The new digital TV standard frees some frequencies for 5G. Most channels will broadcast with HEVC Main 10 (bits). There is also a Main 8 which will probably not be used for long and people should be careful about what they buy.
The new North American ATSC-3 TV standard also uses HEVC so that particular royalty will be charged on a TV purchase in that part of the world. Dunno how much it will end up adding. The current practice seems to be to pack in as much chargeable intellectual property into these "industry standards" as is humanly possible.
wait, is there really forward progression in broadcast OTA television in the US?
I've always thought that cable television and modern broadcast television was all still mpeg-2. HEVC would be a huge leap forward in tech (and backward in openness, I suppose?)
Are UHD disks going to be anymore than the modern version of laserdisk?
It seems to me that even bluray is basically dead at this point. The younger generation isn't buying huge stacks of movies to fill out the 200 disk shelves they got for christmas, and the older generation frequently doesn't even have a bluray players.
Random (couple year old) link about bluray vs dvd sales numbers.
Broadcast TV is rapidly dying, though. The very fact that they're changing codecs around to "free some frequencies" for more valuable spectrum users is the proof of that.
No, that's just the general progression of frequency allocation as we develop better coding and modulation schemes to more effectively use frequency.
On the analog side all new voice specifications on VHF/UHF are mandated to use 12.5kHz instead of the old 25kHz wide channels for the same reasons. Amateur radio is currently the only one I know of that still can use 25kHz wide FM frequencies[1].
P25, DMR, DStar and Fusion all use 12.5kHz since they can get digital audio into much narrower spectrum(DMR in fact supports two channels over one 12.5kHz channel using TMDA which is pretty awesome).
Also, as second point, broadcast TV is still very relevant for rural areas where high speed internet access hasn't made significant inroads. It's pretty straightforward to get a VHU/UHF antenna up on a roof/tower and get a reasonable number of channels.
It's anecdotal but I also know of a fair number of cord cutters who supplement their Netflix/Amazon/Hulu with local broadcasting.
iOS 11 also encodes videos into HEVC, and photos into HEIC, which is basically HEVC still frames. Considering the network effect of iOS devices, this fight is hardly won.
At least for HEIC, it's not really exposed to the Web - pictures are silently transcoded to JPEG when uploading. Apple could swap out HEIC for AV1 behind the scenes whenever they want, or alternately sliently transcode HEIC to AV1.
Did you read the article? Apple is going to support the new standard. It doesn't matter that the old phones support HEVC.
Now if only Apple would join Vulkan, too, so we can all agree on a cross-platform graphics API, too. Because of Apple Khronos now has to make a subset of Vulkan that will be cross-platform. This means that if developers end-up adopting that one over Metal on iOS, the situation will be worse off for everyone, including Apple.
Apple has gotten better with supporting standards from the Steve Jobs days, but I think it still has some way to go.
I only see the HEVC mention for Germany and France. I'm not really seeing how it's "mandatory for Europe."
Anyways, for the countries that did make it mandatory, this is why it's stupid to mandate a protocol or specific technology into law. Haven't they learned from South Korea's IE/banking mess?
There is no law mandating that, it's just what you need to support if you want to decode the signal you actually receive with your antenna. The broadcasters have agreed to a common standard (which makes sense, imagine the mess if everybody broadcasted with a different technology).
Legacy TV is dying out anyway, so eventually, some manufacturers would start making TVs without HEVC that would be targeted for Internet video and it will only snowball.
I don't think the patent issues are at all resolved or easy. Variousparties hold patents and have no intention of designing a product around them and simply exist to extract rent from others.
They will wait till the format gains traction and then sue the players with the biggest bank accounts.
Most companies understand this, and will accordingly take it slow, preferring to deal with the known risk of existing codecs.
> I don't think the patent issues are at all resolved or easy.
Same applies to any codec, including HEVC. I.e. patent trolling can always happen and HEVC users aren't immune to it either. So AVC1 wins being actually officially free.
I wonder how much this is enabled just due to patents expiring. Patents (theoretically anyway) last 20 years, so you'd expect 10 years to see off a lot of them. I don't know so much about video, but in the end the solution to mp3 patent encumbrance was mostly to just wait for the patents to expire.
The reason for the traction of unencumbered media codecs lately is that MPEG LA got greedy with the license terms for HVEC, and now the cost of licensing HVEC/H265 is more than a lot of big licensor's are interested in paying. This was not true during the H264 period, and the reason there wasn't nearly as much push for open codecs then.
So in a roundabout way we can thank the shortsightedness of MPEG LA, for the coming era of open codecs.
VP9 is getting a lot better. Since the advent of the -frame-parallel and -tile-columns options, encoding scales well with CPU cores. The only frustrating thing for me is these aren't used by default. The VP9 encoding guide has info on their use: http://wiki.webmproject.org/ffmpeg/vp9-encoding-guide
I should also mention that my BIOS has a performance setting that can be "Energy Saving", "Normal", or "High Performance", and I keep mine on "Energy Saving".
Kicking it up a notch or two could undoubtedly boost the performance a bit, and a manual overclock should go even further. (My chip is stable at 4.7Ghz, but it consumes way too much power to leave it there all the time - the computer idles at ~70 watts on "Energy Saver" mode!)
As a reply to other threads that ask if this means Apple will switch to AV1: encoding speed is the number one reason presented as a benefit of HEVC in one of the WWDC talks on HTTP streaming. So... I'd guess they'll still record things in HEVC, but maybe add support for decoding AV1.
If they haven't tried optimizing encoding speed yet, how can they be sure there isn't some misfeature in the standard that will hinder high-speed encoding? Like IIRC with some old On2 codec, where the order of the tokens in the encoded stream was not ideal for an optimized implementation.
Not sure if you intended this, but that is exactly the basis for the old legal workaround.
To be patentable, an invention must be "fixed in a tangible medium of expression" (or something like that). So the first software patents tried saying "we are patenting the following algorithm ... running on a hardware computer!" Amazingly they got away with it and have been getting away with it ever since.
Hm, I wonder if you could argue that running the algorithm on a virtual machine doesn't violate the patent....
Readit News
The new digital TV standard frees some frequencies for 5G. Most channels will broadcast with HEVC Main 10 (bits). There is also a Main 8 which will probably not be used for long and people should be careful about what they buy.
At least we won't have HEVC on the Internet.
I've always thought that cable television and modern broadcast television was all still mpeg-2. HEVC would be a huge leap forward in tech (and backward in openness, I suppose?)
It seems to me that even bluray is basically dead at this point. The younger generation isn't buying huge stacks of movies to fill out the 200 disk shelves they got for christmas, and the older generation frequently doesn't even have a bluray players.
Random (couple year old) link about bluray vs dvd sales numbers.
https://www.avforums.com/threads/dvd-and-blu-ray-sales-stati...
On the analog side all new voice specifications on VHF/UHF are mandated to use 12.5kHz instead of the old 25kHz wide channels for the same reasons. Amateur radio is currently the only one I know of that still can use 25kHz wide FM frequencies[1].
P25, DMR, DStar and Fusion all use 12.5kHz since they can get digital audio into much narrower spectrum(DMR in fact supports two channels over one 12.5kHz channel using TMDA which is pretty awesome).
[1] http://wiki.radioreference.com/index.php/Narrowbanding
It's anecdotal but I also know of a fair number of cord cutters who supplement their Netflix/Amazon/Hulu with local broadcasting.
https://ngcodec.com/news/2017/10/21/why-we-are-supporting-vp...
So to me that bodes well for future AV1 support in all kinds of devices.
Now if only Apple would join Vulkan, too, so we can all agree on a cross-platform graphics API, too. Because of Apple Khronos now has to make a subset of Vulkan that will be cross-platform. This means that if developers end-up adopting that one over Metal on iOS, the situation will be worse off for everyone, including Apple.
Apple has gotten better with supporting standards from the Steve Jobs days, but I think it still has some way to go.
Anyways, for the countries that did make it mandatory, this is why it's stupid to mandate a protocol or specific technology into law. Haven't they learned from South Korea's IE/banking mess?
They will wait till the format gains traction and then sue the players with the biggest bank accounts.
Most companies understand this, and will accordingly take it slow, preferring to deal with the known risk of existing codecs.
Same applies to any codec, including HEVC. I.e. patent trolling can always happen and HEVC users aren't immune to it either. So AVC1 wins being actually officially free.
http://aomedia.org/press-releases/
http://aomedia.org/about-us/
AOMedia seemed to do that quite quickly when Facebook joined. Maybe Apple asked them not to, but I don't see why Apple would.
> Founding members are Amazon, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix and NVIDIA.
A similar sentence exists on AOM's about page[2].
[1]: http://aomedia.org/ [2]: http://aomedia.org/about-us/
So yea, quite a bit slower, at least on my old hardware.
I still go with VP9, though. I don't buy that many movies, and leaving it running in the background doesn't seem to make a big impact on gaming.
Kicking it up a notch or two could undoubtedly boost the performance a bit, and a manual overclock should go even further. (My chip is stable at 4.7Ghz, but it consumes way too much power to leave it there all the time - the computer idles at ~70 watts on "Energy Saver" mode!)
I see the same jump from C4 to C5 Amazon machines. I'd love to chat about encoding with you at some point.
https://bitmovin.com/bitmovin-supports-av1-encoding-vod-live...
They also have an AV1 demo page which works with Firefox Nightly:
http://demo.bitmovin.com/public/firefox/av1/
We all build on others previous work.
Maybe so.
> Reason software builds on Mathematics and you cannot patent Mathematics.
This is not a convincing reason. All engineering builds on mathematics; this is not specific to software.
It's a small but very important distinction.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_Eur...
To be patentable, an invention must be "fixed in a tangible medium of expression" (or something like that). So the first software patents tried saying "we are patenting the following algorithm ... running on a hardware computer!" Amazingly they got away with it and have been getting away with it ever since.
Hm, I wonder if you could argue that running the algorithm on a virtual machine doesn't violate the patent....