A New H.265 Patent Pool Is Causing Concerns

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A New H.265 Patent Pool Is Causing Concerns

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

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

[AndyChow]

This kills the crab.

I'm not familiar with patent laws. Can this apply retroactively to all the content already encoded with H.265? Are current distributors grandfathered in?

[duby229]

This kills the crab.

I'm not familiar with patent laws. Can this apply retroactively to all the content already encoded with H.265? Are current distributors grandfathered in?

If they can get a judge to find in their favor, then yeah they can get paid retroactively.

But really these situations have been going on for decades. And still the most common codecs are the patented ones. Some government somewhere needs to make the decision that software is inherently not patentable. And then they need to enforce it with a religious zeal. Most other governments would have no choice but to follow suit/

[mike4]

It's about patent trolls and all the others...

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/patent-trolls-how-some-say-theyre-hurting-us-economy/

[Gusar]

And still the most common codecs are the patented ones.

Well, when the licensing is considered sane, companies don't have a problem paying. That's the case with h264 - no per-content fees, a cap on the annual fee. So h264 is everywhere.

But when licensing isn't sane, it's a whole different picture. For example, it wasn't until people started backing up their DVDs with xvid and divx (also, online piracy) that a market for standalone mpeg4-asp players was created. But content distributors never delivered their content in mpeg4-asp, it pretty much went straight from mpeg2 to h264 (with a bit of h263 and vp6, due to flash).

It's about patent trolls and all the others...

Except these aren't exactly trolls. These companies did research the tech the patents cover and are making products that use these patents. They're also not suing anyone, not yet at least. So while their behavior is crap, fueled by greed, they're not classic trolls. It's quite possible they'll kill hevc though.


Cisco is doing something interesting, they're working on a hevc-like codec, using only patents that they themselves own and they'll allow royalty-free use of them. They call it Thor, here's the code: https://github.com/cisco/thor and the presentation of the codec at an IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) metting: http://recordings.conf.meetecho.com/...pter=chapter_1. Because of this hevc stupidity, maybe Thor will take off.

VP9 is also in a really good position now, especially as there's already stuff out there with hardware vp9 decoders. But it needs a better encoder, libvpx is still too slow for home use.

[Danny3]

I'm curious how long people will put up with this crap?

Maybe once patents were useful, but today they just stop innovation and are only useful to shitty companies like Apple who pays 100 $ to the anventor an then the make millions suing everyone else.

[jakubo]

If they can get a judge to find in their favor, then yeah they can get paid retroactively.

But really these situations have been going on for decades. And still the most common codecs are the patented ones. Some government somewhere needs to make the decision that software is inherently not patentable. And then they need to enforce it with a religious zeal. Most other governments would have no choice but to follow suit/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/29/new-zealand-just-abolished-software-patents-heres-why-we-should-too/

[CrystalGamma]

I used to follow the Daala weekly meeting protocols, but they stopped being published in May. Anyone know what happened?

[OneTimeShot]

Who exactly is concerned? You want to use the protocol, you pay the price for your decision. My internet connection is 20MB/s - I don't need to pay extra for a 5% smaller download.

If you support open standards, you have plenty of free alternatives. I'll add that MPEG1 is out of patent now, and that's good enough for the 99% of cat videos on the Internet...

[bug77]

Good. Now can we crucify the idiots who thought, of all alternatives, HTML5 should use H264?
I know H264!=H265, but still, if it happened for one, this could happen for the other.