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Comment by cillian64 | Hacker News Reader

For starters, x264/x265 are software video encoders, h264/h265 are the respective standards. AV1 is a standard, libaom is the reference software encoder.

H264 and h265 are patent encumbered, so depending what you are doing you need to pay royalties to use them. You are free to use AV1 with paying any royalties. Also, AV1 can deliver better quality video at the same bitrate compared to h264/h265 (at the expense of encoding time). This makes it useful for things like netflix where they can put lots of effort into encoding something once and then reap the bandwidth reduction reward for each person who watches it.

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> H264 and h265 are patent encumbered

Same as AV1 [1].

> use AV1 with paying any royalties

Same as H.264/5 for almost all normal usage.

https://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/ReadArticle.as...

Yeah, a bunch of parasites who had nothing to do with the development of the codec and yet they're desperately trying to extract rent.

It doesn't really matter though, because AOmedia's patent license here:

https://aomedia.googlesource.com/aom/+/refs/heads/main/PATEN...

has a defensive clause:

> Defensive Termination. If any Licensee, its Affiliates, or its agents initiates patent litigation or files, maintains, or voluntarily participates in a lawsuit against another entity or any person asserting that any Implementation infringes Necessary Claims, any patent licenses granted under this License directly to the Licensee are immediately terminated as of the date of the initiation of action

So if you sue anybody for patents you essentially lose access to all of the relevant patents by any of those companies:

https://aomedia.org/membership/members/

So please stop spreading baseless FUD.

Basically, it's NOT patent-free, it is completely patents encumbered, but since most usages of AV1 are YouTube, Google will help you defend yourself against suers.

However, make a competitor of YouTube, and I wish you good luck not paying those fees.

With regards to "from people who had nothing to do with development", there are many research centers, not patent trolls, who actually published publicly their researches. Maybe the people who did AV1 didn't read the literature, but I'll presume they did.

> Google will help you defend yourself against suers

They don't indemnify you from patent claims.

They merely offer you the ability to use their patents to help defend yourself. But against the likes of NTT, Orange, Phillips etc patents aren't the issue, it's running out of money to litigate the issue.

> Yeah, a bunch of parasites

I think it's worth tempering the language here.

These aren't patent trolls but companies who have been involved in codec design for decades and will be involved in ones in the future e.g. NTT, Dolby, Toshiba.

> So please stop spreading baseless FUD.

No one is spreading FUD. You have outlined a worthless termination clause given that it only applies to those who are interested in implementing the codec. That offers zero protection against third party claims like an indemnification would.

Anyone spamming patents and going after independent reinventors is being a parasite. It doesn't matter how much legitimate research they also do. No tempering is needed.

And that's assuming validity in the first place.

> I think it's worth tempering the language here.

Normally I would agree with you, but not in this case. Software patents need to die, and anyone who tries to extract rent through them *is* a parasite. Especially if they employ mafia-like tactics like those patent pools. Oh, quite a nice codec you have there; it'd be a shame if anything happened to it.

Nowadays you can't even fart without infringing someone else's patent. So, sorry, but I'm not going to apologize for calling them parasites. This is one of very few strong opinions I have, and is a hill I'll gladly die on.

This isn’t quite right. While AV1 is “open”, patent holders have still claimed patents covering aspects of it. So there are still issues with trying to use/distribute it as those patent holders can still claim infringement. Linux is another example of this.

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