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xiphmontHad this happened next week, I'd have thought it was an April Fools' joke.
Out of nowhere, a new patent licensing group just announced it has formed a second, competing patent pool for HEVC that is independent of MPEG LA. And they apparently haven't decided what their pricing will be... maybe they'll have a fee structure ready in a few months.
Video on the Net (and let's be clear-- video's future is the Net) already suffers endless technology licensing problems. And the industry's solution is apparently even more licensing.
In case you've been living in a cave, Google has been trying to establish VP9 as a royalty- and strings-free alternative (new version release candidate just out this week!), and NetVC, our own next-next-generation royalty-free video codec, was just conditionally approved as an IETF working group on Tuesday and we'll be submitting our Daala codec as an input to the standardization process. The biggest practical question surrounding both efforts is 'how can you possibly keep up with the MPEG behemoth'?
Apparently all we have to do is stand back and let the dominant players commit suicide while they dance around Schroedinger's Cash Box.
no subject
Date: 2015-03-27 08:34 pm (UTC)Best of luck, Monty; you've been working on this for a loooooooong time!
WTF? No! WAFO!
Date: 2015-03-27 11:59 pm (UTC)The WebM project website seems to be suffering quite a lot of bit rot. The most recent blog post is dated December 15, 2014 but the post talks about VP8, not VP9, and it begins with the line "Since the WebM project was open-sourced just a week ago.." Something has gone wrong there.
This sort of neglect undermines the perception of VP9 because it makes it look as though Google doesn't take VP9 seriously. Maybe it really is the case that they don't take it seriously.
AT&T
Date: 2015-03-28 01:53 am (UTC)AT&T was forced by US Government decree to license
all its patents as a condition of Monopoly.
This is why Transistor was so quickly taken up by Japanese
companies like Sony to make a portable radio.
Unix and C is in the same situation because AT&T created it.
Not some hippies.
Re: WTF? No! WAFO!
Date: 2015-03-28 04:25 pm (UTC)VP9 support is mandatory in Android 4.4 (although sadly so is HEVC) and it is used by default on YouTube for Firefox and Chrome, so I think that Google's commitment to the codec is pretty clear. They could have just threatened to support VP9 to get a discount on HEVC licensing, but they have completely followed through.
The best the HEVC crowd can say is "you have no choice but to have HEVC on your device". That is their only survival strategy, because HEVC offers the consumer **NOTHING** over VP9.
It'll be interesting if Microsoft and Apple decide that VP9 is worth fighting against (TBH - I'm not sure that they actually care much at this point).
Biggest threat to VP9 adoption is not h265
Date: 2015-03-28 06:31 pm (UTC)Re: Biggest threat to VP9 adoption is not h265
Date: 2015-03-28 07:14 pm (UTC)Meanwhile Daala (NetVC) already has OSX support and ffmpeg can handle the binary stream : https://wiki.xiph.org/Daala_Quickstart
Your GUIs just need to update.
Ogg
Date: 2015-03-28 07:47 pm (UTC)Re: Ogg
Date: 2015-03-28 11:45 pm (UTC)Re: WTF? No! WAFO!
Date: 2015-03-29 12:30 am (UTC)This doesn't seem to be the case for Firefox 37 beta on OS X. I tried a few videos on YouTube. The best available resolution for all was 720p and in the "Stats for Nerds" window (right click on the video to choose it from the context menu) it said AVC (H.264) was used. The YouTube HTML5 (https://www.youtube.com/html5) status page tells me MSE isn't available, which would explain the lack of 1080p resolution. Maybe MSE and/or VP9 is available for HTML5 video in Firefox on some platforms, but it isn't seem to be there yet for Firefox 37 beta on OS X.
Re: Ogg
Date: 2015-03-29 01:29 am (UTC)Re: Ogg
Date: 2015-03-29 04:51 am (UTC)Yes, as others have pointed out Ogg itself is a container.
Ogg Theora is a video codec, but it is old, very old by codec standards, and it really isn't up to handling today's demands.
NetVC/Daala, which is too new, and isn't widely supported yet, but over the next couple of years looks to be exceptional.
In the relatively near term, Google has indicated that VP10 should arrive rather soon for a standard.
Basically, HEVC is already approaching End-Of-Life, and it never really got anywhere.
Re: WTF? No! WAFO!
Date: 2015-03-29 10:34 am (UTC)There is _NO_ way to do live video with vp9 and the encoder is too fucking slow!
I would have implemented a trial live ecoding long ago if it worked.
VP10
Date: 2015-03-29 01:40 pm (UTC)Ouch - I hadn't spotted that news. They could at least wait for the hardware manufacturers to catch up a bit... There are already people complaining that CPU usage for YouTube is significantly higher for VP9.
If my Googling is correct, on desktop AMD and NVidia don't have any VP9 acceleration, and even Intel only does selected bits of it in silicon.
Re: AT&T
Date: 2015-03-29 02:23 pm (UTC)Transistor invented: 1947. Licensing for transistors opened in general: 1952. AT&T, as part of a settlement, required to license all its patents to all interested parties: 1956. Japanese companies -- and who knows how many others around the world -- had licensed the transistor four years before the court settlement mandated licensing.
Unix: first release, 1973. Licensed, and still under ownership and licensing, which is at least in part claimed by the Company That Will Not Die No Matter How Much We Want It To, SCO. That license does not extend to rewritten Unix-alikes, so the hippies have been instrumental in spreading Unix in the form of BSD, Linux, and other license-free non-AT&T Unix relatives.
C: first release, 1978. So far as I am able to tell, the language itself was never patented or placed under license, which permitted anyone -- including those hippies at GNU -- to write a compiler.
Re: WTF? No! WAFO!
Date: 2015-03-29 02:38 pm (UTC)"Fail" doesn't really begin to describe this whole thing right at the moment. They could have the keys to the kingdom if they could find a means to have DRM that even if it's Open Source, it wouldn't matter. Providing the superlative open answers means that they would have won- even with Chrome.
Re: WTF? No! WAFO!
Date: 2015-03-29 04:33 pm (UTC)This idiocy won't stop until software patents are abolished.
Which won't be anytime soon, because FOSS zealots don't have spending money to lobby (aka bribe) for it. Apparently Google doesn't have enough pull for this either. (Or isn't actually interested)
PS:
It's really irritating how much time I have to waste just to comment with this livejournal nonsense. This time tha captcha wouldn't load in my FF profile...(domain / ckey mismatch )
Re: Ogg
Date: 2015-03-29 05:21 pm (UTC)They're focusing on VP9 and only will make a VP10 if they can achieve meaningful improvement.
Re: Ogg
Date: 2015-03-29 05:22 pm (UTC)They're focusing on VP9 and only will make a VP10 if they can achieve meaningful improvement.
Re: Biggest threat to VP9 adoption is not h265
Date: 2015-03-29 05:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-29 06:32 pm (UTC)How are people already shipping HEVC?
Date: 2015-03-30 03:45 am (UTC)Re: WTF? No! WAFO!
Date: 2015-03-30 06:28 am (UTC)Encrypted Media Extensions is probably as close as its every going to get to open source DRM. I suppose people like Netflix will (or are) use EME for their DRM, maybe in combination with the WebCrypto API.
Re: Biggest threat to VP9 adoption is not h265
Date: 2015-03-30 08:32 pm (UTC)Side note: this might be a blow to HEVC popularisation, but it also serves as FUD to those free and independent codecs too. If rogue patent pool can happen for standardised codec, why couldn't it happen for a "me too" one from a single party that had less resources to check all the potential IP risks?
Re: Biggest threat to VP9 adoption is not h265
Date: 2015-03-30 09:31 pm (UTC)But if it can happen to all codecs, then what's the difference? You might as well go with the codec without any obvious licensing problems today (VP9) as opposed to the codec which two competing patent pools and an uncertain licensing future (HEVC).
Re: WTF? No! WAFO!
Date: 2015-03-30 10:53 pm (UTC)Re: WTF? No! WAFO!
Date: 2015-03-31 01:48 am (UTC)Re: Biggest threat to VP9 adoption is not h265
Date: 2015-03-31 10:25 pm (UTC)The situation with encoder speed, quality and choice may of course improve over time, but libvpx/VP9 has a lot of catching up before it even is on par with HEVC camp... and based on the experience with VP8, it will probably only keep getting more and more behind.
Looks like it is "technical merits" versus "no royalty to use", as before.
Re: WTF? No! WAFO!
Date: 2015-04-03 03:44 am (UTC)Re: WTF? No! WAFO!
Date: 2015-04-05 05:00 am (UTC)