H.265 video will cause more freedom issues than H.264

10 respostas [Última entrada]
t3g
t3g
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Joined: 05/15/2011

http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=H.265-HEVC-Patent-Pool

"A new patent pool is forming that wants 0.5% of the gross revenue for H.265 videos from content owners and distributors."

Let's hope this encourages Mozilla to finish Daala since the developer has been on their payroll for many years, but we really haven't seen anything. Same goes for Google pushing WebM v2 which uses VP9 and Opus on more platforms and hardware.

Calinou
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Joined: 03/08/2014

The real fight is for hardware acceleration support -- neither WebM nor Daala are supported on most hardware currently (so the CPU is used instead for decoding, let alone encoding). Maybe you're fine with software decoding (which is much slower and more power-hungry), but mobile definitely can't afford it.

jxself
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Joined: 09/13/2010
GNUser
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Joined: 07/17/2013

Does that still requires proprietary software?
I see in the second link that AllWinner boards are capable of VP8 decoding, does that mean with only proprietary drivers/firmware or any other software too?
Thanks.

Legimet
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Joined: 12/10/2013

Well, there is a project to reverse engineer CedarX: https://linux-sunxi.org/CedarX

t3g
t3g
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Joined: 05/15/2011

Companies like Apple and Microsoft will not support WebM because they may get patent royalties from H.264 and H.265. The Safari browsers on Apple hardware only have support for H.264, but since WebM is not supported at the phone/tablet level, it becomes more of an issue as that is where the majority of users have moved to for their everyday needs.

Internet Explorer is a little better in that you can install a WebM codec for HTML5 video, but it requires a installation of a Google package that has the GoogleUpdate.exe process always running and checking with Google servers.

jxself
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Joined: 09/13/2010

This situation is improving, and there is a JavaScript decoder for WebM available now. This can be easily adopted as a fallback method for browsers that don't have built-in support for WebM, since both Safari & IE do support JavaScript.

t3g
t3g
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Joined: 05/15/2011

Which one do you recommend? Route9.js? Whammy?

jxself
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Joined: 09/13/2010

There is also http://libwebpjs.appspot.com/vp8/webm-javascript-decoder/ and dash.js is also an option for adaptive streaming. I've not used any of them though so can't make a recommendation but it seems that every browser is covered with free codecs is all I wanted to point out. :)

t3g
t3g
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Joined: 05/15/2011

Most of these have either been abandoned and/or not updated in years. Kinda sucks that WebM is still not a big priority as I would like to build sites for either myself or clients that I can do without MP4 entirely and just serve WebM.

jxself
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Joined: 09/13/2010

The bitstream has been frozen for years. That makes any decoder based on the frozen bitstream remains compatible even through future encoder versions as long as the bitstream doesn't change (and it hasn't - it's been frozen.)