Web giants gang up to take on MPEG LA, HEVC Advance with royalty-free streaming codec

Re: Old media meet...

It will end up same as before. The Old Media will find a shill to go in front of a standards meeting and offer the codec "free" for all to use in a manner which deliberately sabotages the standards process and disarms any such ideas about royalty free. The sole difference between then and now is that Microsoft and Cisco were on the side of Old Media that time.

Cisco did it at IETF in WebRTC WG with H264 a couple of years back. It will be interesting which company will be used to front the "charitable action" this time.

By the way, I have some serious doubts about the genuine desire of those two to come up with a free codec. Their previous actions @ IETF and other standards bodies show quite clearly that they are ready to do anything and everything to ensure that MPEG-LA retains its position in the market.

And yet Microsoft is a member of the Alliance for Open Media that is developing the new codec. Perhaps they also would like to be done with the need to pay royalties for patents that many think ought not to have been issued.

It is easy to add codecs to computers, but the bigger question is consumer electronics devices. Add a new codec and will it be supported by phones, tablets, set-top boxes, digital TVs, etc? Computers may be getting good use but the most hours watched remains on embedded devices with fixed ASICs. Everyone got excited some months back when V-Nova uncloaked that they had a new codec which, they claim, is more efficient than anything on the market but until it becomes viable for embedded devices I remain sceptical.

Re: Ye canna break the laws of physics

Sure, if you assume that every adjoining pixel is a different colour and changes every frame.

But usually when I watch tv there are only minimal changes between frames, other than on those somewhat blurry car chases (and even then the whole point of the 'movie' is to not change too much between scenes to fool the eye into thinking it is movement), and cut scenes (which can easily be staggered over a number of frames with minimal interruption to a viewer).

Re: Ye canna break the laws of physics

Well, 1080p is very roughly 200MB/sec, uncompressed, whereas Freeview HD manages to transmit a compressed facsimile of that data at under 8Mb/sec, that's a 200:1 compression rate. So even assuming a similar compression ration to H.264, your 4K video is already down to 25Mb/sec.

Troll or not?

To be fair many of these codecs are built on solid research that takes many, many years. I wouldn't call them patent trolls because a patent troll tends to depend on someone else's work and most of the MPEG LA patent holders are genuine researchers. What is good is that some of the more fundamental mathematics which have driven MPEG2 and MPEG4 are expiring in patent so many simple applications basic mathematics can no longer be charged for. If a company spends millions on research they perhaps deserve to get revenue from it?

Re: There will never be a royalty free codec

But you forget. The consortium has patents of their own (take Google and how they bought the company that developed the VP codec series). Meaning if a submarine patent does emerge, whatever they're using it on is likely to be in conflict with one of their patents, meaning attempting to attack the consortium risks a patent war in court, with the possible result of their patent being invalidated. That's probably one reason MPEG-LA stopped attacking Google over VP8: because Google got patents in the buyout, too, which could potentially snarl AVC.

There's a reason it's called xvid. It's based on DivX (eman sdrawkcab), which is based on MPEG-4 Part 2 (AVC is Part 10). MPEG-4 ISO is the entire spec, including parts 2 and 10.

HEVC is also known as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2 (MPEG-H ISO was developed after MPEG-4 ISO) so was built on experience with MPEG-4 and frequently does better than any MPEG-4 implementation under the same bandwidth constraints.