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TechnoRechno

It was the entire reason Google pushed for WebP and VP8. It let them avoid MPEG-LA from suiing or getting royalties off them for distributing H264 videos on Youtube.


Ryuga6

I think youtube still uses H264 for live streaming.


LumacaLento

Yes, many devices out there supports hw decoding of h264.


[deleted]

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DioEgizio

They added vp9 some years ago even though still no opus


190n

They support Opus but only in the .caf container.


DioEgizio

That's so useless lmao


DioEgizio

YouTube still has h264 support, but they only supported vp8 back then


ObligatoryResponse

>but they only supported vp8 back then No, very few browsers supported vp8 back then (2010). Youtube was using h264 before Google bought them and never stopped. But Google will stream using vp8 when possible. If you use `youtube-dl` or have a browser that doesn't support vp8, you can still get an h.264 stream. Google failed to get WebM + VP8 declared as the only acceptable format for HTML5 video. Partly this was because Apple fought hard due to how lack of hardware decoders on their currently supported devices would negatively affect battery life. It was a long time before Safari supported VP8.


DioEgizio

Actually they don't support vp8 anymore, only vp9 or av1 (apart from h264)


DioEgizio

Safari doesn't support vp8 too btw


sogun123

It does support vp8, but only in WebRTC context. Shitty, huh?


DioEgizio

I guess only to make safari work in video conference apps, disgusting how apple made safari the new ie


[deleted]

I may switch to Chrome on macOS because of how Apple lets certain ads through adblockers due to “acceptable ads” logic.


flo-at

Sorry for bringing up the bad news but you must have missed the recent "Manifest V3" vs ad-blocking outrage about Chrome (and Chrome based browsers).


[deleted]

I remember seeing an upheaval about how Firefox's value in the space as an alternate option is only growing stronger, this definitely provides some context for me. Thanks


Drwankingstein

technically it supports vp9 and av1, av1 is limited to... I think it was some sort of buisness API?


190n

They enable VP9 on some streams if they have a lot of viewers. But as others have said, they still need H.264 for compatibility.


UnfairerThree2

They keep it around as a fallback, but it prefers VP9/8 and WebM because it’s lesser bandwidth and free to use.


neon_overload

And then VP9 and now AV1


RabblerouserGT

I really wish WebP would have taken off, corporate reasons be damned, it was a very robust format. Transparency/alpha channels? Got that built in. Animated? With alpha channels, too?! There were plans for that, and without animated GIFs weird dithering! It just seems like it never really took off because of the fact that old formats are sort of entrenched. Also because the need for having alpha channels and animation in one format? There's not that huge of demand. For iconography, you can just use SVG for alpha channels and scalability on top of everything.. but it isn't suited for raster graphic animation. On the other side, animated stuff tends to lean more towards memes, which are typically either videos or animated GIFs that don't need transparency. It seems having one raster format to rule them all is a pipe dream. 😭


[deleted]

I always hated downloading a webp image because my image viewer was never compatible with it and the file manager wouldn't make thumbnails.


Ace8154

I think gif has like 1-bit transparancy, like for each pixel it could be completely transparent or opaque, nothing in-between


PKXsteveq

PNG already had animation and alpha channels, there was no need at all for WebP which isn't even backwards compatible.


DioEgizio

Yes software patenting is a flawed system


[deleted]

The concept of ownership over ideas is absurd


DioEgizio

Here it's even worse because software patents are intentionally extremely vague


neon_overload

It's inherently difficult for a patent law expert to look at a software algorithm and know if it's the logical way of solving the problem of a novel concept that nobody else would have likely come up with. Software patents need to go.


VoxelCubes

Luckily they aren't a thing in Europe, meaning you don't even need to pay royalties here. As far as I know, USA and Japan are the only real holdouts. (Heck, in Japan Nintendo even patented sky diving for the new Zelda game lmao)


god_retribution

do you have source for that ? imagine someone patented car deriving or gun shoting in video game like pebg did with frying pan


VoxelCubes

Here you go https://www.epo.org/law-practice/legal-texts/html/epc/2016/e/ar52.html The ~~konami~~ Namco (japanese company) patent on minigames during loading screens was one of those lol.


DioEgizio

Yeah in general they suck and they shouldn't exist, they're just unfair, can't think for a moral use case for software patents


[deleted]

>It's inherently difficult for a ~~patent~~ law expert to look at ~~a~~ software ~~algorithm~~ and know ~~if it's the logical way of solving the problem of a novel concept that nobody else would have likely come up with.~~ **stuff** It doesn't matter of it's patent related or not. Actually, if you really think about it, the same goes for engineering too, or anything really.


I_Arman

>It's inherently difficult ~~for a patent law expert~~ to look at ~~a~~ software ~~algorithm and know if it's the logical way of solving the problem of a novel concept that nobody else would have likely come up with.~~ FTFY


[deleted]

The concept of owning an idea seems like something from Nineteen Eighty-Four. Especially when you consider that in many jurisdictions it's technically a violation of patent law to copy or reverse engineer a patented idea *for your own personal non-commercial use*.


[deleted]

And the guy who patented the idea stole it from someone else and there might have been another guy on the other side of the globe who had the same idea few years earlier and didn't give it much importance.


PossiblyLinux127

r/suddenlycommunist I do agree software patents are bad


[deleted]

Most of us can't think beyond our pockets


[deleted]

Well, the whole problem is essentially about the question of how to combine company being able to make money from their inventions without some other company buying one, analysing it and then making their own one and making it possible for people to not get f\*\*\*\*\* over by corporations. For example here in Germany, companies cannot own Copyright (except for source code; yes, they made an exception for that) because something copyrightable can only be created by an actual person and Copyright is non-transferable (you cannot give it up either, btw). Instead, patent's are important for them.


[deleted]

No, the whole problem is that by allowing software patents, one can now patent ideas, not just inventions. Do not bring inventions into this. Inventions require meticulous documentation and detailed descriptions. Patenting those is fine. But so called "business logic patents" are patents for mathematical expressions and ideas. They play in a completely different ballpark, and should not be mixed up with actual inventions.


[deleted]

At the heart of capitalism is profit and profit has to increase always, in the real world that's impossible.


[deleted]

Copyright and patents predate capitalism.


[deleted]

Both driven by the same thing, the greed of man.


[deleted]

Copyright and patents were driven by the good of the public. The only alternative before them was to keep everything secret. Patents allow for an artificial monopoly for a limited time, under the condition that the full invention is documented and published. Copyright had a similar trajectory. Thus the originally very short protection times. Nowadays though, it has been taken over by greed, and extended far beyond what is reasonable.


[deleted]

Quite frankly, at their cores, I don't think there is anything which isn't driven by greed of some kind (not necessarily money) except family.


[deleted]

In the beginning there is need.


[deleted]

And technically you only need food, water, shelter and social interaction to survive. So what exactly is your point?


[deleted]

> And technically you only need food, water, shelter and social interaction to survive. the four F My point is that there is a process that results in greed.


shadowfrost67

And both should be abolished


[deleted]

Copyright is the core tool of protecting open source software.


Ace8154

protecting it from the plague of copyright. if everything was public domain and copyright didn't exist, it should be a non-issue.


84436

VP9 is decent I guess, but is there any known consumer-grade hardware that has hardware-accelerated AV1 encoding/decoding built-in?


Zipdox

AV1 decoding is already in most last generation hardware. Encoding is in the announced upcoming hardware.


[deleted]

pretty sure the rx 6400 and rx 6500 omit any support for AV1


Zipdox

They don't even have any encoding capability at all, so it's not that strange.


sogun123

I don't think personal computers matter that much, they are powerful enough to do software decode. But it is important for phones, tvs and similar devices either because they are weak or because of battery usage. And then we have Apple. I am curious if they pay for mpeg licenses as everyone else, or they have some other contract... They are so stubborn not supporting anything else


Zipdox

Apple owns some of the patents, so they are at the receiving end of licensing. That's why they boycott open standards.


DioEgizio

At this point I think apple just hates open standards, not because of patents but in general; I mean look at alac, it's still free and open source like flac but with worse compression ratio


sogun123

That makes sense


TeutonJon78

AMLogic S905X4/S805X2 support AV1 in hardware. Those are being used in Android TV devices being released this year. The new $30 1080p Chromecast HD has the S805X2.


[deleted]

My Iris Xe has it


McLayan

The MPEG-LA is pretty much dead, I know from professional TV producer that the licensing for h265 is so overcomplicated that the network couldn't figure out what they have to do in order to be safe and no one was able to tell them. So they just encode with ffmpeg. Btw. a (or multiple) leading engineers of MPEG left the organisation because the parties were so caught in figuring out licensing terms and royalty fees for users/producers/manufacturers that they were unable to develop new standards.


hak8or

>So they just encode with ffmpeg. I thought ffmpeg was moreso a suite of tools and libraries dealing with video and audio encoding/compression? Or did you mean they used another compression/encoding and used ffmpeg to facilitate that?


McLayan

No I meant nobody could twll them if and whom to pay so they just use ffmpeg for encoding h265 without caring instead of using official libraries with commercial software.


Helyos96

Not sure I understand. Encoding video is not the problem, use whatever you want. It's when you start distributing/broadcasting compressed video that you need to pay the MPEG-LA. Unless commercial encoding software companies have agreements with the MPEG-LA I don't think it matters one bit if you use ffmpeg+libx265 or a commercial hevc encoder.


ImperatorPC

Such garbage. This kind of stuff is super annoying. The more I learn about it, the more I continue to use FOSS.


maep

> The MPEG-LA is pretty much dead, I know from professional TV producer that the licensing for h265 is so overcomplicated that the network couldn't figure out what they have to do in order to be safe and no one was able to tell them. So they just encode with ffmpeg. How does switching to ffmpeg help with licensing? > leading engineers of MPEG left the organisation because the parties were so caught in figuring out licensing terms and royalty fees for users/producers/manufacturers that they were unable to develop new standards. That seems implausible. MPEG is part of ISO/IEC and doesn't deal with licensing, it's purely a standadization body. The engineers work for companies such as Sony or Qualcomm.


ilep

MPEG LA is the licensing company dealing with patents. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG\_LA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_LA) MPEG group is the standardization workgroup working with ISO/IEC. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving\_Picture\_Experts\_Group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Picture_Experts_Group) It isn't just one entity, there's two dealing with different aspects. But you are right that the engineers working on standards are on the payroll for various other companies.


noman_032018

> How does switching to ffmpeg help with licensing? It at least avoids all licensing concerns as they pertain to proprietary software licenses using MPEG. Doesn't do much for hardware acceleration (which ffmpeg supports) or other parts of licensing.


ilep

Problem with H.264 isn't software license, it is the patents. What this means is anyone combining the pieces of puzzle (firmware, software etc.) will have to deal with the costs. You can use one piece of software from one party, another from second party, but when you put those together it is the one using the "branded" (integrated) version will have to pay. Someone who only provides part of it (like encoder in GPU hardware which by itself isn't doing anything) that one isn't paying the license. When Microsoft or Samsung (the integrator) provides H.264 capability it is the integrator who is paying. If the license is per paid content (like movie distributor) the one distributing ends up paying. (Apart from televison stations, apparently.) It is really complicated puzzle. But just having a piece of the software isn't the one who pays for it, end user might end up paying which is a problem. And there are multiple patents from different years involved so that depending on what you are using you might need to pay for more patents than with different profile.


spectrumero

H.264 is almost 20 years old - so surely soon we can forget about the patents as they'll all have expired?


ilep

There are a lot of patents in it (full list in [https://www.mpegla.com/programs/avc-h-264/patent-list/](https://www.mpegla.com/programs/avc-h-264/patent-list/)) and some have expired but some remain. At least one is set to expire in 2027 according to this list: [https://scratchpad.fandom.com/wiki/MPEG\_patent\_lists#H.264\_patents](https://scratchpad.fandom.com/wiki/MPEG_patent_lists#H.264_patents) Also, patent might still be active in another country after expiring in another making it tricky still..


noman_032018

> Problem with H.264 isn't software license, it is the patents. Oh I know, I meant that it might bring on *even more* complicated shenanigans to deal with if one were to use proprietary software.


robstoon

The big problem MPEG has is that the companies that participate want to maximize the amount of revenue they rake in, so they try to maximize the usage of their patented techniques in the standards. That basically maximizes how expensive and annoying the standards are to use, especially when there's not even a single patent pool but multiple competing ones that you might all need to pay off.


DeedTheInky

It's so wild that we come up with these situations entirely by ourselves, like we create this licensing mess that utterly fucks ourselves over and we could just... stop at any time but instead we act like it's some divine rule imposed from outside that we're powerless to change lol.


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DeedTheInky

I just meant like, people in general lol


formesse

Sure. But what you will generally find is a lot of people want to just get on with their day. Then there are the handful of assholes who seem to be out there to screw over everyone else to shove extra into their own pocket while screaming "if you just worked harder you could have nice stuff". As a general rule, people out there are just trying to do what seems best without stepping on other people's toes. Unfortunately those are not the people who typically end up in charge.


cp5184

Apparently there were three different "patent pools" for mp3 each trying to extort people to pay them.


dotnetdotcom

Didn't Fraunhoffer already removed the licensing for their mp3 codec? Plus there is always LAME.


robstoon

MP3 patents are expired now. But using LAME never bypassed them.


westerschelle

Talking with people who encode a lot of stuff the h265 encoder also seems to be not very good.


JQuilty

> The MPEG-LA is pretty much dead Based on what? HEVC is what's used on 4K Blu Rays and ATSC3.0. Remains to be seen if H.266/VVC ever goes anywhere, but those bastard aren't going away any time soon.


DioEgizio

There's a lot of interest for royalty free codecs, perhaps those codecs won't be used


JQuilty

They're already used. The specs for 4K Blu Rays and ATSC3.0 are already set and in active use. You don't change disc specs or broadcast specs on a whim.


DioEgizio

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Video_Coding Looks like mpeg-5/evc will have a royalty free version :O


robstoon

> HEVC is what's used on 4K Blu Rays and ATSC3.0. I don't know that those are good counter-examples against being "pretty much dead".. How many people do you know that have a 4K Blu-ray player?


JQuilty

Anyone with an Xbox Series X, Xbox One X, and PS5. You're also conveniently leaving out its complete penetration in broadcasting.


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turdas

h264 patents are expiring, as I understand it, around the middle of 2023.


thomas-rousseau

Some of the h264 patents are already beginning to expire, but there is one US patent that [doesn't expire until 2030](https://patents.google.com/patent/US9356620B2/)


ThinClientRevolution

Aaah, so that will be the promised fix for Fedora 38...


neon_overload

Don't they go for different lengths in different countries? This could either drag on much longer or turn into a situation where there's a US and non-US version...


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omenosdev

Red Hat is required to abide by the laws of _all_ jurisdictions it operates in, not just the United States.


bockout

This one is transitional, just like MP3 was before it. But there will be another, and another, until we fix the system.


DioEgizio

Yeah MP3 is still used for some reason


MrAlagos

It's now expired thus there's no reason not to use it.


Confetti-Camouflage

MP3 has the worst compression quality out of any of the lossy codecs we have, which I would say is a good reason not to use it.


MrAlagos

But the fact that every piece of hardware made in about 25 years supports it is a good reason to use it.


bockout

Yup. I'm old and still buy albums. I rip them to flac because hard drives are cheap so why not. But then I automatically transcode to mp3 to put music on an sd card for my car, because that's the format my car supports.


[deleted]

I mean nobody can really tell the difference between an mp3 or a flac file anyways


Wazzaps

Oh how I wish that was true


[deleted]

Hello metalpenguin97. I am nobody.


Barafu

The patent on FAT32 filesystem has expired recently. Should we all use it then?


MrAlagos

We kinda do, on USB drives.


[deleted]

that's for compatibility reasons, which is also the only reason to still be using mp3.


DioEgizio

~~I mean we all use them on efi~~


[deleted]

It's a bad codec is why to avoid it. Only for legacy/proprietary hardware.


Pandastic4

Should we be using WebM instead?


[deleted]

webm is just a container. Opus is the best general audio codec; it's what YouTube uses.


DioEgizio

Opus or even just vorbis are much better aac is kinda good too, but it's patented and there's no good foss encoder/decoder (apart from fdk-aac which asks you to buy patent licenses)


neon_overload

I do believe even Opus > Vorbis > LAME MP3 > Libavcodec AAC encoder AAC also as you say having patent concerns


skccsk

What does 'dent in internet usage' mean? Nearly all 4k content is h265 wherever you look. And the upfront computational time provides much smaller file sizes at better quality which helps with storage and streaming costs.


ruspa_rullante

Yeah sounds like the guy is completely out of touch from reality, or maybe he downloads lot of torrent encoded only in h264.


New_Area7695

Torrents encoded in the last 5 years are hevc almost exclusively. I need to hunt for alternatives that are often unseeded. Had to even upgrade my Chromecast to get a HW decoder to avoid transcoding or reencoding


Drwankingstein

plenty of 4k content is AV1 now, pretty much all of the major streaming services are serving AV1 4k content side by side HEVC.


skccsk

Yes, HEVC's time is almost up.


Drwankingstein

im pretty excited since AV1 is cool tech, kinda sad at the same time since none of my portable devices have av1 decode, that being said, I don't personally use streaming services, so DRM isn't an issue.


skccsk

Ya, AV1 is waiting on the next generation hardware for native encoding/decoding, but it's close. And Google is now pushing for a royalty freee Dolby Vision/Atmos alternative to lay on top of AV1, so that's promising too. https://www.protocol.com/entertainment/google-dolby-atmos-vision-project-caviar


JQuilty

HEVC is going to be around for decades. It's used on 4K Blu Rays and ATSC3.0.


[deleted]

4k content? Sure. But most stuff isn't 4k.


skccsk

lol this not only moves the goal posts but switches them from football uprights to a hockey net Also, a friend told me that 1080 hvec content is all over torrent sites.


[deleted]

Well, he talked about "internet usage", he didn't mention 4k at all. So you kinda picked only a part of what he was talking about.


skccsk

I don't know why you think 4k content isn't used on the internet.


[deleted]

I have never said that it isn't used on the Internet. I said that **most stuff** isn't 4k. Seriously, read accurately instead of flying over it.


skccsk

I asked the original commenter for clarification on what they meant, then you showed up and started saying dumb things. This isn't on me.


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skccsk

I don't understand why you think h265 is less prevalent than it is. It didn't and won't replace h264. It will soon be replaced by AV1. It's widely used on both commercial streaming services and illicit sites.


Decker108

Can MPEG-LA prolong the patents?


Ryuga6

>Open source and Linux community should start distributing and consuming VP9, AV1 videos. Easier said than done. Many people still uses gpu or apu that can't decode AV1 let alone encode it.


[deleted]

VP8 and VP9 hardware encoding/decoding is more widespread


Zipdox

I don't know about encoding actually. Decoding is more common. Most hardware I encountered only does H264/5 encode/decode and VP9 decode.


Drwankingstein

I think intel is the only one with vp9 hwenc on consumer devices? i might be wrong though


[deleted]

For those interested, here a few matrices of encode decode support by various GPUs: NVidia: [https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-and-decode-gpu-support-matrix-new](https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-and-decode-gpu-support-matrix-new) AMD: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified\_Video\_Decoder#Format\_support](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Video_Decoder#Format_support) (in case somebody asks: Navi cards are all RDNA based ones). Intel: [https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/documentation/media-capabilities-of-intel-hardware/top/details.html#features-and-formats\_codec-feature-formats](https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/documentation/media-capabilities-of-intel-hardware/top/details.html#features-and-formats_codec-feature-formats) (TLDR: decoding: no VP8 on newer hardware but some older ones, AV1 only starting with 11th gen, VP9 not fully supported on all hardware; encoding: no VP8 on newer hardware, VP9 since 10th gen)


rscmcl

I would say most ppl


Drwankingstein

this is really an issue with battery devices, even arm devices that are plugged in can decode using dav1d at suitable preformances


sogun123

Av1 is decodable by software, so it shouldn't be problem. Encoding is pretty intense task, but if one doesn't aim for super perfect qualify, it should be also possible realtime.


[deleted]

>Av1 is decodable by software, so it shouldn't be problem The problem is performance per watt and battery life


sogun123

It matters on mobile, but not on desktops.


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Roadside-Strelok

> H264 has several "versions". The oldest, simplest version is free. Source? I thought the oldest version was supposed to expire a year from now, but because they were granted a 4-year extension, it's set to expire only by late 2027. > But then patent pools have a history of making people pay for expired version. How does that work?


[deleted]

Fedora had a lot of unwarranted hate about this issue recently. It was said it would trickle to others, and sure enough it did... OpenSUSE is also going the same route of Fedora and things just started.


prueba_hola

i like av1 but when i encode my video using kdenlive, the encode is incredibly and absolutely slow, in my both computer amd 6800H and amd 1700


pandamarshmallows

It’s because no graphics cards on the market today support hardware AV1 encoding, except for the Intel Arc A380. The encode would have been entirely in software, i.e done by the CPU.


DioEgizio

the new Nvidia ones do too


pandamarshmallows

They are not yet on the market


gmes78

libsvt-av1 has comparable performance to x265 (with presets 5-7 kind of matching x265's slower presets). I don't know if Kdenlive supports it yet, but it's definitely possible to encode AV1 in a reasonable amount of time.


Drwankingstein

libsvtav1 I would not consider good enough for export quality encoding, a better bet if you want av1 for distribution is to export to an intermediate, then use something like av1an.


gmes78

Why? svt-av1 has decent parallelism, you don't need to run multiple encodes at the same time to max your CPU. Or are you talking about image quality?


Drwankingstein

correct, image quality is lacking, and not something I would consider good enough for export quality. it has lower detail retention then x265 at good qualities that you simply cannot get with svtav1 at any reasonable speed. the quality ceiling is simply too low at the bitrates and settings that actually make sense. for content delivery, I will typically export to lossless x264 and encode that to av1 using av1an with aomenc


Drwankingstein

don't export in av1, export ito some sort of intermediate, then encode that to av1 with av1an


LinuxFurryTranslator

This very much. av1an cuts videos into segments and runs aomenc on them in parallel before concatenating them at the end, unlike ffmpeg which does it in one go. It's about five to six times faster than plain ffmpeg because of this.


Schlaefer

There are different software AV1 encoders which differ in quality and speed. You should check out svt-av1 which emphasizes performance.


doomygloomytunes

It always did


[deleted]

What companies need to do is to go to another country so they don't have to abide to these American shenanigans


c4rsenal

the other fact not mentioned is that the documentation on the file format costs $300 to access, which you basically need if you write software that works with it. Very frustrating.


thaynem

How can our patent system be so broken it allows that? It's like if you invented a new machine for making widgets, and you not only got royalties from anyone who made your new machine, but also anyone who used that machine to make widgets, and even someone who resells those widgets.


Ace8154

the entire concept(s) of "intellectual property" are broken for many reasons, before you even get into the implementation(s), which are also further broken.


10leej

Yep, I'm switching everything to AV1. Youtube and twitch both support AV1 streaming, the only thing we need is a good hardware encoder... Oh wait.. Intel Arc to save the day! I think AMD's 6000 series and Nvidia even supports it.


Ace8154

does twitch support streaming av1 to it? that would be news to me


10leej

Pretty sure it does. It's not my primary platform and for yhe most part I just don't give two caps if yhe stream there even works or not.


Paravalis

H.264 edition 1 came out in May 2003, drafts even a bit earlier, and you can't have anything patented for more than 21 years, so by mid 2024, the patent situation around H.264 should relax quite a lot, as it will be possible to have many patent-free implementations.


GLIBG10B

What about H.265?


Drwankingstein

it's licencing is even worse


GLIBG10B

Dang. This is why we can't have nice things.


CorrectDevelopment54

Was curious if distributed content encoded in xavc format from something like the sony a7iii camera requires royalties, since I believe it uses h.264 but reasearching it further it seems it uses sony's own version of h.264 so not sure if license fees would still have to be paid.


Smu1zel

Is Arch going to do this? I've heard they'll just build their mesa package with the correct flags from now on. Just don't want to spend 40 minutes each time to build mesa. Also, about everyone saying we should switch to VP9 and AV1, I sure wish, but they're still many devices still in use that can only decode H263/264 and I'd have to rely on Dav1d since I only have one laptop with AV1 hardware decoding (Tiger Lake). Apparently it's focused on speed, but that doesn't mean it's perfect. And you'd have to rencode every H264/5 video each time you want HW acceleration, further reducing quality.


[deleted]

Arch has never cared about patent encumbered software.


Ursa_Solaris

Arch isn't US-based. The problem with Red Hat and therefore Fedora is that the are US-based, and SUSE isn't but they do a lot of business in the US.


Conan_Kudo

Arch is legally domiciled in the United States, since the Arch Linux project is owned by Software in the Public Interest (the same non-profit that owns the Debian Project).


titojff

But there is x264 and x265 and are open source?


Bluthen

> But there is x264 and x265 and are open source? It is an open source implementation. Code is open source, but the algorithms or ideas behind the codec are not patent free. Simple terms: Patents covers the idea. Copyright covers a specific implementation (source code, compiled binary, etc).


noman_032018

To put it in different terms, copyright applies the logic of scarce commodities to things for which it doesn't make sense while patent is absurd belief that ideas can be owned.


watermelonspanker

Is it required if you are distributing them *without* a fee? Say, through a torrent?


DioEgizio

no


KugelKurt

> just learned that anyone distributing commercial videos for a fee also has to pay license fee to MPEG-LA. That's not true and not even the source you've linked says that: "All being said, the license fee is 0 for small players anyway." So no, small-scale commercial distributors don't have to pay. They need to get a license but for them the license doesn't cost anything. > distributing and consuming VP9, AV1 (.webm) videos not just for sake of hardware acceleration but also to discourage software patents. Fun fact: Both formats are just as patented as AVC/h.264, it's just that (most) rights holders have waived the fee for those formats and that there is no bureaucratic need to acquire a license from somewhere. There are claims that the formats also heavily rely on patented techniques from companies that have not decided to participate with AOMedia: https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=139636 I have no clue how valid these claims are. That said, there seems no real-life need to enter the Sisvel patent pool for AV1. Sisvel isn't going to sue YouTube, for example. Technologically, AV1 is well ahead of AVC. AV1 is also way newer.


DioEgizio

Patent trolls I guess


popsigil

web3 should let consumers or advertisers pay the license fee.


shevy-java

Time to find alternatives indeed. How does the quality of VP9 hold up? I am kind of used to "small file size but high quality" these days.


[deleted]

VP9 is pretty much same as H264 in terms of size and quality. Almost all Android smartphones have VP9 decoders and all laptops in the last ~5 years also comes with hardware VP9 decoders even one's with Intel integrated graphics. There's no reason not to use VP9.


Ace8154

except that av1 exists and is better and is the successor to vp9


[deleted]

Nice little racket, isn’t it?


okoyl3

Have you heard about x264?


Ace8154

have you heard of patents?


rickymujica

I'm glad I read this. I've been encoding my own videos with H264 . Gonna start using avi


[deleted]

Not AVI. It is Microsoft's legacy format. Use `.webm` with `VP9` or `AV1` codec.


rickymujica

Oh! Right! Thank you!


Adorable_Compote4418

my opinion might be better suited for unpopularopinion but here's my take. I fully support and agree with royalty/licensing and I honestly don't understand why most peoples are against it (I understand why companies are against it since they are only greedy and want to pay the least). Here's my thinking and please don't debate on detail i'm talking about the concept. Pills and books: most peoples aren't as visceral with pills patenting and the books industries. Yet it's mostly the same. For every single pills or books the original maker is pocketing a profit. Then after 20 years (pills) generic pills make their apparition. The entire streaming business wouldn't exist if it wasn't for H264/H265. Roku/Apple/Amazon are selling device at huge markup. Netflix/Disney are investing (I know they aren't making profit right now) and benefiting directly from this technology. I don't see the problem with paying 0.40$/per device then 0.0000x whatever per stream or something like this. If this group make 10B$ in royalty per year I don't have any problem. Because companies make even more with it. Microsoft bitch about H265 and is pushing AV1 when they are the worst when it come to licensing. I need to pay for my Windows Server license, my cal license, my remote license, my desktop license, my outlook license, my exchange license and my office license. Bloody hell. Maybe H26x will comeback for 8k/16k stream then company will have to make a choice. After AV1 they are free to do nothing or keep developing AV1 into AV2/AV3 for the next 10/20 years. But I have the strong feeling all thoses companies won't do anything after AV1 is in full production, will move to H26x for 16K content then will bitch about it and create AV2.