremely silly. The original grain is in the film itself, it's part of it, it's what the image is made of. Fake grain is just noise. Either denoise it or keep the real grain, I have no interest in fake grain.
- Dylan16807 2y agoCan't you turn it off in the player and get the denoised version?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- xfp 2y agoOf h.264, h.265, vp8, vp9, and av1, h.264 is the only codec with consistent support across all of chat/messaging clients, browsers, smart TVs/phones, tablets, and streaming devices. The population of active, supported devices and software is much larger and much older than people realize. As such, it remains the only viable video codec if you don't want to be forced to provide multiple encodings.
- flossposse 2y agoThis is long overdue. Cisco's decade-long refusal to deliver binaries, or even hashes of the binaries, over an https connection astounds me.