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Comment by vetinari | Hacker News Reader

Nowadays, smartphone SoCs support both VP9 decoding and encoding in hardware. They have been supporting the same for VP8 for a while.

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On the desktop: Nvidia added full hardware acceleration support for HEVC and VP9 in their GM206 GPU only this year. Intel has partial hardware acceleration for both codecs since this year as well, as does AMD. But: Only for decoding.

On mobile, there are some SoCs that can do HEVC and VP9 decoding in 4K in hardware (like Nvidia's Tegra X1), but the large majority of smartphones does not yet have this capability. Encoding is a different story altogether. And iPhones will only do H.264 anyway for the foreseeable future.

I'm a strong proponent of open standards and I'm really looking forward to VP9 and HEVC, but it will be a while before they'll have good hardware acceleration on all platforms.

HEVC is not an open standard. It has, arguably, even worse/strict license model.

Not to mention -when last I checked- multiple, competing patent pools, each with its own licensing terms! >:D

“open standard” just means is that there's a spec which you could use to produce a compatible encoder or decoder. It doesn't mean that no country in the world has issued a patent which could conceivably affect your ability to sell a product.

The other thing to remember is that most companies find the presence of a licensing model reassuring because you know the costs up front, as opposed to finding out when someone sues after you've shipped millions of units. That's one of the reasons why VP8 never posed a threat to H.264 – it was almost certain to get bogged down in lawsuits if it became popular – and why HEVC Advance is arguably the biggest threat to H.265 since it removes that comfort zone.

“open standard” just means is that there's a spec which you could use to produce a compatible encoder or decoder.

A published standard has that advantage, but I think when most people talk about "open standards" they are implying a standard that can freely be implemented, in much the same way that for example Open Source software implies more than mere visibility of the source code.

“most” people in certain communities: if you poll open source developers, that's probably true but almost everything you use has components covered by ISO/IETF/ITU-T/etc. standards which do allow licensing at varying levels and all of those people also strongly feel that they work on "open standards” as well.

> in much the same way that for example Open Source software implies more than mere visibility of the source code.

This has a very similar problem: public domain != BSD != Apache != GPL, etc. Depending on who you talk to, only some of those are true open source licenses.

In both cases, the term is too vague to be useful for this level of fine-parsing and you have to talk in more detail about the aspects which you're specifically referring to rather than using a broad term.

Fair enough, though the point 'leonatan was trying to make in this case seemed clear to me.

I understood the narrow viewpoint leonatan was coming from but I don't think it's helpful to promulgate personal political viewpoints as universal truth. If you say “HEVC isn't an open standard”, a sizable number of people are going to say “This person has no idea what they're talking about”. If instead you say “HEVC is patent encumbered” you avoid all of that and focus on the core problem.

"open standard" does, in various contexts, mean you can use it without paying a royalty, including in the W3C, the EU, and various other national governments and standards bodies:

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

That discussion reaffirms my point starting with the very first sentence: “open standard” simply doesn't have a fixed definition outside of a few very specific contexts.

Even the exceptions you list are aspirational goals rather than ensured outcomes: the W3C might define an open standard, get everyone involved to agree to some sort of blanket license, and still have the standard in practice be encumbered by an outside company or insufficiently comprehensive legal agreement with a dishonest standards committee member.

It's a fine and worthy goal but it doesn't mean all that much in practice absent changes to IP laws.

This argument doesn't seem very strong. Even if you've paid one group to license their rights, that's no guarantee that someone else won't also assert rights to what you're using as well.

I suggest that the real problem here is having a legal rights framework where such great uncertainties can exist in terms of both the rights involved and the potential costs incurred or actions required as a result.

Many problems in the tech industry would be solved if no-one could interfere with the free exchange of information just by applying laws intended for very different purposes to lock down things like file formats and communication protocols. When these IP laws were first conceived, I don't think legally preventing anyone from offering a DVD player that could skip the ads was what they had in mind.

> I suggest that the real problem here is having a legal rights framework where such great uncertainties can exist in terms of both the rights involved and the potential costs incurred or actions required as a result.

Complete agreement: IP reform would be enormously valuable simply for making it possible for less than massive companies to treat this as anything more survivable than a nuclear hand-grenade duel. Eventually winning a case doesn't help if the litigation bankrupts you.

So now we have a three way Mexican standoff :) My vote and support is on the good, the ugly and the bad had their times.

We shouldn't depend on HW implementations. Instead OpenCL (possibly/hopefully with a DSP profile should suffice).

OpenCL and other GPU implementations of codecs are not as efficient in terms of power consumption as dedicated hardware.

OpenCL implementations of codecs aren't even as efficient as CPU implementations. Just because there's some pixels in there doesn't make it a good fit. They are entirely useless.

Smartphones are not the only hardware that uses codecs. There are computers, consoles, handhelds, DSLRs, video cameras, security cameras etc. When you actually look at hardware in its totality VP9 has been completely irrelevant.

And from my perspective a ubiquitous codec is infinitely more valuable than an open one.

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