I am still a bit confused what the point of VP9 is.
Microsoft and Apple pay for the licenses on behalf of developers and users so licensing cost only affects a very tiny minority. And with the likes of Sony (PS), Microsoft (Windows/XBox) and Apple (iOS/OSX/Final Cut) firmly in the H.265 camp why would you produce content for VP9 if no one can play it.
You're forgetting the largest smartphone OS provider. And as Android is embedded into devices like televisions and cars, having a great libre codec available could be a significant advantage.
If you encode a video into mpeg4 format, even using a commercial tool whose makers pays mpeg4 license, that license doesn't extend to the resulting video.
If you post such video on your website, you're violating mpeg4 patents and have to pay mpeg4 licensing fee (up to $5 million/year).
That basically puts mpeg4 out of reach for 99.9% content creators that cannot afford even talking to mpeg4 consortium about the license.
Not to mention that most people don't use commercial tools. We use ffmpeg/x264, which is not only free but has better quality than expensive commercial tools. Even using those tools without paying a license is not permitted (although, obviously, most people simply don't understand that or willfully ignore banking that mpeg4 la won't sue them).
Microsoft and Apple pays so that users of their software can CONSUME mpeg4 format.
All CREATORS are left out in cold and have to license the patents.
Given that video becomes more and more ubiquitous, it's not an acceptable situation for the web just as it wasn't acceptable to have to pay for using .gif format to post a picture on your website (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html)
> If you post such video on your website, you're violating mpeg4 patents and have to pay mpeg4 licensing fee (up to $5 million/year).
No. There is a (in my opinion) fairly permissive "free" tier[1]. Posting a h264 encoded video on your website does not immediately mean you need to pay royalties.
> That basically puts mpeg4 out of reach for 99.9% content creators that cannot afford even talking to mpeg4 consortium about the license.
I think that's a bit of hyperbole.
It's not cheap, but the MPEG-LA don't charge you for talking to them. If you submit a valid request for a license based on your units[2], then they will provide you with one. In fact, you don't need to pay fees if your paid-for content is less than 12 minutes long[2], and you're looking at $5000/year + $2500 per encoder for a 500k - 999k audience.
As always comes up in the discussions of AVC/h264 vs WebM/Theora/VP8-9: there's no guarantee that use of the latter solutions provides protection from patent litigation. AVC/h264 isn't immune either, but at least you have an idea and (so far) there doesn't appear to have been any major trolls chasing h264 content distributors. WebM/VP8/etc are untested here; not just because of their youth but also because there are few (if any?) big deployments outside of YouTube (and even then).
Saying the free tier means you don't need to pay royalties is a bit of a stretch. Are you suggesting everyone who wants to post videos should somehow configure their web server to power itself off after serving up exactly N copies of the mpeg-4 video stream? That's ridiculous.
If you put mpeg-4 video up on the internet, eventually the MPEG-LA will come calling for royalties; the question is just how long you can stay under the radar. Maybe you can forever, but counting on it is bad business. Making choices for how to build internet technologies (and businesses) based on the MPEG-LA's current licensing terms is not great thinking either. What do you suggest people do if the terms change in 2016 to be more aggressive, once the MPEG-LA no longer feels the need to offer free tiers to improve adoption?
I also don't know how you can say there are no big trolls chasing h264 content distributors. Motorola rolled up with submarine h264 patents and asserted them against one of the biggest players in the business - the only thing stopping them from going after companies that do pure content distribution is whether it would be profitable.
If I use my Canon 5D/iPhone to film a movie then edit with Final Cut Pro and upload my video to YouTube at what point am I required to pay the MPEG-LA for a license ? Are you really suggesting that tens of millions of people are in breach of MPEG-LA licensing requirements ?
So let me get this straight -- Patents not only cover the right to produce instances of an invention, but also for usage of those instances/devices also? So what happens if for example Ford is found to be violating someones patent on an engine part. Then even if Ford pays up a license, could the patent owner sue me for driving the car, and charge me a per mile royalty?
Part of me would love to see this happen, simply so that enough "regular people" will force their politicians to change the laws.
This is, after all, why many U.S.-based distros refused to package and ship patent-encumbered code by default, is because end-users would also be theoretically liable.
I'm not sure this has ever been tested in court. But yes, as far as I can tell, that is what they are trying to claim.
It's interesting, because to stream H.264 video, you don't even need to necessarily have encode it. You could get video encoded by a third party (perhaps you got it that way, or perhaps you sent it to a third party to re-encode), serve it to your users, and they could play it with licensed H.264 player. The MPEG-LA seems to think that for doing that, you should have to pay them a license, despite the fact that you have never touched an H.264 encoder or decoder.
I would find it hard to believe that they could sue you for this and actually succeed, though they could probably bleed smaller players dry in the process of defending themselves.
It would be interesting to set up a video service that did this; used H.264 without ever using an encoder. You could make your users upload it encoded appropriately, or use Zencoder or AWS Encoding to transcode it for you.
Not in this case because then technically YouTube is a publisher and Google pays the license.
But if you were to post this video on your website and and if there was any income attached (e.g. you also have AdSense ads on your website), then you have to pay.
If there is no income attached, you don't have to pay royalties but still need to get the license and good luck with that if you're a dad and all you want is post a video of your kid on the internet so that his grandparents can see it.
"Where MPEG-4 Visual material is provided for remuneration, video providers may be required to pay royalties for the right to use the decoders and encoders in the following circumstances:
* MPEG-4 Visual material is provided for direct remuneration (for example, remuneration is from a user for a subscription and the number of different subscribers exceeds certain minimums, or for specific video titles).
* Remuneration is from other sources (for example, free over-the-air broadcasting).
However, in the case of video that is delivered via the Internet to a user without charge, no royalties are payable during the first term of the license (ending December 31, 2008), but you still need to obtain the license."
Microsoft and Apple aren't paying for the licenses at all. They are companies not the codec license charity faries. The cost is just attached to the price of their products without the consumer knowing.
Also there is Android, Chrome and ChromeOS which should have support.
Not everyone wants to pay a tax or go though a licensing procedure to implement some supposedly 'open' standard.
The main issue is Free software doesn't work with licensing. Linux distros are free (as in money), they can't have proprietary licensed patents. So you can't legally playback videos on your Linux distro so people keep buying Windows. It could even be considered another form of vendor lock in, except this time it's locking you into big business $$$ all hail capitalism VS opensource not everything has to have money running it.
There are usage cases for people outside of the bigcontent->consumer devices ecosystem. For example if I'm a game dev looking to put FMV videos into my game I can shop around for something proprietary like Blink or H.26X and fork over money for a 'off the shelf solution' or I can grab a open source library stick it in and not have to pay a dime. And who cares if it has to full back onto software decoding on Apple and Windows devices it's only a few minutes of playback and the game itself is going to be eating the battery much more. Similarly if I'm looking to implement some kind of video chat protocol.
Also if I'm on standards body looking to make a new standard for some new media or transmission format why use something that will require the companies making products get an extra overhead. Unfortunately we are likely to be stuck with H.26X derivatives from now on since it had gotten wide spread usage by being first to the gate and has so many companies backing it, generally with vested interests (the companies in the H.264 patent pool is basically every hardware manufacturer ever, I can't see how a fucking video codec can have that many patents on it)
Also patents on technology are now basically forever, not 20 years. Most technology doesn't last 20 years now days. Even the older industries that rely on 30 year old technology due to it's reliability are probably going to end up moving onto a fast update cycle (look at SpaceX making a new rocket in 2 years). We are unlikely to ever see H.26X free as they will just keep releasing newer versions with more patents on it and ensuring their employees on the various standards boards vote it in for things like new media format standards. Yeh, your media player doesn't have to pay for H.264 in the year 2030, but there is still a license cost for H.265 and by then they are up to H.269 with super retina display support and 3D volumetric holograms or whatever.
It also goes well beyond a single video codec. Look at the future of SD Cards, SDXC. It's using the exfat filesystem from Microsoft so every SD card reader will have a hidden MS tax attached to it for the next 20 years (by which time we will likely have abandoned the format and just be using some wireless storage standard, chances are it will have it's own licensing). Pretty much every device in existence has hundreds of companies receiving kickbacks (if they use H.264 there are hundreds right there). These licenses are generally not horrible individually but all this crap together with other stuff like DRM, secure boot loaders and so on makes a web trapping people to specific technologies, business interests and so on and generally just making alternatives such as Linux much more of a pain to use.
In case anyone was wondering, like I was how VP9 quality stacks up, here's a comparison: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctjm1kxw-BM (although it's a bit weird since everything is re-encoded for youtube, so take with a grain of salt).
To my eyes, VP9 looks roughly on par with h264, but not as good as h265.
That would be a pretty big grain, Comparisons like that are basically useless. Your YouTube is likely to be using H.264. H.265 and H.264 will be sharing much of their encoding technologies, so they gain fewer encoding artefacts and loose less quality by taking a H.264 and re-encoding it as a H.265 than you would by taking a VP9 and re-encoding is as a H.264.
The only real way is for someone to shoot raw video, and compress them both separately.
"yes, vp9 would be helpful with its larger transform sizes. Plus the improved coefficient coding scheme, assymmetric transforms, new intra prediction modes, etc.
There's also some investigation going on around genuine yuv444 support,
or even lossless. However, keep in mind that most improvements of vp9 compared to vp8
are related to video coding (inter-frame prediction). And there's the cost inherent to introducing another bitstream format, which is a long-haul effort. Takeway: need some experiments and data point about extra-gain vs extra-complexity (including project complexity)"
Slightly related to the discussion here: yesterday I found out that the Rasberry Pi is about 10% cheaper because it doesn't include licences for proprietary codecs [1]. As consumer electronics are getting cheaper and open/free licenses are becoming more popular, hopefully we'll see more of this happening.
The RPi does come with licenses for some proprietary codecs, namely MPEG-4 Part 10 (H264) and MPEG-4 Part 2 (DivX, Xvid and the like), mostly because they're cheap and their use widespread. The extra license you can buy are for codecs that are either too expensive (MPEG-2) or not used very much so their inclusion would increase the price of the RPi for everyone while only being useful for a few.
29 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 66.7 ms ] threadMicrosoft and Apple pay for the licenses on behalf of developers and users so licensing cost only affects a very tiny minority. And with the likes of Sony (PS), Microsoft (Windows/XBox) and Apple (iOS/OSX/Final Cut) firmly in the H.265 camp why would you produce content for VP9 if no one can play it.
If you encode a video into mpeg4 format, even using a commercial tool whose makers pays mpeg4 license, that license doesn't extend to the resulting video.
If you post such video on your website, you're violating mpeg4 patents and have to pay mpeg4 licensing fee (up to $5 million/year).
That basically puts mpeg4 out of reach for 99.9% content creators that cannot afford even talking to mpeg4 consortium about the license.
Not to mention that most people don't use commercial tools. We use ffmpeg/x264, which is not only free but has better quality than expensive commercial tools. Even using those tools without paying a license is not permitted (although, obviously, most people simply don't understand that or willfully ignore banking that mpeg4 la won't sue them).
Microsoft and Apple pays so that users of their software can CONSUME mpeg4 format.
All CREATORS are left out in cold and have to license the patents.
Given that video becomes more and more ubiquitous, it's not an acceptable situation for the web just as it wasn't acceptable to have to pay for using .gif format to post a picture on your website (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html)
No. There is a (in my opinion) fairly permissive "free" tier[1]. Posting a h264 encoded video on your website does not immediately mean you need to pay royalties.
> That basically puts mpeg4 out of reach for 99.9% content creators that cannot afford even talking to mpeg4 consortium about the license.
I think that's a bit of hyperbole.
It's not cheap, but the MPEG-LA don't charge you for talking to them. If you submit a valid request for a license based on your units[2], then they will provide you with one. In fact, you don't need to pay fees if your paid-for content is less than 12 minutes long[2], and you're looking at $5000/year + $2500 per encoder for a 500k - 999k audience.
As always comes up in the discussions of AVC/h264 vs WebM/Theora/VP8-9: there's no guarantee that use of the latter solutions provides protection from patent litigation. AVC/h264 isn't immune either, but at least you have an idea and (so far) there doesn't appear to have been any major trolls chasing h264 content distributors. WebM/VP8/etc are untested here; not just because of their youth but also because there are few (if any?) big deployments outside of YouTube (and even then).
[1]: http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/mpeg-la-h264... [2]: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/AVC_TermsS...
If you put mpeg-4 video up on the internet, eventually the MPEG-LA will come calling for royalties; the question is just how long you can stay under the radar. Maybe you can forever, but counting on it is bad business. Making choices for how to build internet technologies (and businesses) based on the MPEG-LA's current licensing terms is not great thinking either. What do you suggest people do if the terms change in 2016 to be more aggressive, once the MPEG-LA no longer feels the need to offer free tiers to improve adoption?
I also don't know how you can say there are no big trolls chasing h264 content distributors. Motorola rolled up with submarine h264 patents and asserted them against one of the biggest players in the business - the only thing stopping them from going after companies that do pure content distribution is whether it would be profitable.
If I use my Canon 5D/iPhone to film a movie then edit with Final Cut Pro and upload my video to YouTube at what point am I required to pay the MPEG-LA for a license ? Are you really suggesting that tens of millions of people are in breach of MPEG-LA licensing requirements ?
But yes, quite possibly millions of people have been violating the H264 patent terms without knowing it.
Part of me would love to see this happen, simply so that enough "regular people" will force their politicians to change the laws.
It's interesting, because to stream H.264 video, you don't even need to necessarily have encode it. You could get video encoded by a third party (perhaps you got it that way, or perhaps you sent it to a third party to re-encode), serve it to your users, and they could play it with licensed H.264 player. The MPEG-LA seems to think that for doing that, you should have to pay them a license, despite the fact that you have never touched an H.264 encoder or decoder.
I would find it hard to believe that they could sue you for this and actually succeed, though they could probably bleed smaller players dry in the process of defending themselves.
It would be interesting to set up a video service that did this; used H.264 without ever using an encoder. You could make your users upload it encoded appropriately, or use Zencoder or AWS Encoding to transcode it for you.
But if you were to post this video on your website and and if there was any income attached (e.g. you also have AdSense ads on your website), then you have to pay.
If there is no income attached, you don't have to pay royalties but still need to get the license and good luck with that if you're a dad and all you want is post a video of your kid on the internet so that his grandparents can see it.
This is clearly stated in e.g. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/licensing/mpeg...
"Where MPEG-4 Visual material is provided for remuneration, video providers may be required to pay royalties for the right to use the decoders and encoders in the following circumstances:
* MPEG-4 Visual material is provided for direct remuneration (for example, remuneration is from a user for a subscription and the number of different subscribers exceeds certain minimums, or for specific video titles).
* Remuneration is from other sources (for example, free over-the-air broadcasting).
However, in the case of video that is delivered via the Internet to a user without charge, no royalties are payable during the first term of the license (ending December 31, 2008), but you still need to obtain the license."
Uploading to YouTube (which serves ads to earn profits) is not non-commercial.
Don't trust me. Read the license agreement which came with your device.
Also if you are running a H.264 subscription service you are likely to be paying [tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/h-264-patents-how-much-do-the...).
Also there is Android, Chrome and ChromeOS which should have support.
Not everyone wants to pay a tax or go though a licensing procedure to implement some supposedly 'open' standard.
The main issue is Free software doesn't work with licensing. Linux distros are free (as in money), they can't have proprietary licensed patents. So you can't legally playback videos on your Linux distro so people keep buying Windows. It could even be considered another form of vendor lock in, except this time it's locking you into big business $$$ all hail capitalism VS opensource not everything has to have money running it.
There are usage cases for people outside of the bigcontent->consumer devices ecosystem. For example if I'm a game dev looking to put FMV videos into my game I can shop around for something proprietary like Blink or H.26X and fork over money for a 'off the shelf solution' or I can grab a open source library stick it in and not have to pay a dime. And who cares if it has to full back onto software decoding on Apple and Windows devices it's only a few minutes of playback and the game itself is going to be eating the battery much more. Similarly if I'm looking to implement some kind of video chat protocol.
Also if I'm on standards body looking to make a new standard for some new media or transmission format why use something that will require the companies making products get an extra overhead. Unfortunately we are likely to be stuck with H.26X derivatives from now on since it had gotten wide spread usage by being first to the gate and has so many companies backing it, generally with vested interests (the companies in the H.264 patent pool is basically every hardware manufacturer ever, I can't see how a fucking video codec can have that many patents on it)
Also patents on technology are now basically forever, not 20 years. Most technology doesn't last 20 years now days. Even the older industries that rely on 30 year old technology due to it's reliability are probably going to end up moving onto a fast update cycle (look at SpaceX making a new rocket in 2 years). We are unlikely to ever see H.26X free as they will just keep releasing newer versions with more patents on it and ensuring their employees on the various standards boards vote it in for things like new media format standards. Yeh, your media player doesn't have to pay for H.264 in the year 2030, but there is still a license cost for H.265 and by then they are up to H.269 with super retina display support and 3D volumetric holograms or whatever.
It also goes well beyond a single video codec. Look at the future of SD Cards, SDXC. It's using the exfat filesystem from Microsoft so every SD card reader will have a hidden MS tax attached to it for the next 20 years (by which time we will likely have abandoned the format and just be using some wireless storage standard, chances are it will have it's own licensing). Pretty much every device in existence has hundreds of companies receiving kickbacks (if they use H.264 there are hundreds right there). These licenses are generally not horrible individually but all this crap together with other stuff like DRM, secure boot loaders and so on makes a web trapping people to specific technologies, business interests and so on and generally just making alternatives such as Linux much more of a pain to use.
To my eyes, VP9 looks roughly on par with h264, but not as good as h265.
The only real way is for someone to shoot raw video, and compress them both separately.
"yes, vp9 would be helpful with its larger transform sizes. Plus the improved coefficient coding scheme, assymmetric transforms, new intra prediction modes, etc. There's also some investigation going on around genuine yuv444 support, or even lossless. However, keep in mind that most improvements of vp9 compared to vp8 are related to video coding (inter-frame prediction). And there's the cost inherent to introducing another bitstream format, which is a long-haul effort. Takeway: need some experiments and data point about extra-gain vs extra-complexity (including project complexity)"
https://groups.google.com/a/webmproject.org/d/msg/webp-discu...
[1] http://www.raspberrypi.com/license-keys/