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Old 28th February 2013, 21:25   #141  |  Link
me7
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When you compare the situation with SACD and DVD-A, remember that the CD has practically surpassed human hearing and all of these formats don't offer any practical advantage.
Right now, people love streaming high resolution videos over the internet. The quality is usually so bad that I'd roughly compare it to audio cassettes. A new video codec that improves the bad quality of youtube videos could have a similar impact as the CD had. People are ready for it, even my non-tech-savvy friends stream 1080p videos from youtube every day.
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Old 28th February 2013, 21:28   #142  |  Link
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I really don't see how it's a different scenario other than you've just made an arbitrary line. H.264 deserves no special place of being considered irreplaceable versus any other video codec or format.
I also think it's a "different" scenario, but in an entirely opposite way.

Back then, my laptop couldn't handle H.264 properly. Do I buy a new laptop? No, I do so a few years later because it's a fully-functional laptop. Nowadays, my phone won't handle H.265. Do I buy a new phone? Well, yea duh, give me 8 months for my contract to end.

That's the what the appliancization of hardware has led to, and with some of the biggest mobile players brawling for market share and carrier** support using whatever technological leverage they can, I doubt it'd even be possible to get any decent mobile gadget next year without H.265.

**at least in the US, this will singlehandedly ensure quick and peaceful media progressions for the next cycle or two. They love, NEED, the efficiency. "Oh you don't have H.265? Why don't we put your gadget back in the corner over here."

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Old 1st March 2013, 10:21   #143  |  Link
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I wish it was just as simple with Ogg Vorbis. Sometimes I wonder if a competitor pays for not mentioning it in the list of supported formats (I know several devices which support Ogg Vorbis audio, but their manufacturers don't advertize that).

Marketing will have an important impact. The MPEG-LA has the power. DivX had a little less. Xiph hardly any. The popularity does not reflect the results of technical comparisons regarding quality and efficiency...
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Old 4th March 2013, 06:52   #144  |  Link
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Not sure if that was posted here before, but some researchers (?) claim that h265 decoding can be done on an iPad for example.

http://www.v-net.tv/hevc-capable-devices-hit-1b-in-2012-ahead-of-standard/

Only needs a software update.

I think once decent encoders become available, and if device support really comes that fast (though the question is if the encoding settings need to be reduced in order to make it playable...), h265 will be used. It is useful everywhere. My connection is not even good enough for 480p at YouTube (mostly I use 240...), so if they can pack in 480p in a 240p sized stream, that would be awesome. The 720p/1080p people stream on demand is not very good in quality, if the same bandwidth can give better quality, I think it'd be quite popular.
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Old 4th March 2013, 21:14   #145  |  Link
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At the JCT-VC meetings there was a demo of 1080p HEVC playback on an iPhone5, pure software decode.
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Old 5th March 2013, 01:29   #146  |  Link
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It is useful everywhere. My connection is not even good enough for 480p at YouTube (mostly I use 240...), so if they can pack in 480p in a 240p sized stream, that would be awesome. The 720p/1080p people stream on demand is not very good in quality, if the same bandwidth can give better quality, I think it'd be quite popular.
It's just because of youtube crappy encoder, not because of H.264. H.265 wouldn't really change anything there - if they wanted, they could improve quality a lot even with H.264.
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Old 6th March 2013, 11:31   #147  |  Link
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Originally Posted by kadajawi View Post
Not sure if that was posted here before, but some researchers (?) claim that h265 decoding can be done on an iPad for example.

http://www.v-net.tv/hevc-capable-devices-hit-1b-in-2012-ahead-of-standard/

Only needs a software update.
HEVC will never catch on as a software-only update on current devices. It would just eat battery too quickly to be useful, although the newest phones and pads would be able to use multicore decoding and get some improvement, and one or two might figure out how to leverage the GPU for some steps. It will never reach ubiquity until it's baked into hardware, just like AVC, and just like MP3 and MP4 audio before it. At best, a small portion of people will use it for personal collections and a few companies will integrated it into streaming apps, but it will remain niche until battery consumption issues are solved.

It's too bad, because I'd love it if it rolled out everywhere today, particularly the still image part.
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Old 7th March 2013, 11:25   #148  |  Link
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Fraunhofer HHI has presented a software HEVC decoder supporting Main and Main 10 profile on the CeBIT. Allegedly "a single core" is sufficient for 1080p50, "four cores" for 2160p50 (4k). (Their test sequences were really low bitrate, so take it with a grain of salt...)

http://www.hhi.fraunhofer.de/en/medi...2013.html?NL=0
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldu...n-1817722.html (German, English auto translation)
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Old 9th March 2013, 16:17   #149  |  Link
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The situation around HEVC is different from H.264's 10 years ago.

Chipmakers were already prepraring HEVC acceleation.
Hardware video decoder gets only small area of chip and today even mobile GPU are much more powerful than that.
Considering that HEVC is 3-4 times more complex and that each new node (32 nm, 22nm... etc) gets 2x more power efficient, HEVC hardware decoding on 20-22 nm chip will consume the same amount of power as H.264 on 40-45 nm chip.
Even 28 nm chips would have a long bttery life.

As an example, the last Atom CPUs (32 nm) have no issues with harware decoding of Blu-Ray (H.264 High Profile). I have tried to play two Blu-Ray streams at the same time (or any other x264 encodes at high bitrate) on Atom N2600 (CPU+GPU TDP 3.5 W), zero dropped frames.

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Old 17th March 2013, 23:45   #150  |  Link
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The situation around HEVC is different from H.264's 10 years ago.
As an example, the last Atom CPUs (32 nm) have no issues with harware decoding of Blu-Ray (H.264 High Profile). I have tried to play two Blu-Ray streams at the same time (or any other x264 encodes at high bitrate) on Atom N2600 (CPU+GPU TDP 3.5 W), zero dropped frames.
Well no problem with ARM too but it's hardware decoding (GPU). Atom (CPU) can't decode two 1080p BD H264 stream with softwate decoding.
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Old 28th April 2013, 01:50   #151  |  Link
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Except there wasn't an existing base of billions of phones capable of decoding MPEG-1, and MPEG-1 was obviously a pretty basic standard comparatively speaking. Right now there are literally billions of embedded devices with hardware capability for H.264; it's a completely different situation if you take magnitude and proliferation into account, not to mention the relative maturity of H.264 when compared to something like MPEG-1 (please, no comparison)
But the thing with smartphones and perhaps tablets to a slightly lesser extent is they tend to have a short lifespan. Even less so then computers I would say. Most people probably keep their phones for at most 2-3 years, even if they're cheap ones and/or unsubsidised. Amongst other things, by that time the battery starts to die out and while many phones do have replaceable batteries, many people don't bother. So if it takes 2-3 years for most phones to have H265 support, we get most phones supporting in 4-6 years which is a fairly long time, but not that long.

BTW, for the person who mentioned royalties, I would say the MPEG-LA didn't get to where they are today by being stupid. Presuming there must be one of VP9 or Daala or something else (Intel/Real NGV perhaps?) which will be sufficiently improved over H264, even if not able to compete with H265, they have to be careful not to price themselves out of the market. As others have said, there are plenty of areas, particularly streaming videos and legal downloads where plenty of people would love to have smaller files or higher quality even for 1080p. Bandwidth is improving, but not that fast.
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Old 1st May 2013, 13:42   #152  |  Link
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Hype victim.

There are very few people willing to spend a week on a movie.
Not really, if the gains are big enough.

Do you know how long it takes to render a photorealistic image for some architecual design (what i partially do for a living), not to mention render special effects for some movie or an entire CG movie?

It always makes me smile when i see some comments on here from ppl complaining about 2fps encodes on their laptops.

A movie only needs to be encoded once for disc distribution. After that its just copies. So what even if it takes a whole weekend. Is that really such a big problem??

Sure, broadcasting and other areas where realtime encodes might be required is another story but i dont think thats the current target they have in mind. H264 is still more than capable (as mentioned many times here already). Its not because there is H265 that you suddenly arent allowed to use H264 anymore... And when the hardware catches up, switch to H265 if you want.

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Old 1st May 2013, 14:09   #153  |  Link
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Old 16th May 2013, 18:51   #154  |  Link
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There were more than a billion VCRs sold when DVD came out. There were more than a billion DVD players sold when BluRay came out. Did you fight against those things coming out as well? I really don't see how it's a different scenario other than you've just made an arbitrary line. H.264 deserves no special place of being considered irreplaceable versus any other video codec or format.
You're talking about the past. I'm talking about now. Apples and oranges.

Facts:

1. H.264 is still technically advanced--we're not talking about VCR or DVD quality, and to the best of my knowledge, very few people complain about well-encoded H.264 at 1080p. 4k, sure, whatever, but we're reaching a point of pretty significant diminishing returns, in my opinion. I don't get the impression the typical consumer cares.
2. H.264 has royalty issues. Those go away if you wait long enough. For how long are we planning on letting MPEG-LA hold companies over a barrel? At what point does optimizing along codecs no longer matter when bandwidth and storage space are consistently becoming less of an issue? (and if you think this is nonsense, consider nobody's really seriously cared about updating JPEG for a solid twenty years--because the savings simply don't justify the pain of updating the world)
3. Unlike previous codecs, H.264 really does enjoy an unprecedented amount of support. I cannot think of a previous format that is as ubiquitous. That alone makes it very hard to migrate away from: moving to something with effectively zero support while still maintaining support for old products isn't trivial.

I think over time, yes, H.265 and/or VP8 and/or VP9 will enjoy hardware support, but given the proliferation of H.264...codified as a standard among Windows 7, OSX, iOS, android, blue-ray formats, and so on....that's going to be a lot more difficult than it's previously been, particularly given that the value-add (making already great looking video look....better?) is hard to communicate to a typical customer.

My point really boils down to: there's a diminishing return on investment with these video codecs, particularly given some realities about royalties, network speeds, storage requirements and so forth. I feel we're already near it with H.264, and at some point....it's just a royalties carrot on a stick.

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Old 16th May 2013, 19:20   #155  |  Link
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1. H.264 is still technically advanced--we're not talking about VCR or DVD quality, and to the best of my knowledge, very few people complain about well-encoded H.264 at 1080p. 4k, sure, whatever, but we're reaching a point of pretty significant diminishing returns, in my opinion. I don't get the impression the typical consumer cares.
Consumers don't even know about bitrate directly. However better compression makes for better quality at given bandwidth (which can enable new features like 3D and 4K), or lower bandwidth at the same quality, or a mix of the two. As metered and capped bandwidth becomes more common, more efficient compression will always be useful.

HEVC will also bring 10-bit decoding mainstream; a quality improvement that H.264 High Profile can't deliver at any bitrate.

Quote:
2. H.264 has royalty issues. Those go away if you wait long enough. For how long are we planning on letting MPEG-LA hold companies over a barrel? At what point does optimizing along codecs no longer matter when bandwidth and storage space are consistently becoming less of an issue? (and if you think this is nonsense, consider nobody's really seriously cared about updating JPEG for a solid twenty years--because the savings simply don't justify the pain of updating the world)
H.264's royalty issues are primarily theoretical and philosophical. I'm not aware of any business and usage models that haven't emerged due to the MPEG-LA licensing terms. Clearly the H.264 licensing costs are far, far less important than the cost savings from more efficient encoding. Otherwise Theora would have mattered.

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3. Unlike previous codecs, H.264 really does enjoy an unprecedented amount of support. I cannot think of a previous format that is as ubiquitous. That alone makes it very hard to migrate away from: moving to something with effectively zero support while still maintaining support for old products isn't trivial.
MPEG-2 was more ubiquitous than any codec before or since. It probably counted for >98% of eyeball hours of digital video last decade. DVD+cable+sat+ATSC+DVB were all MPEG-2, and are still mainly MPEG-2.

MPEG-2 will still be widely used alongside H.264 and HEVC throughout this decade.

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I think over time, yes, H.265 and/or VP8 and/or VP9 will enjoy hardware support, but given the proliferation of H.264...codified as a standard among Windows 7, OSX, iOS, android, blue-ray formats, and so on....that's going to be a lot more difficult than it's previously been, particularly given that the value-add (making already great looking video look....better?) is hard to communicate to a typical customer.
Again, it's not something that the customer would even know about. How many people know what Profile @ Level their handsets support today ? But if you're a wireless carrier and blanching at the CAPEX predictions to handle the huge growth of wireless video, you're going to want every handset on your network to be able to consume the lowest bandwidth streams possible. Same with content distributors, who drop support for devices with less-capable decoders whenever they can get away with it.

Plus it's cheap to add another decoder to GPUs and processors, and getting cheaper every generation. Adding HEVC would increase device COGS by way less than higher clock speed or extra cores. The days of $100+ deadicated MPEG-2 cards is way gone. All video decoders take up a really small and shrinking area of the silicon on today's chips.

Quote:
My point really boils down to: there's a diminishing return on investment with these video codecs, particularly given some realities about royalties, network speeds, storage requirements and so forth. I feel we're already near it with H.264, and at some point....it's just a royalties carrot on a stick.
If compression efficiency doesn't matter, how come the industry is continuously making big investments to improve their existing MPEG-2 and H.264 encoders? A 10% compression efficiency improvement is 10% more channels for Comcast, Dish, etcetera, and that makes for significant revenue for them.

Honestly, the H.264 royalties are barely a rounding error compared to what a content delivery company pays for their encoders, service, staff to maintain them, bandwidth, etcetera. HEVC royalties could be 10x as much as H.264 and would still be a huge net payoff just from bandwidth and storage savings.

The critical thing is that per-decoder license fees stay reasonable.
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Old 16th May 2013, 20:47   #156  |  Link
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I agree to an extent but I don't think the addressable market will be anywhere as big as with MPEG-2 or AVC. Only green-field deployments and 4K are going to use it for DTH broadcasting, though a few European governments are mandating it.

Only web (including mobile) are going to be big consumers of HEVC and arguably the web doesn't have serious video bandwidth restrictions anyway. ARPU for web video is very low anyway.

HEVC won't bring 10-bit mainstream. There's a huge push against it from hardware manufacturers.

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HEVC royalties could be 10x as much as H.264 and would still be a huge net payoff just from bandwidth and storage savings.
This is definitely not the case for operator-loaned STBs.

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Old 16th May 2013, 21:00   #157  |  Link
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I agree to an extent but I don't think the addressable market will be anywhere as big as with MPEG-2 or AVC. Only green-field deployments and 4K are going to use it for DTH broadcasting, though a few European governments are mandating it.
For OTA, broadcasting, sure. Huge decoder switching costs, which is why most of that is MPEG-2. South Korea has already done two rounds of OTA HEVC 4K already, though.

I think OTA is a pretty small and shrinking slice of viewership, though.

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Only web (including mobile) are going to be big consumers of HEVC and arguably the web doesn't have serious video bandwidth restrictions anyway.
That is an argument you'd have to actually make. Until everyone in a household can reliably get 15 Mbps streams simultaneously, the web has serious bandwidth restrictions.

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HEVC won't bring 10-bit mainstream. There's a huge push against it from hardware manufacturers.
Citation? That's not what I'm hearing for living-room devices. Mobile doesn't seem to have nearly as much taste for 10-bit, certainly.

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This is definitely not the case for operator-loaned STBs.
Huge switching costs there, which is why they're mostly still getting MPEG-2 anyway. The bandwidth savings of MPEG-2 -> HEVC could make STB replacement cost-effective, however.

But video decoder license fees are a small fraction of a STB's cost, and are a lot higher and uncapped for MPEG-2 anyway. If license fees were a big deal, people would have stopped shipping MPEG-2 decode a long time ago (note that it's not in Win8 by default now). VC-1 and H.264 were both much, much cheaper at the time.
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Old 16th May 2013, 22:56   #158  |  Link
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For OTA, broadcasting, sure. Huge decoder switching costs, which is why most of that is MPEG-2. South Korea has already done two rounds of OTA HEVC 4K already, though.

I think OTA is a pretty small and shrinking slice of viewership, though.

That is an argument you'd have to actually make. Until everyone in a household can reliably get 15 Mbps streams simultaneously, the web has serious bandwidth restrictions.
Improved compression isn't holding back any major product developments that will cause a significant revenue stream for web video (though perhaps so for mobile) - it's why a lot of places are happy sending the junk from Elemental "GPU" encoders after all. Apart from being an incremental improvement, what new revenue streams will HEVC bring in? H.264 brought in HD video on the web but in my opinion HEVC brings no new products to the table. I guess there's a possibility for 4K but I would imagine Hollywood would want to charge a premium for that and not give it away to Netflix. It's the same with MPEG-DASH; deployment is sluggish since the benefits don't appear to be financially worthwhile.

In most of the world STBs last for ~10 years or so; Korea is the special case in that there is a short upgrade period. All the more so when people have a lot of PVR'd recordings that can't be easily moved between STB (Device specific DRM).

Quote:
Citation? That's not what I'm hearing for living-room devices. Mobile doesn't seem to have nearly as much taste for 10-bit, certainly.
I think it's public knowledge that there's a row going on about this in DVB, which will in effect set the global agenda for living room devices.

Quote:
Huge switching costs there, which is why they're mostly still getting MPEG-2 anyway. The bandwidth savings of MPEG-2 -> HEVC could make STB replacement cost-effective, however.

But video decoder license fees are a small fraction of a STB's cost, and are a lot higher and uncapped for MPEG-2 anyway. If license fees were a big deal, people would have stopped shipping MPEG-2 decode a long time ago (note that it's not in Win8 by default now). VC-1 and H.264 were both much, much cheaper at the time.
Codec licensing fees are still not insignificant and are the basis of a lot of the audio codec STB wars (Dolby/DTS/AAC). Even on modern platforms there is still a lot of legacy MPEG-2. It's different in Win8 because end-users purchase the product, whereas STBs are given away for free and so a few dollars saved across millions of devices is worth saving, nobody is going to notice a few extra dollars on Win8 RRP.

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Old 6th July 2013, 20:12   #159  |  Link
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I don't know when it was added, but one of the mirrors of x264.nl is http://x264.x265.net/
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Old 6th July 2013, 22:05   #160  |  Link
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Because the guy who has that mirror booked the domain for future use by any FOSS x264-like HEVC encoder - it is explained if you go straight to x265.net.
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