> While the US and EU patents around MPEG-4 Part 2 expired in recent years, until today there remained one patent still active in Brazil.
Since MPEG-this Part that is hard to keep straight, this is the MPEG standard backing Xvid and DivX codecs. So let's encode video and torrent like it's 2002!
FWIW, Via Licensing listed this patent as standards-essential to several MPEG codecs (AVC/H.264, HEVC/H.265, VVC/H.266), and it's also listed for VC-1 (a SMPTE standard).
Yeah. I think h264 is coming soon, too, though. Most of the remaining known h264 patents expire next year, with only one patent extending out further.
I do believe that more modern codecs like h265 and AV1 have a lot to offer us, but having h264 be fully unencumbered by patents will be nice. By modern standards it is very well-supported in both hardware and software, computationally cheap to encode and decode, and still does a good enough job for most use cases. h264 doesn't seem like it will be displaced any time soon to the degree that h264 once displaced its own predecessors, though obviously that's not to say that we don't see or won't see more adoption of newer video codecs across the internet in general, just that I think the h264 long tail will be one of the longest long tails of a video codec.
And thanks to the availability of codecs like AV1 which are effectively not patent encumbered (seems there is no practical reason to take the threats otherwise seriously) it seems the era of patent encumbered media formats is slowly coming to a close. Good riddance.
edit: Bit of a mess but here is some source for the h264 expiration.
So it seems 2030-11-10 is the date where h264 (version 3) will become patent unencumbered world wide, a bit earlier for the U.S. The other profiles/newer versions like AVC/SVC will take a while longer.
Well I'm not sure about decode, but as of a few years ago weren't h.265 and AV1 able to do much better compression than h.264 at almost all levels of compute? https://people.videolan.org/~unlord/SVT-AV1_BD-rate.png And h.266 encoders can probably go faster now too.
I would hope so! Otherwise the Pareto front wouldn't have moved in ~20 years which would be rather hard to believe.
However, at the same time, h265, h266 and AV1 are all vastly more complicated, and will have less broad hardware acceleration support than h264, which, again, even if it is not optimally efficient use of compute, just doesn't require a whole lot by modern standards.
So I'd argue there is really no reason to be rushing away from h264 unless you have a compelling reason. There are some obvious compelling reasons in some cases; nobody is going to be terribly surprised that an entity like Netflix is eager to switch to codecs that will save bandwidth, because at their scale saving bytes definitely adds up, bonus points if it can increase the quality at the same time.
On the other hand, though, unless you are absolutely sure you can switch to only new codecs, you will probably want to keep some h264 encodings around to act as a fallback baseline for legacy devices. And thus, you also have to take into account the complexity brought on by needing to store and maintain multiple encodings - in many use cases, like simple <video>s thrown into website backgrounds, I can see just eating the extra bandwidth costs and keeping it all h264 as a valid strategy.
Moving in the right direction, but unfortunately it's still quite a few years before H264 is off patent, globally:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...
At which point, the continued march towards higher resolution and bandwidth video will probably limit their utility
> While the US and EU patents around MPEG-4 Part 2 expired in recent years, until today there remained one patent still active in Brazil.
Since MPEG-this Part that is hard to keep straight, this is the MPEG standard backing Xvid and DivX codecs. So let's encode video and torrent like it's 2002!
FWIW, Via Licensing listed this patent as standards-essential to several MPEG codecs (AVC/H.264, HEVC/H.265, VVC/H.266), and it's also listed for VC-1 (a SMPTE standard).
The openness of those codecs depend on the last patent expiring, not the first.
Of course.
Note that MPEG-4 part 2 is H.263/DivX/XviD, not H.264.
Yeah. I think h264 is coming soon, too, though. Most of the remaining known h264 patents expire next year, with only one patent extending out further.
I do believe that more modern codecs like h265 and AV1 have a lot to offer us, but having h264 be fully unencumbered by patents will be nice. By modern standards it is very well-supported in both hardware and software, computationally cheap to encode and decode, and still does a good enough job for most use cases. h264 doesn't seem like it will be displaced any time soon to the degree that h264 once displaced its own predecessors, though obviously that's not to say that we don't see or won't see more adoption of newer video codecs across the internet in general, just that I think the h264 long tail will be one of the longest long tails of a video codec.
And thanks to the availability of codecs like AV1 which are effectively not patent encumbered (seems there is no practical reason to take the threats otherwise seriously) it seems the era of patent encumbered media formats is slowly coming to a close. Good riddance.
edit: Bit of a mess but here is some source for the h264 expiration.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...
So it seems 2030-11-10 is the date where h264 (version 3) will become patent unencumbered world wide, a bit earlier for the U.S. The other profiles/newer versions like AVC/SVC will take a while longer.
> computationally cheap to encode and decode
Well I'm not sure about decode, but as of a few years ago weren't h.265 and AV1 able to do much better compression than h.264 at almost all levels of compute? https://people.videolan.org/~unlord/SVT-AV1_BD-rate.png And h.266 encoders can probably go faster now too.
I would hope so! Otherwise the Pareto front wouldn't have moved in ~20 years which would be rather hard to believe.
However, at the same time, h265, h266 and AV1 are all vastly more complicated, and will have less broad hardware acceleration support than h264, which, again, even if it is not optimally efficient use of compute, just doesn't require a whole lot by modern standards.
So I'd argue there is really no reason to be rushing away from h264 unless you have a compelling reason. There are some obvious compelling reasons in some cases; nobody is going to be terribly surprised that an entity like Netflix is eager to switch to codecs that will save bandwidth, because at their scale saving bytes definitely adds up, bonus points if it can increase the quality at the same time.
On the other hand, though, unless you are absolutely sure you can switch to only new codecs, you will probably want to keep some h264 encodings around to act as a fallback baseline for legacy devices. And thus, you also have to take into account the complexity brought on by needing to store and maintain multiple encodings - in many use cases, like simple <video>s thrown into website backgrounds, I can see just eating the extra bandwidth costs and keeping it all h264 as a valid strategy.
just that I think the h264 long tail will be one of the longest long tails of a video codec.
I think MPEG-1 and 2 (from which MP3 comes) might be even longer.
DivX/XviD yes, but not H.263. Patents for H.263 expired long ago. This is MPEG-4 ASP, which is a superset of H.263.
(Source: have written a H.263 decoder as a learning exercise.)
H.263 was used as the former codec of Netmeeting (and maybe some other VoIP software too).
But they sold xvid decoders already for the last 20 years. Every Chinese dvd players could play xvid already. Just not >1 b-frames
Very nice, I hope this means increased support for it in open source projects
Good. I have been poking at rcarmo/go-264 but was hesitant to tackle encoding :)
Too late; software patents in Europe were void so most people grabbed XVID/DIVX encoders from Debian Multimedia. PKF and the like.
And, yes, I remember w32codecs until MPlayer's bundled set superseded them. And mencoder for sure ;)