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Originally Posted by utack
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Tim is a smart engineer, but engineers typically aren't well equipped to present legal opinions / advice (from 2 min to 9 min). Nobody pays for patents twice. If you license from both MPEG LA and HEVC Advance, the companies that are in both only get paid once. The patent chart Tim is using is out of date and inaccurate. Fraunhofer sold their patents to GE, which is why GE has HEVC patents. Canon licenses their patents through MPEG LA. Velos Media has told hundreds of companies what they charge, and they've signed many companies to their license program.
The truth is that every competitive device that supports video now supports HEVC in hardware. Billions of devices, with billions more sold each year. Most every TV, smartphone, tablet or connected set-top box (including Google Chromecast Ultra). If the patent situation were really untenable, Apple, Samsung, LG, Sony, Amazon, Google, GoPro, Roku and hundreds of other device OEMs wouldn't be incorporating HEVC in their devices. And we wouldn't be watching 4K HDR HEVC movies from Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Vudu, and Apple. If you want another perspective, I gave a talk at the SF Video meetup on the topic...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgE8-4rcXl0
The Alliance for Open Media isn't the only group working to deal with the difficulties of licensing patents for industry standards. MPEG is dealing with it. The Media Coding Industry Forum is dealing with it. And outside firms like Unified Patents, with their Video Codec Zone (specifically focused on HEVC) are dealing with it. It's an ongoing challenge (both for HEVC and for new standards in development), but it's being dealt with.
On the other hand, I'm blazing along at less than 1 frame per minute of 1080P with aomenc cpu-used=1 on a fast Core i7-7820X (with hyperthreading disabled, for the fastest possible single-threaded performance). The resulting videos are roughly on par with my HEVC encodes at identical bit rates (sometimes better, but very often worse). They're clean, but soft and lacking detail.