H.265 or VP9?

roxics

roxics

Veteran
Interesting how things are going about. I hear way more about H.265 but then I read that Google is encoding all of its 4K videos using VP9 and plans to switch to encoding its entire library in VP9.

H.265 is a collaboration of multiple companies but has a $0.20 licensing fee.
VP9 is free and open source but guided by only Google.

Chrome, Firefox and Opera support VP9 and the latter two will probably only ever support VP9.
Microsoft plans to add H.265 to Windows 10 coming this year and Apple will likely follow suite soon after since they have a stake in H.265.
Though neither support it in their browsers yet.

Android currently supports H.265
The iPhone 6 uses H.265 for its Facetime video but not for anything else yet.

How do you think this is going to pan out?
Which codec would you prefer becomes dominate and why?
 
H.265 has ITU, ISO, IEC MPEG weight behind it. Likely will be the more universal format. The .20 license fee only kicks in for commercial media release quantities in excess of 100,000/year. Not likely to impact most of us. It is an open standard. VP9 belongs to Google. Both however are primarily delivery codecs. Higher compression ratios regardless of playback quality are not very friendly originals for creative production work. The data thrown out in the compression process is the data you need for editing, FX and grading without artifacts.
 
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Yeah it looks like ultimately H.265 will come out on top. But with Google and youtube having so much pull, these devices will have to have some kind of hardware VP9 decoding right? Seems a little inefficient to do it all with the CPU.
 
Razz16mm said:
Higher compression ratios regardless of playback quality are not very friendly originals for creative production work. The data thrown out in the compression process is the data you need for editing, FX and grading without artifacts.
Click to expand...

Razz, I know you own a Digital Bolex D16 and are probably happily swimming in the raw workflow. I don't want to dissuade you from that. I just want to say that if ever you liked a certain camera but were turned off by a high compression ratio, it's not necessarily a bad thing. Compression can be bad, can introduce artifacts, can throw out detail, can limit editability. But not all the time.

There are many compression techniques, and I know you know much of this. But just to make sure we're on the same page: Part of the compression process is abbreviation. Uncompressed spells out every pixel one at a time. Something like "Red dot, then another red dot, then another red dot, oh now a green one, etc.," which compression sort of abbreviates like "Three red dots, then one green." This is basically the techniques called Huffman Coding, Arithmetic Coding, and other totally and completely mathematically lossless compression techniques. But it seems to shrink things only 1.5 to 3 times. So not much gain.

The next, more aggressive kind of compression is the substitution of a symbol for a whole swath of pixels. A compressor has a book of symbols. If a patch of pixels resembles a symbol enough, it replaces all the "red pixel, red pixel, blue pixel, new line, red pixel, red pixel, etc." with "triangle" or something like that. This is a simplified rendition of the Discrete Cosine Transfer. Its description may make you nervous, and no doubt some information can be lost. But if the book of predefined symbols is big enough, and the symbols are small enough, and if you still throw a decent number of bits at the problem, it can even be indistinguishable at normal viewing distances. JPEG normally is indistinguishable up to about a 7:1 compression --- which is a lot of savings! The newer compressors compress even more efficiently, so that they are unnoticeable at twice that, or more!
 
Interesting. I wonder how much this will actually affect things or if the ball is so much in motion for H.265 at this point that it doesn't matter. Just simply a bump in the road. Certainly Google is probably a happy about this though.
 
I smell a bit of patent troll on this case.

MPEG LA group was not enough for some money-starving companies it seems...
 
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