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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Its purpose is to replace the JPEG image format when quality or file size is an issue.

Some of the HEVC algorithms may be protected by patents in some countries

There have been some patent disputes over JPEG, but I don't think replacing it with another possibly patented format is a good idea, even if it's technically superior in some ways.

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"Most devices already include or will include hardware HEVC support, so we suggest to use it if patents are an issue."

I don't know if that suggestion makes much sense, but you missed it in your quote.

What kinds of devices have hardware HEVC acceleration? Phones, PC graphics cards, Blu-ray players?

None of them today, but all of them in a few years.

One of Samsung's cameras, iPhone 6 uses it for FaceTime, various 4k TV's.

nVidia GPUs with GM2xx chips (currently GeForce 900 Series)

Unless they changed their ways since h.264, it's probably a non-commercial license, even for tools or devices that suggest otherwise - like Final Cut Pro (http://bemasc.net/wordpress/2010/02/02/no-you-cant-do-that-w...)

You can actually use HEVC for your content for free, even commercially.

Royalties only get involved when distributing encoders & decoders.

See page 7 here http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/HEVC/Documents/HEVCweb.p...

Then surely you have an issue, don't you, if you bundle the decoder in JS?

Hmm, that does make me wonder, actually - as far as I know, you can freely distribute source code for encoders & decoders without having to pay any royalties. Binaries / compiled versions are where the royalties come in. And technically, JS code is source code that gets compiled by the browser... so I'm not actually sure where it falls in all this.

I don't think source code is exempt from patents per se. I think the rule is more like some point in the supply chain has to have a license. It's common to distribute a chip or software library with no license with the assumption that the final product will get a license. But if the source code is the final product it needs a license. IANAL.

Yes, the content - that means unlike h.264 licensing there's no separate license for streaming (page 7 of http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avcweb.pdf)

But with h.264, _codec_ licensing is for non-commercial (and internal business) use only (page 8).

There's no clear statement that HEVC licensing is for any and all purposes, and their use of the term "End user" in MPEG-LA's (non-binding) public material across patent pools is quite inconsistent, so it may mean only non-commercial users.

Given that it's MPEG-LA that we're talking about here, and their history, I assume there will be nasty surprises unless there's hard evidence that there aren't.

Yep, and that bit of JS you are distributing _is_ a decoder. I've been bitten by this before, and it resulted in buying the MPEG-LA a few ferraris a month after they noticed and we were popular while we worked to create an alternate solution.

Good times.

I can't imagine ever wanting to spin up a hardware HEVC decoder context every time I want to render an image. That would enormously slow down display of a web page with this format.

Edit: decoder, not encoder

That would be decoding, not encoding.

"Most" is a huge overestimation. I don't think Haswell supports HEVC encoding. Qualcomm will only support it next year with the high-end Snapdragon 810, and Apple only recently supported it in the latest iOS devices.

But the vast majority of people right now don't have support for HEVC encoding and won't have for 5+ years.

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