The difference is that HEVC/HEIF has at least three different patent licensing organizations that all want to be paid. While AV1/AVIF is supposed to be "patent free"
I'm no expert on the new license but it seems the restrictions on HEVC are relatively light. I'm pretty sure it is free to compress and distribute media but the license affects hardware and software encoders/decoders. So maybe your HEVC enabled video card with built-in decoder will be a dollar more expensive. I know that every Apple device shipped comes with HEVC hardware standard for the last few years. I would wager most Android devices too.
I can freely record video on my Sony camera and watch it on my iPhone, Mac, PS4, Switch etc.
"The commercial use of patented H.264 technologies requires the payment of royalties to MPEG LA and other patent owners. MPEG LA has allowed the free use of H.264 technologies for streaming Internet video that is free to end users, and Cisco Systems pays royalties to MPEG LA on behalf of the users of binaries for its open source H.264 encoder."
(...)
"On August 26, 2010, MPEG LA announced that royalties won't be charged for H.264 encoded Internet video that is free to end users.[74] All other royalties remain in place, such as royalties for products that decode and encode H.264 video as well as to operators of free television and subscription channels.[75] The license terms are updated in 5-year blocks.[76]"
[74] "MPEG LA's AVC License Will Not Charge Royalties for Internet Video that is Free to End Users through Life of License" (PDF). MPEG LA. August 26, 2010. Retrieved August 26, 2010. http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachme... [75] Hachman, Mark (August 26, 2010). "MPEG LA Cuts Royalties from Free Web Video, Forever". pcmag.com. Retrieved August 26, 2010. https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2368359,00.asp [76] "AVC FAQ". MPEG LA. August 1, 2002. Retrieved May 17, 2010. http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/FAQ.aspx
Yeah, doesn't sound like that would include Netflix, etc. Nor would it include a huge amount of other video that is distributed in other ways. It also doesn't cover using your computer to encode h.264 like your webcam almost certainly does.
The fact is you probably have several h.264 enabled devices on your computer right now that are licensed. And just because Cisco is covering the cost for it's open source encoder doesn't mean the license doesn't exist.
My feeling is if HEVC wins the race it will be the same. 90% of people won't even notice since your license will be included in your hardware/OS without you ever knowing.
I'm on the phone so I can't really look up all the resources, but they shouldn't be hard to find. But this licensing mess is also why most oss development stalled and we still don't have an encoder that would be anything close to the quality of libx264. Instead, most important OSS experts have moved on to AV1.
Yes, but they aren't coming after users. Look at the pools, it is mostly device manufacturers like TV, audio systems and mobile phones. They are holding each other in a mexican stand-off. Two of the three largest pools have already agreed to the same $0 royalty for non physical distribution that h.264 has. They want to extract that money from their competitors in the physical device space.
Fair enough, the uncertainty around final pricing is slowing adoption. But that can ossify quickly, although no guarantee it will.
I hate I'm being drawn into a patent argument when my point is: it won't matter either way. Even if HEVC wins 99% of people will never be affected by a license fee. Let them scrap over $0.25 royalty fees on TVs all they want. In the end I don't care if it is HEVC of AV1 that wins. I just want the fight to be over so I don't have the cognitive overload of having to support both.
The user paid less than $1 per devices for turning on the blocks of Hardware Encoder and Decoder which is on by default for almost of all of the 1.2Billion Annual Smartphone shipment and 250M PC as well as 300M of Tablet.
As far as I am aware, there are no royalty fees to be paid if you are delivering your content on Digital / Internet Streaming. Only if you are on disc such as BlurRay.
Most of them can probably be avoided for the purposes of an AVIF file, but patent US20160232939A1 [2] in my reading seems to be about in-container signalling to express relationships between a "static media item" and "one or more entities" that together "form a group", and "indicating, in the file, a grouping type for the group". The patent appears to be written in a way to allow this definition to encompass, say, a thumbnail and a bunch of frames thereafter, or, say a master image and a set of pictures derived from it, or alternate camera angles of the same thing. Some of these techniques sound like stuff we've seen before, but as is common in patents, the precise wording of claims is often key, and this is where patent lawyers come in.
A thorough look of the AVIF specification [3] and the patents registered with the MPEG LA about this format [1] is likely wise before any widespread deployment that makes use of advanced features of the HEIF container; using it to hold exactly 1 'one-layer' still-image is probably fine.
Additionally, in my reading [5], the HEIF reference software released by Nokia [4] includes a patent grant for non-commercial evaluation, testing and academic research only.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19874321 [2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160232939A1/ [3] https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-avif/ [4] https://github.com/nokiatech/heif/blob/master/LICENSE.TXT [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19874368
Thanks to the propaganda spread by Google and Mozilla. AV1 is "Royalty free". Not Patent Free.
Not to mention Google patents other people's work into AV1. [1]
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/inventor-says-go...
Except that is not the case. They email its author on whether they could use it. And in a turn of an event they patents it precisely to stop other video codec from using it.