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Comment by ryuuchin | Hacker News Reader

It'll be interesting to see the adoption rate of h265/HEVC and whether it will actually take off since the licensing costs seem to be prohibitively expensive[1].

AV1 may wind up being the defacto winner because of this even if it means we have to wait longer before any transition occurs. We may wind up sticking to h264 and VP9 longer despite hardware already shipping with h265/HEVC support.

[1] https://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/07/26/0149234/hevc-advance...

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I want someone to challenge one of the codec patents as a test case. It should even be possible to make a bit of performance art: get an old punch card machine or even a room full of people to decode a few small frames of H.265. It'll work, it's pure math, and, under Alice v. CLS, that should make it crystal clear that the mere addition of a computer cannot make it patentable.

If I studied math or CS, I would find it unfair that I cannot patent my work, while my friends who studied e.g. mechanical engineering can.

If software became unpatentable and I worked in mechanical engineering, I would find it unfair that my friends in math and CS could solve problems without worrying about accidentally infringing on a patent while I would have to ask a team of lawyers to help me avoid reinventing someone else's so-called invention.

I am hoping that the industry moves the direction that cryptography did: patented algorithms never see any traction.

Daala is an open source, patent-free codec that aims to be superior to h265

... that'll probably be as popular as ogg-vorbis. Compression algorithms simply don't benefit that much from outside scrutiny (like encryption does), so without major corporate backing, (open) standards are very unlikely to succeed.

Well, ogg-opus is available in almost all youtube videos and for podcasts I usually download them in that format and listen to them in my phone.

I understand what you say and it's a shame. Opus/vorbis are just so much better than any alternative...

For corporate backing, see the list of companies at http://aomedia.org/about-us/ . It's immensely impressive, to say the least.

It has taken off among pirates alright.

(There is a noticeable battery life penalty for h265 content though)

I thought H265 was banned among most private trackers?

I know my private releases to friends are all H265, though they all use hardware that has native decoding (or is beefy enough to transcode from)

How common are native h265 decoders now? I've been curious when we would start to see stronger hardware support.

Most Samsung phones can do it. I know at least as early as the Note 4. HEVC is codec of choice for 360 video for the Gear environment due to its small file size. The Galaxy S7 can do 4K60 in HEVC. Although, VLC has a hard time playing these files on beefy PCs used to encode these files. My 4K/UHD LG SmartTV running WebOS from 2013/14 plays HEVC as well. The Netflix app handles their 4K streams with no problem.

There are just personal first hand knowledge examples.

For non-mobile devices? (AFAIK)

Nvidia Geforce GPU's in the 900/1000 series can encode/decode it

Intel Skylake GPU's can encode/decode it

The Nvidia SHIELD TV can encode/decode it

All iPhones have it. FaceTime uses it, for example.

Is there a scene standard yet? From a quick glance the content available is H264 reencoded to H265 at amusingly small filesizes.

H264 -> H264 -> H265 isn't going to look very god, no matter what you do (and depending on what your source is you could even have high bitrate MPEG2-TS at the start of that chain).

Battery life is poor because hardware deciding of hevc is not yet common. The GTX 10 series can do it but for most other devices it must be decoded in the CPU.

I think Kaby lake cpus should have decoding support as well

The BBC recently released a video codec called Turing (named after Alan Turing):

"...an open source software HEVC video encoder that allows highly efficient compression of video content with low computational complexity."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2016/09/turing-codec

So BBC are supporting HEVC? All these is getting silly. I wish they support AV1.

With HEVC Advance's fees targeting 0.5% of content owner revenue

IANAL but doesn't that mean it's still free for non-commercial use (i.e. revenue is 0)? If so, it may turn into a situation where only those who can bear the cost and those who are giving away free content will use it.

You can read the licensing details here: http://epdf.hevcadvance.com/pdf/embed?hash=45a69e5fbd2854d3a...

I believe the latest terms removed the content revenue fee.

You will also need a license from MPEG-LA: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/HEVC/Documents/HEVCweb.p...

And also one from Technicolor, whose licensing fees are undisclosed.

AFAIK H.265 is basically the standard for 4K streaming and is used in all 4K smart TVs.

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