Can we all just agree on using AV1 instead of another patent encumbered format?
This is a market that is voluntarily paying for perceived value.
$0.20 for MPEG-LA, $0.40 for HEVC Advance, and "call us" for Technicolor and Velos Media. $0.99 doesn't sound far off.
Very few Win10 users would want a CPU-targeted HEVC codec.
Intel, nVidia and AMD have that codec in their hardware. They are probably paying for a license to use these patents, they ship Win10 drivers for their hardware, and Microsoft publishes that drivers on Windows update.
Nearly 30 years after MP3, the only audio codec that could rivals mp3 at the standard rate of 128kbps at a significant lower bitrate was Opus at 96Kbps.
And MP3 is still by far the most popular codec due to compatibility reason.
This is similar to JPEG, although things are about to change.
AAC and Vorbis were doing this for years before Opus was on the scene. Opus is a further improvement on audio codecs, but not an unprecedented one.
Is it? Because Google/YouTube, Amazon/Twitch, Netflix, Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, Facebook, Intel, AMD, ARM, Nvidia, Cisco, etc, are all part of AO Media:
* https://aomedia.org/membership/members/
The main major tech player I don't see is Qualcomm.
And most of those companies are also part of MPEG as well.
They're part of MPEG because of legacy reasons in having to deal with H.264.
AV1 will probably win in most circumstances (big tech) but is unlikely to win where there are big gains to be had by reducing file size (broadcasters with gigantic libraries).
Broadcasters are also used to paying a lot and not getting much.
You were probably thinking about hardware decoding though.
They're complementary options rather than competing. Each does something well, and it sounds like you want the thing that software encoding does.
AV1 is unlikely to ever be practical for "muggle" encode use, at least in this decade. It will only be worth committing that much compute workload to making a smaller file if the recipients will number in at least what, millions?
I'd be really curious what a hardware realtime AV1 encoder would even look like. How much silicon would that take? That kind of chip would have be be colossal even if it sacrifices huge amounts of efficiency to spit out frames at reasonable time (in the same way hardware hevc and vp9 encoders kind of suck).
I would still take freedom over patented software
> […] but h265 is now significantly more efficient than av1.
What did you mean?
Also this kind of performance claims are 100% hot air. Real world benchmarks talk.
H266 will be adopted by broadcasting and archival and will make mpeg tankers of money. Whatever the next generation of physical home media is after blu-ray will use it, the player for it will read it, and your TV cable box will take h266 signals in to decode. The costs of paying mpeg will be in the cost of the discs, the cost of the cable package, etc.
The real win we should... hope? For is that h266 never sees a personal computer hardware decoder from Qualcomm / Samsung / Intel /AMD / Nvidia / etc. If online video is exclusively distributed with AV1 then none of these companies need touch the festering MPEG patent hell and consumers avoid that parasite leeching money out of their computer purchases.
Because the cable box and physical media player are dying. You can generally opt out of them and avoid filling the MPEG coffers with software patent money. And the big web companies that have the power to dictate what computers are using for the next decade and beyond are all way favoring AV1 with the exception of Apple.
Can we agree not to work on such projects? I feel that the lack of a good open-source encoder/decoder would spell the death of most codecs nowadays. That would also teach Fraunhoffer about it.
Of course, everyone is free to scratch their itch. And the bigger the void, the more itchy it gets. Luckily, we still have AV1.
http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html
But if you use an H.264 encoder or decoder in a country that recognizes software patents then you need to buy a patent license if your usage comes under the terms of the license:
If you build x264 or other open source implementation of h.264/h.265, and embed it for example in commercial video conferencing software/appliance, you have to pay patent licensing fees for that product.
It's also why Firefox downloads a blob from Cisco to handle MPEG-4 video - Cisco covers the licensing for distribution et al.
Cisco has some products which use compressed video in a browser setting. It would be useful if all browsers supported a good codec. Individually downloaded codec plugins suck, because installing is iffy. Therefore, give something away which doesn't cost licensing money to make your existing licensed products more usable.
And get some good feels on the interwebs.
That wasn't enough, and WebRTC requires both VP8 and H.264 as MTI codecs.
However, patent clerks have also from time to time registered algorithmic patents.