Closing the Chapter on OpenH264

> But even scene groups heavily release in 265 instead of AV1.

I believe this is because scene groups don't really care about patent licensing, and there's around 5-6 years of computers with hardware H.265 decoding and no hardware AV1 decoding. I think we'll see AV1 and successors take over in 5-10 years when it's safer to assume users will have AV1 decoding.

> I hope the future is bright with AV1.

I bought an Intel Arc A580 and then later B580 which also has an AV1 hardware encoder, and I have to say that it's really pleasant, good enough for real time streaming, video recording even at lower bitrates (e.g. 1080p30 at ~10 Mbps is okay) and ends up saving a lot of space when compared to both H264 and H265, which previously wasn't viable because the CPU based encoder is painfully slow.

I saved a few hundred GB of space by re-encoding all of my local videos in AV1, I'm guessing it might be have been one of the better cases because most of the videos were anime instead of more detailed video like regular movies, but it worked out nicely for me! Plus, the software support is also quite good: OBS and Handbrake had no issues, neither does VLC seem to have any.

All of that makes me wish it'd become more widespread in the next decade or so, everywhere from YouTube and Twitch to even our phone cameras.

I'll continue to use h264 because it has hardware acceleration on my Thinkpad X220, whereas x265 doesn't enjoy the same luxuries on this laptop.

vp9 is widely used (e.g. YouTube is mostly vp9, av1 and fallback h264) and not much worse

AV1 is extremely slow to encode last time I tried.

I avoid AV1 sources for anything I care about, because of film grain synthesis.

Weird considering a ton of codec patents are held by Fraunhofer, which is based in Germany. https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/amm.html

Formerly MP3 (expired 2017), MPEG-H Audio, xHE-AAC, EVS, LC3/LC3plus, Symphoria, Sonamic and upHear

Too often the organisation behind projects is in the US, so is restricted to only what is legal in the US.

I suspect that’s the case here. IIRC, the Freedesktop servers are hosted in the US, so are also affected by what’s legal there too.

And in this case, they were shipping a userspace for their sandboxes, which is a dependency for many others. If it contains code that cannot be distributed in the US, then anyone in the US will have to pick an alternative.

VP8 should be required by the base WebRTC spec, but some devices only have hardware acceleration for H.264 so you should test the actual performance before changing codecs. Also consider using VP9 / AV1 if you know all the devices in a call support it and are fast enough to encode/decode it.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Guides/Fo...

> Which codecs can be within those tracks is not mandated by the WebRTC specification. However, RFC 7742 specifies that all WebRTC-compatible browsers must support VP8 and H.264's Constrained Baseline profile for video, and RFC 7874 specifies that browsers must support at least the Opus codec as well as G.711's PCMA and PCMU formats.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Guides/Fo...

Correct. The most supported container and codec families are those coming out of the MPEG - .mp3, .m4a, .mp4, H.264, H.265 etc. - because they are the products of a giant standards effort. A lot of modern TVs and set-top boxes will accept content in e.g. the Matroska container, and VP/AV video content, but unfortunately support still isn't at the level of the MPEGs.

As I understand it, Cisco licenses the relevant patents and sublicenses them gratis to every user who uses Cisco’s binaries obtained from Cisco directly and not redistributed (thus also the difficulties in the article with working with Cisco’s unmaintained web server). The sublicense doesn’t apply to binaries built independently from source. I suppose this was imposed by the patent holders.

Does AV1 need a successor right now? At least as of some years ago SVT-AV1 was stronger than x265 on both software encoding speed and quality/bitrate[1], and a successor would reset the timer on getting hardware decoders rolled out.

[1] https://medium.com/@ewoutterhoeven/av1-is-ready-for-prime-ti...

The problem with the patents are largely misunderstood. Most importantly the patents do not directly apply to the individual consumer downloading and decoding such audio/video content. The patents only apply to commercial settings - the sales of software that can encode or decode audio and video in the MPEG formats, and sales of audio and video content encoded in those formats. This is why Mozilla made a big fuss over not wanting to include H.264 decoding in Firefox years ago, because they feared they'd have to spend a bit of their money since they are after all a commercial endeavour. No, really, it was never about wanting to "protect" users, it was always about their earnings. You can happily encode AAC audio and H.264 video and share it free of charge with everyone, and they can always listen to and watch that content, without any worries.

And pardon the nitpick but it's H.264 and H.265, not x264 and x265.

Seems like the last h264 patents expires in about 5 months, silly to start moving around to options that might have submarine patents when we'll have something functional that's patent free in quite a short time.

I encode a lot of my media as h264 because it makes it easy for my kids to stream it from Jellyfin without transcoding.

They've been working on it for years but I'm not sure there's any great need for it right now. The various MPEG alternatives seem to be eating themselves with patent infighting and fragmentation.

edit: Got confused by Wikipedia.

It says AV1 is open source and royalty free, and all modern hardware seems to have hardware decode for it. It doesn't seem any of the big players are realistically worried about bogus patent claims.