At which point, the continued march towards higher resolution and bandwidth video will probably limit their utility
ronsor [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> At which point, the continued march towards higher resolution and bandwidth video will probably limit their utility
Just as the patent system intended: maximum extraction was enabled while the product was useful.
goalieca [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Now if only copyright didn't last forever..
ronsor [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The Berne Convention has permanently burned us there
matheusmoreira [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Intellectual property is total bullshit as a concept but I suppose patents are at least tolerable since they only last 10 to 20 years, unlike copyright which lasts for our lifetimes plus a million billion years.
Teever [3 hidden]5 mins ago
[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
The purpose of the system as it was originally conceived was not to provide maximum economic extraction -- the purpose was to promote the progress of science and useful arts.
It is not necessarily the case that the maximization of economic extraction coincides with the progress of science and useful arts.
ronsor [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I am familiar with the Copyright Clause. You need to remind the courts, Congress, and rights holders, not me. If I had my way, rent seeking would be dead.
avazhi [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Interesting how you’ve chosen to interpret that section.
When I was in law school we were taught what seemed obvious then and is obvious now: that Congress has the power to promote the progress of science and useful arts by giving authors and inventors exclusive right to the economic fruits of their works. You can argue about flaws in the system but it’s pretty laughable to suggest that copyrights and patents don’t exist for the purposes of maximum economic value extraction for inventors and authors.
There is quite literally no other reason for granting a copyright or patent. It’s also why if a plaintiff is successful in a claim for an infringement of either, he’ll get awarded money in the United States that at a bare minimum is designed to compensate him for the money he would have made if the patent or copyright had been complied with. Europe has some different ideas about moral rights in this space, but since you’re quoting US material I assume you aren’t referring to our funny brothers across the pond.
It’s obvious to most people that humans act in certain ways due to incentives, and we like to incentivise invention and creativity in the West.
jbk [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Read the list of patents left: a lot of them are on SVC (no one uses this) and on higher profile.
For a lot of use cases, including Basic and Main profile, H.264 is already free.
userbinator [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I don't think video resolution will increase all that much in the future, except for niche uses, as the resolution of the human eye becomes a limiting factor.
dabinat [3 hidden]5 mins ago
For distribution perhaps, but for acquisition it makes sense to have the highest resolution possible.
joshspankit [3 hidden]5 mins ago
You may be underestimating the desire to earn through differentiation.
Assuming the product companies accept the plateau on resolution (I agree it’s likely), there are many ways to exploit the other stuff. Colour space, tacling each type of compression artifact, additional channels (probly not long until we have HDR RGBW), etc etc and those will each come with their committees made of patent-hungry companies seeing non-encumbered encodings as “undesirable”
makeitdouble [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I read "resolution" as pixel count more than DPI.
As it becomes cheaper to capture and process higher res content, we're bound to push it to bigger displays (VR included). I guess the human eye will be the limit when we're at retina levels of DPI on a sphere.
Dylan16807 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Most videos are probably going to stay aimed near 30-40 degrees of width. So while we already can do 8k or higher pretty easily, 4k is enough for a huge amount of content. Even 1080p can hit "retina" at 30 degrees, if barely. And while that threshold for "retina" is flawed it's pretty good for video content.
We'll see how much 360 content shows up, but the size gap is so big it basically needs to be handled entirely differently. A 16x9 screen, 40 degrees wide, is only 2% of a sphere.
theandrewbailey [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> While the US and EU patents around MPEG-4 Part 2 expired in recent years, until today there remained one patent still active in Brazil.
Since MPEG-this Part that is hard to keep straight, this is the MPEG standard backing Xvid and DivX codecs. So let's encode video and torrent like it's 2002!
CharlesW [3 hidden]5 mins ago
FWIW, Via Licensing listed this patent as standards-essential to several MPEG codecs (AVC/H.264, HEVC/H.265, VVC/H.266), and it's also listed for VC-1 (a SMPTE standard).
p1mrx [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The openness of those codecs depend on the last patent expiring, not the first.
CharlesW [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Of course.
dylan604 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> So let's encode video and torrent like it's 2002!
Let's have a meet up a Circuit City!!
xattt [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I’m not sure how to get there. Do you have Microsoft Streets and Trips directions I can print off?
p1mrx [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Note that MPEG-4 part 2 is H.263/DivX/XviD, not H.264.
jchw [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Yeah. I think h264 is coming soon, too, though. Most of the remaining known h264 patents expire next year, with only one patent extending out further.
I do believe that more modern codecs like h265 and AV1 have a lot to offer us, but having h264 be fully unencumbered by patents will be nice. By modern standards it is very well-supported in both hardware and software, computationally cheap to encode and decode, and still does a good enough job for most use cases. h264 doesn't seem like it will be displaced any time soon to the degree that h264 once displaced its own predecessors, though obviously that's not to say that we don't see or won't see more adoption of newer video codecs across the internet in general, just that I think the h264 long tail will be one of the longest long tails of a video codec.
And thanks to the availability of codecs like AV1 which are effectively not patent encumbered (seems there is no practical reason to take the threats otherwise seriously) it seems the era of patent encumbered media formats is slowly coming to a close. Good riddance.
edit: Bit of a mess but here is some source for the h264 expiration.
So it seems 2030-11-10 is the date where h264 (version 3) will become patent unencumbered world wide, a bit earlier for the U.S. The other profiles/newer versions like AVC/SVC will take a while longer.
Dylan16807 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> computationally cheap to encode and decode
Well I'm not sure about decode, but as of a few years ago weren't h.265 and AV1 able to do much better compression than h.264 at almost all levels of compute? https://people.videolan.org/~unlord/SVT-AV1_BD-rate.png And h.266 encoders can probably go faster now too.
jchw [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I would hope so! Otherwise the Pareto front wouldn't have moved in ~20 years which would be rather hard to believe.
However, at the same time, h265, h266 and AV1 are all vastly more complicated, and will have less broad hardware acceleration support than h264, which, again, even if it is not optimally efficient use of compute, just doesn't require a whole lot by modern standards.
So I'd argue there is really no reason to be rushing away from h264 unless you have a compelling reason. There are some obvious compelling reasons in some cases; nobody is going to be terribly surprised that an entity like Netflix is eager to switch to codecs that will save bandwidth, because at their scale saving bytes definitely adds up, bonus points if it can increase the quality at the same time.
On the other hand, though, unless you are absolutely sure you can switch to only new codecs, you will probably want to keep some h264 encodings around to act as a fallback baseline for legacy devices. And thus, you also have to take into account the complexity brought on by needing to store and maintain multiple encodings - in many use cases, like simple <video>s thrown into website backgrounds, I can see just eating the extra bandwidth costs and keeping it all h264 as a valid strategy.
duskwuff [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Once the patents expire, I expect to see H.264 become the JPEG of video codecs - it may not be the most efficient format available, but it's widely supported, relatively easy to encode/decode, and good enough quality for many use cases.
(MP3 is in a similar place. AAC and Opus are technically superior, but everything supports MP3.)
ksec [3 hidden]5 mins ago
>(MP3 is in a similar place. AAC and Opus are technically superior, but everything supports MP3.)
Actually MP3 is more like the H.263 / Divx here. AAC-LC is more like H.264. The difference in support of AAC-LC and MP3 is near zero, both in terms of hardware and software. While AAC-LC is vastly more superior. AAC-LC has been declared patent free ( all patent expired ) by Redhat for 9 years already.
The only part that is not perfect is there isn't a decent open source AAC-LC encoder. While you could use QAAC using Apple's encoder in iTunes. It would still have been better if there was an open source version. Luckily we just have a new AAC encoder with FFmpeg, it is doing great for and although sill not Apple's quality. But hopefully improve in the future.
Or Apple could have just open source the god damn thing.
Dylan16807 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Well a lot of the improvements cost more computation. I wouldn't be surprised if low-computation video had only improved slightly, but it seems like it has improved a lot. The advantage of h264 is hardware adoption much more than actually being computationally cheap, it seems? Well, maybe. The thing is, I don't know how the decoders scale. Can you make a decoder for a constrained AV1/h.265 in the same hardware space or maximum CPU budget as an h.264 decoder and still see very big advantages?
userbinator [3 hidden]5 mins ago
just that I think the h264 long tail will be one of the longest long tails of a video codec.
I think MPEG-1 and 2 (from which MP3 comes) might be even longer.
drmpeg [3 hidden]5 mins ago
MPEG-2 video is still very much alive. In the US, almost all terrestrial OTA broadcast (ATSC 1.0) and all SD channels on cable systems. Even Comcast VOD was all MPEG-2 (including HD) until they shut down the QAM version in 2023.
userbinator [3 hidden]5 mins ago
DivX/XviD yes, but not H.263. Patents for H.263 expired long ago. This is MPEG-4 ASP, which is a superset of H.263.
(Source: have written a H.263 decoder as a learning exercise.)
anthk [3 hidden]5 mins ago
H.263 was used as the former codec of Netmeeting (and maybe some other VoIP software too).
userbinator [3 hidden]5 mins ago
H.263 was definitely a standard in videoconferencing and low-bitrate video in general (YouTube and many other streaming sutes used FLV1, which was a variant of H.263) prior to H.264.
1317 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
as everyone is saying, this is Xvid, NOT h264. pretty poor reporting by phoronix here
Good. I have been poking at rcarmo/go-264 but was hesitant to tackle encoding :)
midnightbobarun [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Very nice, I hope this means increased support for it in open source projects
rurban [3 hidden]5 mins ago
But they sold xvid decoders already for the last 20 years. Every Chinese dvd players could play xvid already. Just not >1 b-frames
nikanj [3 hidden]5 mins ago
It's so weird to look at the patents list for H.264 and see multiple patents granted after the H.264 specification was released. Was the situation similar for MPEG-4?
wmf [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The patent pool system is really bad. There's no incentive to weed out bad patents.
userbinator [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Those patents may not necessarily be required to encode or decode, if they're just a new way to implement some part of the specification.
aboardRat4 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
When MPEG-5?
ksec [3 hidden]5 mins ago
There is. MPEG-5 EVC Basic Profile that is Patent unencumbered, with only dozens patents that is soon to be expired, and EVC High Profile that competes with VVC in terms of quality.
There is also LCEVC ( Not connected with EVC ) that is a scaling layer on top of existing video codec. You can apply LCEVC on top of EVC, VVC, HEVC or AVC as well as AV1 and AV2. LCEVC has been selected by Brail as part of their TV 3.0 technology stack on top VVC.
While there are momentum on LCEVC, I actually wished EVC gained more momentum. I guess everything is too late now.
LtdJorge [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Never, I hope
anthk [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Too late; software patents in Europe were void so most people grabbed XVID/DIVX encoders from Debian Multimedia. PKF and the like.
And, yes, I remember w32codecs until MPlayer's bundled set superseded them. And mencoder for sure ;)
HN.zip
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...
At which point, the continued march towards higher resolution and bandwidth video will probably limit their utility
Just as the patent system intended: maximum extraction was enabled while the product was useful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause
The purpose of the system as it was originally conceived was not to provide maximum economic extraction -- the purpose was to promote the progress of science and useful arts.
It is not necessarily the case that the maximization of economic extraction coincides with the progress of science and useful arts.
When I was in law school we were taught what seemed obvious then and is obvious now: that Congress has the power to promote the progress of science and useful arts by giving authors and inventors exclusive right to the economic fruits of their works. You can argue about flaws in the system but it’s pretty laughable to suggest that copyrights and patents don’t exist for the purposes of maximum economic value extraction for inventors and authors.
There is quite literally no other reason for granting a copyright or patent. It’s also why if a plaintiff is successful in a claim for an infringement of either, he’ll get awarded money in the United States that at a bare minimum is designed to compensate him for the money he would have made if the patent or copyright had been complied with. Europe has some different ideas about moral rights in this space, but since you’re quoting US material I assume you aren’t referring to our funny brothers across the pond.
It’s obvious to most people that humans act in certain ways due to incentives, and we like to incentivise invention and creativity in the West.
For a lot of use cases, including Basic and Main profile, H.264 is already free.
Assuming the product companies accept the plateau on resolution (I agree it’s likely), there are many ways to exploit the other stuff. Colour space, tacling each type of compression artifact, additional channels (probly not long until we have HDR RGBW), etc etc and those will each come with their committees made of patent-hungry companies seeing non-encumbered encodings as “undesirable”
As it becomes cheaper to capture and process higher res content, we're bound to push it to bigger displays (VR included). I guess the human eye will be the limit when we're at retina levels of DPI on a sphere.
We'll see how much 360 content shows up, but the size gap is so big it basically needs to be handled entirely differently. A 16x9 screen, 40 degrees wide, is only 2% of a sphere.
Since MPEG-this Part that is hard to keep straight, this is the MPEG standard backing Xvid and DivX codecs. So let's encode video and torrent like it's 2002!
Let's have a meet up a Circuit City!!
I do believe that more modern codecs like h265 and AV1 have a lot to offer us, but having h264 be fully unencumbered by patents will be nice. By modern standards it is very well-supported in both hardware and software, computationally cheap to encode and decode, and still does a good enough job for most use cases. h264 doesn't seem like it will be displaced any time soon to the degree that h264 once displaced its own predecessors, though obviously that's not to say that we don't see or won't see more adoption of newer video codecs across the internet in general, just that I think the h264 long tail will be one of the longest long tails of a video codec.
And thanks to the availability of codecs like AV1 which are effectively not patent encumbered (seems there is no practical reason to take the threats otherwise seriously) it seems the era of patent encumbered media formats is slowly coming to a close. Good riddance.
edit: Bit of a mess but here is some source for the h264 expiration.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...
So it seems 2030-11-10 is the date where h264 (version 3) will become patent unencumbered world wide, a bit earlier for the U.S. The other profiles/newer versions like AVC/SVC will take a while longer.
Well I'm not sure about decode, but as of a few years ago weren't h.265 and AV1 able to do much better compression than h.264 at almost all levels of compute? https://people.videolan.org/~unlord/SVT-AV1_BD-rate.png And h.266 encoders can probably go faster now too.
However, at the same time, h265, h266 and AV1 are all vastly more complicated, and will have less broad hardware acceleration support than h264, which, again, even if it is not optimally efficient use of compute, just doesn't require a whole lot by modern standards.
So I'd argue there is really no reason to be rushing away from h264 unless you have a compelling reason. There are some obvious compelling reasons in some cases; nobody is going to be terribly surprised that an entity like Netflix is eager to switch to codecs that will save bandwidth, because at their scale saving bytes definitely adds up, bonus points if it can increase the quality at the same time.
On the other hand, though, unless you are absolutely sure you can switch to only new codecs, you will probably want to keep some h264 encodings around to act as a fallback baseline for legacy devices. And thus, you also have to take into account the complexity brought on by needing to store and maintain multiple encodings - in many use cases, like simple <video>s thrown into website backgrounds, I can see just eating the extra bandwidth costs and keeping it all h264 as a valid strategy.
(MP3 is in a similar place. AAC and Opus are technically superior, but everything supports MP3.)
Actually MP3 is more like the H.263 / Divx here. AAC-LC is more like H.264. The difference in support of AAC-LC and MP3 is near zero, both in terms of hardware and software. While AAC-LC is vastly more superior. AAC-LC has been declared patent free ( all patent expired ) by Redhat for 9 years already.
The only part that is not perfect is there isn't a decent open source AAC-LC encoder. While you could use QAAC using Apple's encoder in iTunes. It would still have been better if there was an open source version. Luckily we just have a new AAC encoder with FFmpeg, it is doing great for and although sill not Apple's quality. But hopefully improve in the future.
Or Apple could have just open source the god damn thing.
I think MPEG-1 and 2 (from which MP3 comes) might be even longer.
(Source: have written a H.263 decoder as a learning exercise.)
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...
There is also LCEVC ( Not connected with EVC ) that is a scaling layer on top of existing video codec. You can apply LCEVC on top of EVC, VVC, HEVC or AVC as well as AV1 and AV2. LCEVC has been selected by Brail as part of their TV 3.0 technology stack on top VVC.
While there are momentum on LCEVC, I actually wished EVC gained more momentum. I guess everything is too late now.
And, yes, I remember w32codecs until MPlayer's bundled set superseded them. And mencoder for sure ;)