Comment by KaiserPro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KaiserPro | Hacker News Reader

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Gah,

Look, the digital video world exploded, 90% of it using MPEG's standards(MPEG1/2 to start with, h.264 now. HVEC/av1 is just a blip) they were all patent encumbered

FFMPEG runs 60% of the digital media world. _if_ patents were to be called in, places like disney, netflix & fox would have to spend literally billions swapping out FFMPEG or licensing it.

Your phone/computer pays a h264 tax, in the same way that they pay ARM/intel, qualcomm, wifi alliance, HDMI alliance et al.

HVEC gives you more efficient 4k, and HDR, but for most people that just isn't important. Streaming services still use h.264, because there is not hardware/software support upstream.

Now, the thing that will decide it is the speed/quality/cost tradeoff. If the hardware doesn't support a codec, it won't be used.

AV1 has a really slow encoder, so until that has changed it's not going to be used for on-the-fly encoding (live or just in time delivery from mezzanine codec)

for industry noise, see https://www.ibc.org/delivery/codec-wars-the-battle-between-h...

Yeah, I cringed when reading this. The whole 'good guys' routine with Cisco, Google, Mozilla stepping up to fight the evil 'malcorp' for justice was pretty embarrassing.

I'm all for a 'de facto' standardisation around a royalty free codec, which is what we get with AV1, but lets not pretend that these companies are doing this for any altruistic reasons.

Everything is moving to streaming, and video usage will only keep growing, so for these huge companies, having what is increasingly a core part of their business in the financial hands of third parties is an extremely unattractive position.

Google was already dead set on leaving this dependency, and now when they started work on their third generation codec (VP10) many other companies started to get the message, prompted in a large part no doubt by the HEVC patent fiasco, which now has resulted in AV1.

>AV1 has a really slow encoder, so until that has changed

Well, optimization has likely only recently started in earnest, given that the bitstream was frozen this summer. Personally I'm more interested in the RAV1e AV1 encoder in the works from Xiph than I am in the 'official' one.

> The whole 'good guys' routine with Cisco, Google, Mozilla stepping up to fight the evil 'malcorp' for justice was pretty embarrassing.

Yep.

If anyone wants to know what Google and Mozilla would do in the face of corporations closing off the Internet, you can look at what they _actually did_ with Encrypted Media Extensions.

EME was made to discourage the creation of proprietary systems for adding DRM, not to appease corporations.

DRM is fundamentally proprietary. Just because the container around it is defined in a standard does not in any way discourage the creation of proprietary systems -- it by definition facilitates them (and therefore appeases corporations that produce DRM content).

The whole "DRM will happen one way or another, EME is better" is only an acceptable argument if you don't have an issue with DRM (because then you can argue that EME is "nicer" than non-EME because EME is a "standard form" of DRM).

Making it frustrating for people to access DRM content results in a distrust of DRM vendors and a general dislike of DRM -- which is (in my view) a positive outcome. Facilitating DRM in a way that makes it much easier for people to view it is not a neutral position in a world where "DRM is inevitable".

so DRM is OK as long as it's enclosed within a standardised protocol?

EME is the better option if you believe DRM is going to happen one way or the other: it can be contained and ideally used cross-platform, not just on blessed end-devices.

EME is bad if you believe DRM would die/be less common if no standard existed.

>ideally used cross-platform, not just on blessed end-devices.

Tough luck with that though since EME only specifies how to communicate with DRM, and the actual DRM consists of multiple 100% proprietary black boxes that only work on blessed end devices and browsers. And since different browsers have different black boxes, you need to play ball with Apple, Google, Microsoft, and every other unique DRM vendor.

EME is a disgrace that should have never come to pass. Premium media should rather be forced to peddle their own clients entirely separate from browsers if they insist on non-cross-platform black box bullshit.

I'm not against content protection in itself, but EME was 100% marketed on false pretenses because it's just as much of a proprietary plugin system than what came before, with just as terrible cross-platform story too. If instead we had content protection schemes implemented in eg. WebAssembly, then we could actually talk about a cross-platform system that also doesn't immediately close out smaller browser vendors from the market.

> EME is the better option if you believe DRM is going to happen one way or the other

Waterboarding is the better option if you believe that torture is going to happen one way or the other.

That analogy doesn't work because the people doing the waterboarding have the power to choose not to use torture in the first place. Whereas the W3C can't choose for content producers to not use DRM--they will do it regardless.

> That analogy doesn't work because the people doing the waterboarding have the power to choose not to use torture in the first place.

The Hollywood studios also have the power not to enforce having to use DRM on their licensees.

Right, but nobody is defending them.

from an economic perspective, I'd rather DRM be as expensive to utilise as possible. A world where media conglomerates have to spend money keeping their DRM up-to-date on every new end-user device is one where they may be more likely to think about the cost/benefit of alternative options.

They will only keep it up-to-date on those with enough market share. No Linux. Maybe Mac. For the slightly smaller players, on mobile, maybe only Iphone, or Iphone + Flagship Android.

which when added up provides a viable market segment for a company that does not insist on DRM. Especially as the mobile device market continues to fragment.

Mozilla decided that providing this feature serves their users better than not providing it. Especially that users can turn it off. ( https://mat.tl/disable-eme-in-chrome-and-firefox.html )

Firefox was forced by Chrome, and Chrome in turn was probably forced by trying to remain a viable platform instead of Netflix et al. simply providing their own desktop apps. (Though I'm only guessing, if you have direct knowledge of the what and why, please do share.)

> Firefox was forced by Chrome, and Chrome in turn was probably forced by trying to remain a viable platform instead of Netflix et al. simply providing their own desktop apps.

The kind of users who are not opposed against DRM already have lots of browsers to choose between. On the other hand, people who are will now feel deeply betrayed by the Mozilla Foundation.

And then there are people like me, who are opposed to DRM, yet don't feel betrayed.

If you're opposed to a browser that can be used by DRM modules, Firefox was already not an option, since it supported NPAPI, and therefore DRM as Flash, Silverlight, etc. If you were using Firefox, you were already accepting that compromise. EME is simply a continuation of the status quo.

> will now feel deeply betrayed by the Mozilla Foundation.

Was there an explicit or implicit covenant by Mozilla and those users?

> Was there an explicit or implicit covenant by Mozilla and those users?

I believe Mozilla's clear stance on DRM in the past (and its clear differentiation against other browser vendors in this respect) is near to such an implicit covenant.

Why would the producers of the content choose to license it to DRM-free delivery services though? Unless you are suggesting that Desktop Linux users are a viable market segment for triple-A content producers themselves, which I doubt.

I don't know the answer to that, but it's a market that startups could potentially capitalise on. It would also not just be desktop linux users, but anyone not using the top N web clients (where N is chosen by said media provider to provide the best cost/benefit to maintaining the DRM on those platforms).

Meh. They can do what they want, but that was the end of my donations to Firefox.

I don't know where you get your sources. Netflix switched to HVEC for 4K and YouTube is using VP9 whereever possible. Those are the biggest players on the market.

On the US market. Which is not only market in existence, nor even biggest one. Take China for example - where neither Netflix nor YouTube are present.

> Compared with the US, China still has plenty of room to grow in a country with a population of about 1.4 billion and 751 million internet users. The proportion of internet users who pay for video content has increased more than 10 times in four years, rising to 13.2 per cent in 2016, and is expected to further increase to 40 per cent in 2022, iResearch said. By comparison, Netflix’s US-based paying members represented around 28.1 per cent of total internet video users in the country as of the end of 2016.

https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/2137870/chinas-consumers-a...

>On the US market

It doesn't matter, when people or any English media speaks of the world, what they really meant was mostly English speaking World. Ignoring China most of the time.

Not the first time I have seen something like World First, World biggest etc when it is not true.

So they have 13.2% of 751M ~= 99.1M (and that's all subscribers, of all services in China). Meanwhile, Netflix alone has 130M users worldwide.

How are they not the biggest service?

You are comparing 2016 China numbers with 2018 Netflix numbers.

Talking about paying users only, maybe Netflix is still on the top - not for long, of course.

> According to research firm IHS Markit, video streaming in China will more than quadruple from $3.5 billion in 2015, to $17.6 billion in 2020. Membership payment will take up a bigger share of the pie, increasing over 500% to $2.6 billion, with the rest coming from advertising revenue.

But talking about active users, iQiyi now have more than 500 million active users.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ywang/2018/03/07/the-billion-do...

You are comparing 2016 China numbers with 2018 Netflix numbers

Yes, but it's all Chinese services combined, not just their top 1st. Unless every of those Chinese subscribers pay for the same service, Netflix is still probably the 1st worldwide paying video service.

But talking about active users, iQiyi now have more than 500 million active users.

Which is small compared to YouTube's 1.8 billion.

But fair enough, maybe YouTube and iQiyi are the biggest players; foepys was still at least half-right.

It does seem that iQiyi is using HEVC for high-res content as well, so the point still stands :)

VP9/10 is a whole 'nother story.....

4k on netflix is still only a small amount, as the people that have either a 4k TV, the bandwidth and device to play it on are still quite rare.

fwiw I've been starting to get HEVC streams from time to time on Windows desktop Chrome when watching Youtube.

Are you sure it's HEVC, because that would be news indeed.

I've never heard of Youtube serving anything but h264 or VP8/VP9.

Yes, I saw the CPU usage icon in the taskbar fill more than usual and instantly enabled the "Stats for Nerds" overlay and the codec was shown there.

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