Trying to milk the last drop before the patents expire? H.264 patents have already expired in most of the world and the remaining ones, which might not even be necessary for the vast majority of H.264 use, are also approaching expiry very soon:
Seems unlikely, migrating away from an entrenched codec like H264 isn't like a routine software update. It has widespread hardware support, and there's an enormous body of H264 video out there.
As fhn points out, there are now truly open video codecs available (open specification, royalty free, unencumbered by patent terms) that are able to compete with the patent-encumbered ones on technical merit. Seems curious that the patent-holders would want to hike prices in this way and validate the motivation behind the truly open codecs.
Also, the article mentions the licensing fees for H265 were also increased recently. It doesn't seem to give a figure, a quick web search turns up 25% [0] or perhaps 20% [1]. Perhaps I'm missing something obvious but I'm not clear on how the change in price relates to the patent dispute between Nokia and certain laptop manufacturers.
(It seems the H264 fee increase affects streaming providers only, whereas the H265 fee increase did not, as it affected laptop manufacturers.)
>Trying to milk the last drop before the patents expire?
Old licenses are grandfathered in previous pricing. So this isn't about milking, but likely a tactic specifically aiming at certain companies. But I am wondering why they bother to do this at this stage of the game.
I am hoping we could further innovate on top of H.264 to have a better patent free video codec.
That makes me feel even more strongly about throwing proprietary and predatory codecs in the trash and opting to use AV1 et al wherever possible, it's better anyways and surely close to a decade after coming out, we'd expect devices to support it well enough.
> it's better anyways and surely close to a decade after coming out, we'd expect devices to support it well enough.
A lot of people, myself included, are still using quite old hardware. The GPU in my daily driver is ~10 years old at this point. Between crypto, COVID, and this AI craze raising GPU costs by insane amounts, it hasn't made sense to replace it with something newer. I know I'm not alone on that...
For legacy devices, VP8/VP9 is a good option. Intel Added VP8 hardware decoding to Broadwell which was 12 years ago. Nvidia had hardware VP9 decoding 10 years ago on the Geforce 10 series. AMD had hardware VP9 decode support 9 years ago on the Radeon 400 series.
I work in AI and I'm surrounded by RTX-4090 and H100 servers but for much of the day to day AI training I use my RTX-970 in the desktop on my desk for convenience and it works just fine for most cases.
Literally 2 meters from my desk is a 2x RTX-4090 server and many times I just use my 8 year old GPU anyway so you don't need it.
For a long time I thought my RTX-2060 was just not capable and the other day I did a ffmpeg GPU transcode and was surprised by how well it did. So now I am thinking about putting on some of Google's new Gemma edge models (probably the smallest will work with my 6GB VRAM + 2 GB) setup. I am not a 100% sure what that 2GB is but I think it is borrowing from the system in some manner.
Insane in absolute terms, but not per user. Take look at the actual fee schedule [1]. The most costly is the license for cable TV, which costs 50¢ per year per subscriber. The least costly is social media, which goes up to whopping 4.5¢ per MAU per user.
I very much understand how the licensing alliance likely was bothered by the fact that they are leaving money on the table, when TikTok's revenue per user is $50 a year, and a cable subscription is easily $800 per year, with the high-end reaching $2000. The big players aren't going to notice much. For the small players, nothing changed.
I think the dumb part is that it's not like decoding or encoding video becomes harder when there's more users. The effort to write code for encoding for a small service of 1000 users and a large service of 10 million users is the exact same. We really don't need middlemen extracting everything they can, which will drive up costs.
Is it insane at all? The biggest fees are charged to the biggest providers. With short form video now the dominant form of addictive social media content, it doesn’t seem insane at all that large media companies ought to compensate inventors/owners of patented video technology. A company with 100 million or more subscribers is not a company I feel a lot of empathy for if they’re trying to avoid paying licensing fees.
It goes to $2.5m for 5 million users/subscribers and tops out at $4.5m for 100 million subscribers. It’s not staggered evenly at all IMO. So I worry mainly for the small players. This shouldn’t have any meaningful effect on any big player.
5 million users isn’t a lot unless we’re talking paid subscribers. Their license likely does not make a distinction. For a (free/ad supported) service like a niche YT clone, this could be fatal.
The problem is that open codecs can still be encumbered by patents and the holders will sue. VP9 and AV1 have their own patent pool for that very reason. Google may have open sourced its codecs but if they don’t indemnify users people who think they’re safe might be in for a bad time.
There's sadly loads of older Apple and Android devices out there holding back AV1 adoption for years to come. Hardware AV1 decoding only just arrived in the Apple M3+ and A17 Pro onwards, and software decoding has its own big trade offs regardless of the OS.
This seems particularly desperate, but I'm not surprised this is happening, given that patent owners in general have been very angry that H.264 didn't wind up being nearly as lucrative as MPEG-2 was. Hell, I remember the days when they couldn't even agree if H.264 should have a free streaming tier at all or not - and it seems like that went away.
Maybe Google should finally make good on their threat to only stream YouTube in royalty-free standards.
Also known as rent-seeking: "The act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, stifled competition, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, heightened debt levels, risk of growing corruption and cronyism, decreased public trust in institutions, and potential national decline."[a]
I guess to me this doesn't seem like that big of a deal? I mean if you have a 100 million subscribers, do you really care much about a few $million increase? I thought the big players like Youtube had already moved to open source codecs already anyway.
They should be sued. It's incredible discriminatory to make it so ridiculously hard for new players to complete.
Hopefully the Licensing Alliance never ever ever gets another customer ever again. Hopefully no one uses any of their new encodings. This is an untrustworthy company, that always have been out to fleece the industry and hold back humanity. Licensing Alliance embodies Lawful Evil, is a stain on the patent system as a whole. It's hard to find the words for how awful, how enraging this cabal is. Ugh. What an evil drain.
We should be able to use computers for audio and video, and it shouldnt involve kings ransoms to some jerks who are better at paperwork & lawyering.
All that work on av1 and av2 looking more and more civilization ally essential as times goes on.
That's just trying to promote a competitor. This is more or less what Fraunhofer did with the mp3 license, which resulted in bunch of new, and better formats.
75 comments
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...
As fhn points out, there are now truly open video codecs available (open specification, royalty free, unencumbered by patent terms) that are able to compete with the patent-encumbered ones on technical merit. Seems curious that the patent-holders would want to hike prices in this way and validate the motivation behind the truly open codecs.
Also, the article mentions the licensing fees for H265 were also increased recently. It doesn't seem to give a figure, a quick web search turns up 25% [0] or perhaps 20% [1]. Perhaps I'm missing something obvious but I'm not clear on how the change in price relates to the patent dispute between Nokia and certain laptop manufacturers.
(It seems the H264 fee increase affects streaming providers only, whereas the H265 fee increase did not, as it affected laptop manufacturers.)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46004129
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46003285
>Trying to milk the last drop before the patents expire?
Old licenses are grandfathered in previous pricing. So this isn't about milking, but likely a tactic specifically aiming at certain companies. But I am wondering why they bother to do this at this stage of the game.
I am hoping we could further innovate on top of H.264 to have a better patent free video codec.
That makes me feel even more strongly about throwing proprietary and predatory codecs in the trash and opting to use AV1 et al wherever possible, it's better anyways and surely close to a decade after coming out, we'd expect devices to support it well enough.
> it's better anyways and surely close to a decade after coming out, we'd expect devices to support it well enough.
A lot of people, myself included, are still using quite old hardware. The GPU in my daily driver is ~10 years old at this point. Between crypto, COVID, and this AI craze raising GPU costs by insane amounts, it hasn't made sense to replace it with something newer. I know I'm not alone on that...
Literally 2 meters from my desk is a 2x RTX-4090 server and many times I just use my 8 year old GPU anyway so you don't need it.
I very much understand how the licensing alliance likely was bothered by the fact that they are leaving money on the table, when TikTok's revenue per user is $50 a year, and a cable subscription is easily $800 per year, with the high-end reaching $2000. The big players aren't going to notice much. For the small players, nothing changed.
[1]: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/3wzYaofEETCfXdQmREx9BK-120...
Maybe Google should finally make good on their threat to only stream YouTube in royalty-free standards.
Also known as rent-seeking: "The act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, stifled competition, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, heightened debt levels, risk of growing corruption and cronyism, decreased public trust in institutions, and potential national decline."[a]
Sigh.
---
[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
Hopefully the Licensing Alliance never ever ever gets another customer ever again. Hopefully no one uses any of their new encodings. This is an untrustworthy company, that always have been out to fleece the industry and hold back humanity. Licensing Alliance embodies Lawful Evil, is a stain on the patent system as a whole. It's hard to find the words for how awful, how enraging this cabal is. Ugh. What an evil drain.
We should be able to use computers for audio and video, and it shouldnt involve kings ransoms to some jerks who are better at paperwork & lawyering.
All that work on av1 and av2 looking more and more civilization ally essential as times goes on.
Also I'm not responsible for whatever happens if you do this.