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Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

> A national testing portal ought to support the default image format taken by the world's most popular phone, period.

What if it can't because the format is proprietary and Apple wants to charge for its use? As I understand it, MS and Google have to pay licensing fees to enable support for it in Windows 10 and Android.

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You're thinking of HEVC (video encoding, like h.265): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#P...

HEIC (image encoding) is available without royalties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_For...

Regardless, in this case, as others noted, iOS would have just converted to jpg if College Board was using a standard image upload form.

> When containing images and image sequences encoded in a particular format (e.g. HEVC or AVC) its use becomes subject to the licensing of patents on the coding format.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say with that quote? As I mentioned, HEVC is subject to licensing costs. If you try to wrap your HEVC video content in an HEIC container, you don't suddenly get to skip paying the original licensing costs.

He's trying to remark the fact that HEIC = HEIF(HEVC) => non-free. See my other reply to your first comment. Note that HEVC doesn't necessarily mean video. It can be used to compress still images, as it's the case of Apple devices.

> HEIC (image encoding) is available without royalties

Ah, ok, thanks!

>HEIC (image encoding) is available without royalties

As stated by that Wikipedia article, HEIF is the royalty-free container. HEIC means the content is encoded with HEVC, which makes it not free.

Support it by performing client-side conversion to JPEG. The device obviously already has the license.

Have you seen what the College Board charges for AP testing? I think it's a cost of doing business and they can afford to pay a reasonable licensing fee to process the test results. If they can't, increase the test cost by another $5.

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