H.264 Streaming Fees: What Changed, Who's Affected, and What It Means

https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=173935

44•phantomathkg•2h ago

Comments

breve•2h ago

There's no point supporting these parasitic business models. Use royalty-free video and audio formats.

AV1 for video: https://aomedia.org/specifications/av1/

And Opus for audio: https://opus-codec.org/

cwillu•1h ago

“Access Advance and Avanci have published rates for a pool asserting content royalties across AVC, HEVC, VP9, VVC, and AV1 that could push major platforms toward nine-figure annual exposure.”

breve•1h ago

Yes, they've made claims on AV1, claims that have never been tested in court.

You need to understand that these are parasitic businesses. They didn't develop AV1. They didn't contribute to AV1. But they will make any claim they think they can get away with.

Show me the court case they've won that validates their claims on AV1.

uyzstvqs•41m ago

AV1 was created by a consortium of some of the biggest tech companies in the world, and "all technology was vetted in a rigorous patent review process before being integrated into the final spec."[0]

On the other side, you've got patent trolls who are upset that their shitty business model is coming to an end. They're just being loud as they're losing.

[0] https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?Art...

jmclnx•1h ago

I was going to suggest you missed vorbis ogg. So I went looking for a link, I found out this:

> Since 2013, the Xiph.Org Foundation has stated that the use of Vorbis should be deprecated in favor of the Opus codec

I never heard of Opus, so some links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_(audio_format)

From what I can find, seems opus only supports audio. ogg also has a video format (ogv), odd it is suggested ogg was superseded by opus. Maybe I am missing something ?

breve•1h ago

Ogg is a container format. It contains audio and video tracks: https://www.xiph.org/ogg/

It's like Matroska: https://www.matroska.org/what_is_matroska.html

Or MP4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP4_file_format

daneel_w•1h ago

Ogg is the container, Vorbis is the audio codec, and colloquially people just called Vorbis-encoded audio "ogg" because of the ogg container.

Vorbis was hit-or-miss. In some cases it did better on same or lower bitrate than MP3 encoded by LAME, in some cases worse. It also suffered an entirely new category of "chirpy/tweety" artefacts similar to what MP3 exhibits at very low bitrates, but with Vorbis they showed up even at nominal bitrates during certain complex spectral patterns. I was a vocal proponent of Vorbis back when it surfaced, but soon changed stance when realizing how unreliable it was quality-wise.

thaumasiotes•1h ago

> and colloquially people just called Vorbis-encoded audio "ogg" because of the ogg container.

I would bet that the primary reason wasn't the container format, which nobody really cares about and most users wouldn't have been aware of, but rather the fact that the file extension was '.ogg'.

daneel_w•1h ago

That is what I meant.

josephg•1h ago

AV1 / Opus where we can. But H264 is far better supported. For example, Safari doesn't include a software AV1 decoder. So AV1 videos only work in safari on M3 or later laptops, and iPhone 15 or later phones.

H264 is the compatibility king.

https://caniuse.com/av1

galad87•1h ago

Safari, or better, macOS and iOS include a software AV1 decoder (libdav1d), but it's used only to decode avif, and to generate file previews in Finder.

WithinReason•1h ago

Dolby just sued Snapchat over patents for using AV1:

https://www.techspot.com/news/111865-dolby-sues-snap-over-vi...

gausswho•47m ago

And that's when you know they're afraid. Dolby's case sounds like a desperate moonshot.

mdavid626•1h ago

AV1 lacks hw support…

breve•1h ago

My laptop has hardware AV1 encoding and decoding. My TV has AV1 decoding. My phone has AV1 decoding. None of these devices are particularly new.

And don't underestimate dav1d (https://www.videolan.org/projects/dav1d.html). You can comfortably play AV1 video in software on your phone. Try it with VLC.

petcat•59m ago

> You can comfortably play AV1 video in software on your phone

Maybe for about 15 minutes before your battery is drained to 20%. I'm not aware of any software video decoder at all that won't unacceptably heat up your phone and kill your battery.

breve•58m ago

Why say maybe? Why not simply try it for yourself?

petcat•55m ago

I don't need to try it myself to know that software video decoding on the CPU is not a viable solution on mobile phones.

breve•38m ago

Of course it is. Even the iPhone 7 from 2016 can play 1080p AV1 video.

Why did you spend all that money on your phone if you're not going to exercise the hardware?

daneel_w•50m ago

You really are underestimating just how far e.g. Apple's mobile CPUs have come in terms of raw performance and power-efficiency.

TheMiddleMan•1h ago

It's coming along nicely https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#Hardware_encoding_and_deco...

Also decoding on a reasonably powerful (non-accelerated) cpu is fast enough for 1080p, not ideal for battery life but still.

canpan•1h ago

Patent free video is in a strange space. I recently looked into just using old formats. To be super safe. With audio we have mp3 which is good enough for a lot of cases and seems to be patent free. But for mpeg2 (used on DVD) even though it is really old (1995?) it is still patent encumbered in some places until 2035? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-2

silotis•38m ago

MPEG plays a clever game with their standards. A standard like MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 Part 10 (aka H.264) doesn't just refer to one standard but rather a whole series of standards published over an extended period. Patents are pooled by standard with deliberate ambiguity over which parts of the standard each patent actually covers.

This lets patent holders spread FUD over whether earlier parts of the standard are actually patent free even after 20 years have passed since the original publishing.

In the face of patent holders threatening a costly legal battle, companies choose to continue paying licensing fees even on standards which plainly should be out of patent protection.

ZeroGravitas•1h ago

This author has worked on behalf of the patent parasite companies before so if you are left feeling "I need to pay these people" that may not be accurate.

uyzstvqs•1h ago

Relevant: Have the patents for H.264 MPEG-4 AVC expired yet?

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...

cowpig•34m ago

A sure sign that this is completely, utterly, decoupled from market forces is the way that a 5M-person streaming platform (which likely has negative margins or is struggling to make profit) is expected to pay $0.45/user, while Netflix is expected to pay 1.5 cents per user.

I would guess that this is because the larger the number for major players, the more incentive they would have to invest in supporting open standards (or try and get a standard of their own).

This is evidence that the patent system is not doing what it's supposed to be doing imo.

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H.264 Streaming Fees: What Changed, Who's Affected, and What It Means

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