Forging an Alliance for Royalty-Free Video

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/09/01/forging-an-alliance-for-royalty-free-video/

by derf_ • 11 years ago

200 59 11 years ago

blog.mozilla.org

atonse• 11 years ago

This is great, but how does it compare to H.265/HEVC? And any news on hardware decoding support? IMO, hardware support is the thing that really makes a difference from a consumer experience point of view (more than patents). It's what allows one to watch hours of video without the device getting hot or losing too much battery life.

TD-Linux2• 11 years ago

This isn't a codec, it's a group to do patent analysis and development for a future codec.

WRT hardware support, I agree, but it won't be available in the early life of any new codec so it's important that it also works well in software (accelerated by SIMD and the like). The power difference is less than you might think, I have some preliminary measurements here: https://people.xiph.org/~tdaede/power/

kibwen2• 11 years ago

Getting your codec supported in hardware is a tricky business, and as much as I've been a huge fan of the Daala initiative it was always going to be an insurmountable hurdle for Mozilla alone. IMO getting buy-in from Cisco and Youtube actually gives us a fighting chance at an actual royalty-free hardware-supported codec, which is why I'm so excited at this news.

cpeterso• 11 years ago

I'm sure Intel, one of the AOM partners, is interested in hardware codecs. :)

ZeroGravitas5• 11 years ago

This is aiming to be better than HEVC, because it won't be ready for a couple of years.

Assuming the groups listed actually back up their words with action, then hardware support will happen, basically every smart TV shipped already has VP9, so if Google's Youtube and Netflix and Amazon and Microsoft agree on a codec, it'll be in hardware (both in the sense of it being available, and in the sense of it being in every video device you can buy almost instantly.)

Sven7• 11 years ago

Apple's missing but still good news.

Dealing with video is like dealing with the toothpaste aisle at the store. Just a ridiculous amount of unnecessary information.

mtgx2• 11 years ago

You're really putting the kart ahead of the horse when you ask questions such as that. First you need a great and highly competitive royalty-free codec. If it satisfies those requirements, the hardware decoding will come later.

dogma11387• 11 years ago

Would be interesting to see if this can be pulled off mostly due to existing patents. H.265 license covers over 500 patents you can find quite a few of them dating form the 90's which will expire in 2-3 years, but also quite a few that wont.

http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/hevc/Documents/hevc-att1...

Considering that many companies patent everything and their mother I wonder if it's possible to actually have a Royalty-Free codec in which the involving parties did not volunteer their IP at no cost because I'm not sure if making one without stepping on the toes of existing patents is possible...

Animats• 11 years ago

This came up a few weeks ago.[1] MPEG-LA's patent portfolio isn't that strong any more. MPEG-LA has a long list of patents, but most of them have expired. The key patents on video compression involved motion estimation, and those expired this year. MPEG-LA got their twenty years of patent protection, and it's over.

The remaining patents are mostly on things you don't need for Internet video. US #6,181,712, has to do with multiplexing two unrelated video streams into one. Broadcasters and cable systems do this, but Internet video does not. US #6,160,849 only applies to compression of interlaced video, which nobody uses on line. US #7,627,041 is about dealing with missing header data due to transmission noise. US #5,878,080 is about backwards-compatible multichannel (>2 channels) audio, also seldom used on-line. US #6,185,539 is for video with overcompressed extra-low-quality audio. So is US #6,009,399.

As I pointed out last time, it's time for a hard look at this patent situation. You can probably do a patent-free MPEG-4 video decoder and encoder for Internet video now. You might have to leave out some newer features nobody uses.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10042469 [2] http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/MPEG_patent_lists

dogma11387• 11 years ago

It seems that MPEG-1 Layer 3 patents are mostly expired, the core patents for MPEG-2 will expire in 2016-2018, but MPEG-4 MPEGLA patents are safe till 2025-2027. Also if the patents expire the organizations loses it's ability to collect royalties for the codec it self from what i understand so if that would've been the case there's little need to create a new codec but MPEG4/AVC patent protection seem to remain quite strong for about another decade.

The MPEG4 licensing scheme is kinda confusing to me it seems that several organizations collect royalties individually even tho it states that MPEGLA collects them in the US, AT&T seems to do so too for their share of the patents.

keeperofdakeys• 11 years ago

That's the great thing about Daala, they are exploring alternate ways to build a video codec.I'm really hopeful that one day it will be as successful as Opus.

There was a great talk about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmho4gcRvQ4

threeseed• 11 years ago

I'm really hopeful that one day it will be as successful as Opus.

I assume you mean more successful.

I have never seen or even heard of an Opus file in the wild.

dogma11387• 11 years ago

Opus is tricky, it's royalty free but it's not a "free (as in free software)" standard, it's based on Patents held by the likes of Broadcom and MSFT which make them available without royalties.

This is what I've mentioned earlier there are quite a few royalty free but they are still based on held patents which are offered without royalties.

That said honestly I'm not sure how big royalties are HDMI has quite steep royalties DisplayPort doesn't and with pretty much all devices that come with a single/mono-cultured display interface will use HDMI rather than DisplayPort.

ocdtrekkie• 11 years ago

It's definitely cool if we get to a point where Microsoft, Mozilla, and Google aren't each pushing their own video codec in their respective browsers. If this ends that, I'm all for it.

Though as long as it isn't proprietary and DRM'd to crud, you won't see any support from Hollywood.

jmvalin2• 11 years ago

Well, DRM is completely independent from the codec. You can put DRM on a free codec and you can have a non-free codec without DRM. As for Hollywood... note that the Alliance also includes Netflix.

dogma11387• 11 years ago

DRM has to be kinda an integral part of the Codec in order for it to work efficiently especially with streaming any other type of DRM will not be really viable since it will either require you to get the entire file or to chop the video into smaller blocks.

DRM for the most part is encryption and if you want to have it with all the vector voodoo of video compression it has to be built in.

That said today there is no way in hell to make a codec without DRM and expect it to have wide support, lack of DRM is actually killing more projects (like various open source streamers) than outrage of the free software community will ever be able too.

An open codec is only viable if it's worth to be picked by the big players and those are the big media and content providers who won't pick up a penny if it didn't had DRM support...

1ris• 11 years ago

I wonder what that means for Daala. It's scheduled to be finished by the end of this year. I hope it still gets finised.

grayrest• 11 years ago

Daala came up in the HN thread when Cisco announced Thor:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10042849

ZeroGravitas5• 11 years ago

I would guess, as an outsider, that it'll basically stop as an independent project and carry on to whatever degree its tech get absorbed into this new project.

There's lots of cool tech in Daala, but I'm guessing that most people involved would be happy to see a royalty-free video codec succeed even if it wasn't entirely their baby and if the member corporations can throw enough lawyers, engineers and existing patents at the problem, then less sexy, more traditional tech will probably get the job done and make Daala's strategy less relevant.

IshKebab• 11 years ago

From what I've seen that is an unrealistic goal. It's not very close to H.265 yet.

Caspy74• 11 years ago

Technologies from Daala, Thor, VP10 and contributions from other participants in the group will all be combined to essentially make one uber codec.

Since Thor was released Daala already started incorporating parts of it that made sense (and vice versa for Thor). So this will just expand that pattern.

spankalee2• 11 years ago

Edit: Looks like I was mistaken. See: http://aomedia.org/

It's important to note that this isn't a project to create a new codec. It's an organization to share the legal infrastructure for things like patent analysis and licensing agreements.

The Joint Development Foundation's website is not even video-specific, but invites any project to join operate under their legal umbrella.

http://www.jointdevelopment.org/

ZeroGravitas5• 11 years ago

It's important to note that this isn't a project to create a new codec.

Are you sure?

The alliance website says "The Open and royalty-free format for next-generation ultra high definition media" and their top news item is "Alliance for Open Media Established to Deliver Next-Generation Open Media Formats".

spankalee2• 11 years ago

Oh, good point. I jumped right to the Joint Development Foundation part. Oops!

cheersalam• 11 years ago

Cisco is working on royalty free open source video codec called Thor. https://github.com/cisco/thor

mtgx2• 11 years ago

Read the post.

ZeroGravitas5• 11 years ago

I guess a new web image standard to replace JPEG might be a nice side-effect of this too.

datashovel• 11 years ago

It will be interesting to see how much of the "stack" ends up being open and royalty free. Don't get me wrong, open format is great, but only part of the story.

That being said, I'm definitely optimistic this is a step in the right direction given the fact that Mozilla is a part of it.

EDIT: Actually, looks like they may be proposing full-stack will be open: http://aomedia.org/about-us/

kerkeslager• 11 years ago

What does this mean for DRM?

Caspy74• 11 years ago

This is a video codec and is a separate topic from DRM. It will have nothing DRM specific.

Daiz2• 11 years ago

Sounds nice and all, but part of me can't help but feel quite "eh" to see names like Netflix, Google and Microsoft in there, all responsible for bringing DRM into HTML and moving the open web more toward a closed one. So while they might champion for the open web in cases like these, it's obvious that the only thing they really care about is their bottom line and not paying license fees on video formats.

NeutronBoy• 11 years ago

So while they might champion for the open web in cases like these, it's obvious that the only thing they really care about is their bottom line and not paying license fees on video formats.

So? Netflix and Google are the two biggest online video players. Without them, adoption is going to be pretty pathetic. You want to start excluding people because of perceived (or actual) motivations?

Daiz2• 11 years ago

You want to start excluding people because of perceived (or actual) motivations?

Nah, I don't subscribe to the (unfortunately common) mentality of being exclusionary based on ideological purity evaluations. But since they obviously don't really subscribe to the idea of Open Web (as evident by their enthusiastic support for DRM in HTML, which is about as anti-Open Web as it gets), I guess I just wish they could be more honest about it. After all, what good is it that someone uses an "Open Media" format when it's put behind a completely closed black box barrier of DRM that you aren't even allowed to legally poke at thanks to anti-circumvention laws?

I do think this particular development is very much a good thing for the Open Web, and I certainly don't doubt Mozilla commitment to that. But the whole HTML DRM debacle did leave a really bitter taste in my mouth.

Caspy74• 11 years ago

Companies definitely look for things that serve themselves. But they are not binary "all good" and "all bad." Those companies have also contributed open technologies as well. And this codec would have nothing in it inherently DRM or "closing."

If successful this will be good for all of us, not just good for them and bad for us.

sitkack2• 11 years ago

What Mozilla should do is patent the hell of out everything they are currently developing. One way out is a MAD style codec arms race. You have to get the other side to capitulate, to tap out. If you have no patents you have no leverage. The problem with the licensing "authorities" is that they are borg like in that hundreds of orgs have put patents in the pool. Nocking out a patent or two won't effect them.

Caspy74• 11 years ago

They are patenting what they develop.

sitkack2• 11 years ago

Can you provide a link? Because this would be excellent news.

nikanj• 11 years ago

Non-practicing entities cannot infringe on patents

9fb29947• 11 years ago

Why isn't Apple in this alliance?

jmvalin2• 11 years ago

You have to start somewhere. Expect more companies to join.

Forging an Alliance for Royalty-Free Video

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