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.
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.
And, yes, I remember w32codecs until MPlayer's bundled set superseded them. And mencoder for sure ;)
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.
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.
Still, I don't see the point. Unlike video, audio decoding is so cheap you can practically do it on software even on fairly constrained devices. So really only in places like Bluetooth headphones where codec complexity can have a direct impact on battery life does it actually factor in. I say for most purposes people should just be going Opus today: it is far ahead of basically anything else. In most cases, for old devices you can simply ship software codecs instead.
Hell, Wikipedia ships video software codecs in the form of ogv.js, mainly because a lot of Apple devices wouldn't expose VP8/VP9 support even on SoCs that had hardware support for it, and that works surprisingly well. So for something like Opus, obviously it is trivial even on older hardware, even in the confines of a web browser. (And of course, Wikipedia uses it for Opus as well, but my understanding is this is only necessary for 1-2% of Internet traffic since most devices/browsers support Opus these days)
That may leave some niches where AAC-LC is still a reasonable choice, like maybe old PMPs. However, I reckon that there are probably a lot of older PMPs that in fact, don't natively support AAC. For example, the trusty Sansa Clip+ from 2009 doesn't have AAC support. If you were to install third-party software such as Rockbox, well, then you'd have Opus support.
So for audio, I think barring any specific reason not to, the meta is to basically always choose Opus.
I think MPEG-1 and 2 (from which MP3 comes) might be even longer.
I don't see H.262 as becoming completely irrelevant any time soon, so it's clearly had a hell of a run, but I expect H.264 to wind up having a similarly long tail. I am not sure I'd bet on it being longer, but I wouldn't bet against it either. I'm only of the opinion that H.264 will have one of the longest of any video codec, but perhaps not the longest.
(Source: have written a H.263 decoder as a learning exercise.)
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.
They exist to maximize the production of scientific and artistic works and do so by incentivizing creators with a limited exclusionary property right over the created work.
If the goal of this particular section were to maximize what authors and inventors can extract from their creations then explicitly assigning to them the property rights in perpetuity of said creations would have been the way to ensure that outcome.
Given that they specifically wrote "by securing for limited Times" it is entirely reasonable to make this interpretation and I'm not sure why you weren't taught this interpretation in law school -- it's a pretty settled thing and there have been many times that this subject has come up in US courts over the years.
And this isn't so whack if you stop and think about it. There are all kinds of limitations on intellectual property rights.
Like take trade secret protection for exampple -- it has no term limit and no disclosure requirement. If maximum extraction were the goal then patents would look like trade secrets. Instead the bargain that the patent system forces on creators requires them to publish their invention and then hands the rights to that invention to the public after a finite period of time. The system is explicitly designed to be less extractive compared to others on purpose.
And if copyright is built for maximum extraction why does it carve out an affirmative defense in the form of fair use for others to use copyrighted works without paying? Same with first sale, same with the idea/expression dichotomy -- so much of the antisocial contemporary intellectual property regime is configured around providing people free access to the use of intellectual property.
> There is quite literally no other reason for granting a copyright or patent.
"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."
It seems pretty clear to me from that sentence that the stated purpose of these laws was to drive the creation of science and art and that a limited time profit incentive being enshrined in law was merely a carrot to create an incentive for that.
The framers understood the complex interplay between property rights, freedoms, and incentives in driving innovation and creation.
Knowing that granting someone an exclusive right to something that isn't subject to finite physical limitations effectively denies everyone else in society that same right the framers still understood that it was necessary to abridge the freedoms of some to enrich society as a whole through the development of science and art.
In choosing to use the words "for limited times" the framers encoded the economic priority of the majority of society over the economic priority of the minority of creators into this section but they also did not give a specific time which to me speaks to their understanding of the complexity the interplay between all the factors and allowed for the possibility that they could change over time.
On damages: that's a non-sequitur. How a system enforces an entitlement once created tells you nothing about why it was created. Tort damages compensate plaintiffs but nobody woudl say that tort law exists to maximize plaintiff recovery.
It isn't in dispute that people respond to incentives. That's precisely why the size of the incentives and the configuration of the incentive structure matters and why we have things like term limits and fair use.
Actually it’s the opposite - both patents and copyrights expire after a period of time, which is the compromise we’ve reached between incentivising people to make money for themselves personally (giving them a legally protected right over their creations), and allowing wider society to benefit from inventions and scientific discovery. The fact that patents and copyrights do not exist in perpetuity points towards the idea that they exist to promote invention and scientific discovery in ways that can be commercially exploited but only for a limited time, usually by their creator or inventor (or his heirs under certain circumstances).
Not sure what else to tell you. This really isn’t that complicated or controversial, in the US at least.
IDK.... its all bits and bytes. This seems to stifle innovation more than anything imo.
Also, it's just not true that products will be useless by the time their patents expire. Example: semaglutide patents have already expired in my country. Competitors immediately entered the market and it led to prices free falling to about a third of what they used to be. These past few months I had drug reps visit every week with lower and lower prices to the point it became hilarious to watch them try to outmatch each other. So many people are going to benefit from this. Looking forward to the day tirzepatide gets its turn.
What's next, I can charge people money for using the number 65234563124 because I'm the first to file a patent for it?
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.
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”
For a lot of use cases, including Basic and Main profile, H.264 is already free.
Something tells me H264 is going to be sticking around for a while just on sheer compatibility and compute requirements
midnightbobarun•17h ago