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Comment by amlib | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the best option will be just waiting for h264 patents to expire, just like happened with mp3s a while ago. On that note, does anyone knows when h264 expires? Or it's earlier siblings like avc? It also has the benefit of having vast access to an array of hardware decoders/encoders, although those might have their own can of IP worms.

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> does anyone knows when h264 expires

I was wondering about this too. https://www.osnews.com/story/24954/us-patent-expiration-for-... seems to think 12/2027.

Would it be surprising if H.264 was replaced by something else by that point? We have multiple subsequent standards, and it seems like everyone producing or providing content would want improved codecs by then.

> something else

Isn't AV1 the "preferred" option as a replacement, at least by those who are looking for something high quality and without patents encumbrance?

According to Wikipedia it seems Safari is only now starting to support it, so there's still a large segment of the Apple market lacking support.

The problem is that H.265's patent owners didn't form a single patent pool, so the licensing is a nightmare, with three separate pools, patent holders that never joined a pool, and lots of double-billing all over the place. H.266 isn't much better. So a lot of people just stuck with H.264 as the "good enough" codec as a result. The only people not using it were organizations who couldn't or wouldn't pay for any patented invention (e.g. most of the web standards people, Wikimedia, etc), who stuck with Theora and later VP8.

AV1 (itself derived from the On2 VP8 and VP9 formats) is supposed to be the answer to H.265's patent shenanigans, but support is very slow to manifest. Like, Apple only added it to the iPhone 15 - as in, the one that just came out a month ago. Implementations of AV1 in discrete GPUs similarly only landed last year with Nvidia 40 series, Intel Arc, and Radeon 7000 series cards.

>So a lot of people just stuck with H.264 as the "good enough" codec as a result. The only people not using it were organizations who couldn't or wouldn't pay for any patented invention (e.g. most of the web standards people, Wikimedia, etc), who stuck with Theora and later VP8.

h.265 is very popular in the piracy scene, since you can get a file size about half that needed for equivalent-quality h.264. Of course, being pirates, they don't worry about patents. And since decoders are freely downloadable for players like VLC, there's no good reason not to use it.

> Implementations of AV1 in discrete GPUs similarly only landed last year with Nvidia 40 series

NVIDIA has supported AV1 hardware decoding since the 30 series. I believe they were the first to market with it.

Radeon 6000 also supports accelerated av1 decoding. The 7000 series added encoding.

That's the very last patent, and I haven't looked at it in any detail to see whether it might even be relevant to a typical software implementation; a lot of patents are on special optimisations / hardware implementations, so may not be relevant to your use-case.

It's also noteworthy that of the full list of H.264 patents here:

https://scratchpad.fandom.com/wiki/MPEG_patent_lists

...the majority of them have already expired. IANAL but since the original H.264 spec became public 20 years ago, everything in it should be usable as prior art.

Also, all existing MPEG-4 part 2 (infamous DivX etc.) patents and anything older, e.g. H.263, MPEG-1/2 and H.261, have certainly expired by now.

AVC is not an older sibling, it is H.264, just like H.265 is HEVC.

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