Oh-oh, a new patent pool (and fees?) for HEVC/H.265 has just sprung up out of nowhere

S

Shenan

Well-known member
Maybe you won't be watching that 4K streaming movie, shooting that 4K video or buying that 4K TV as soon as you thought or at the price you expected.
That's because of a setback that struck the transition to high-resolution 4K video Thursday when a new patent-licensing group called HEVC Advance revealed surprise plans to license patents for video compression technology.
"I don't see how it can't raise the price," said Jan Ozer, a video technology author and consultant at Streaming Learning Center. And the absence of licensing terms from the new group for a few months likely will delay the industry's adoption plans, he added.
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http://www.cnet.com/news/patent-group-raises-new-fees-uncertainty-for-4k-video/
 
FWIW, the Broadband Providers Coalition -all with the exception of Sprint - filed a law suit against the FCC for its "net neutrality" ruling.

IMO, the HEVC concerns are overstated (typical for CNet).
 
Maybe you should read the article. No, MPEG LA licenses H.264. MPEG LA also licenses H.265. MPEG LA said that if you license from them, you don't have to pay anyone else. The group who call themselves HEVC Advance is a completely new group, claiming that they themselves own over 500 patents essential to H.265.

 
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Still not shocked. Patent trolling is universal. In high-tech, you can patent anything, even if it's totally obvious, even if it's been around for decades, even if it was patented before by someone else. You just shuffle the wording around a little to make it look novel, and the people who manage the patents don't know any better. And then you use your patents to bully people into giving you money. With patents the key is quantity, not quality.

The article makes a lot of good points like "It creates confusion in the market", etc. All true. And all completely routine. Having shipped a number of consumer products, I can tell you that fighting patent lawsuits is just part of the job... and a big part.

It remains to be seen if the HEVC advance patents have any merit at all... notice how they're talking about the impressively large number of patents, 500, as opposed to talking about what the patents actually are. Classic signs of bullying tactics -- it will cost you so much to even evaluate the 500 patents that you may as well pay up. If they DO have merit, well that just adds to the cost of H.265; and in the end people will either pay or not.

The article correctly points out that VP9 is looking more and more interesting... the problem is, though, that if people actually start using it in earnest, that's when the patent trolls will come sliming out of the woodwork with allegedly relevant patents in their sweaty little claws. You can't escape it.
 
I don't think we're dealing with your garden-variety patent troll here. It looks like actually some major companies decided that they weren't going to get enough money from the MPEG-LA license fees and decided to form their own secondary patent pool and licensing authority. It's looking like a classic case of people getting greedy and trying to kill the goose that lays golden eggs:

HEVC Advance promises a "transparent" licensing process, but so far it isn't sharing details except to say it's got 500 patents it describes as essential for using HEVC, that it plans to unveil its license in the third quarter, and that expected licensors include General Electric, Technicolor, Dolby, Philips and Mitsubishi Electric.

The group's statement suggested that some patent holders weren't satisfied with the money they'd make through MPEG LA's license. One of HEVC Advance's goals is "delivering a balanced business model that supports HEVC commercialization."
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DLD said:
VP9 is allegedly a lot more processor intensive.
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Can you link to where you read this? It may have been for devices that have built-in hardware decoding for H.265 but not VP-9. This might become less and less common. Also, in Shenan's article, it says the opposite: "the required encoding horsepower has been shown to be higher (sometimes more than 10 times) for HEVC . . . "

I also just found out that VP-9 now has profiles for 4:2:2, 4:4:4, 10-bit, and 12-bit.

Finally, from Shenan's article: "A final note: Google has announced that development on VP10 has begun, and that after the release of VP10, they plan to have an 18-month gap between releases of video standards."
 
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Combat, do note that there is a qualifier to that quote about HEVC being more CPU intensive for encoding. That is supposedly for the cases where HEVC outperformed VP9 significantly on bitrate. I'm reading about some higher CPU utilization for VP9 as well, but it could perhaps be an implementation issue? By the way, here's a brief discussion of the VP9 CPU issues: http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/66047.html

Anyway, here's the actual press release from HEVC Advance: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-rele...t-generation-video-experiences-300056290.html

This PR makes it sound like they're actually still in the phase of attracting patent holders to join the pool. Perhaps they are waving dollar signs around? I'm not sure who they are hoping to attract - surely the patent holders that have joined the MPEG LA patent pool are locked into it for the life of the patents and can't defect to another camp for more money. Then that leaves patent holders that chose not to join the MPEG LA pool to start with. But then I would expect that the MPEG LA license comes with a guarantee of protection against random patent holders coming out of the woodwork? Whatever is going on behind the scenes, I hope that they will get the message that they are in the process of wounding the golden goose.

What a mess. I wonder how this will affect products that are already using HEVC, such as the Samsung NX1, etc.
 
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combatentropy said:
Can you link to where you read this? It may have been for devices that have built-in hardware decoding for H.265 but not VP-9. This might become less and less common. Also, in Shenan's article, it says the opposite: "the required encoding horsepower has been shown to be higher (sometimes more than 10 times) for HEVC . . . "

I also just found out that VP-9 now has profiles for 4:2:2, 4:4:4, 10-bit, and 12-bit.

Finally, from Shenan's article: "A final note: Google has announced that development on VP10 has begun, and that after the release of VP10, they plan to have an 18-month gap between releases of video standards."
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I think this finds HEVC superior per bitrate but VP9 slightly ahead in CPU efficiency.

Then again, I just scanned it on the go. I expect to have missed something.

http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/200925/files/article-vp9-submited-v2.pdf

Some other results that show HEVC advantage overall, though Google disagrees.


http://blog.euclidiq.com/video-compression-blog/the-video-codec-fight-h.265-vs.-vp9


And here's one more :

http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/The-Case-for-VP9-100833.aspx
 
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Shenan said:
... surely the patent holders that have joined the MPEG LA patent pool are locked into it for the life of the patents and can't defect to another camp for more money. Then that leaves patent holders that chose not to join the MPEG LA pool to start with.
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I think the MPEG-LA will chiefly consist of people who were actively invilved in the development of HEVC, and have patents related to that work. Of course they need to get paid for the work they did, so that's fair enough.

The other kind of patent holder is the entity that holds a patent on some technique which they believe is used by HEVC; i.e. the real trolls. They didn't "choose not to join"; they're unconnected people who see an opportunity to suck some cash out of other peoples' pockets. It sounds like HEVC Advance is inviting those people to band together.

The problem here is that the patent system is so badly broken that you can patent just about anything. Have an idea to store bytes in a particular order, or pass information in a data structure as opposed to function parameters, whatever -- you can patent it. No matter how trivial, or obvious -- to a software engineer -- to a patent lawyer, or a court, it can always be made to seem novel and clever. I've spent many insanely frustrating hours dealing with these crappy patents. Because of this garbage, there's no way you can ever know that there won't be more patent holders coming out of the woodwork to sue.

Shenan said:
But then I would expect that the MPEG LA license comes with a guarantee of protection against random patent holders coming out of the woodwork?
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Not a chance, I'm afraid. You buy the rights to the patents they control, that's it. Of course there will be some attempt to make sure that all relevant patents are included, but like I said, you can never know. A patent which makes no mention of video, or compression, could cover some trivial technique which happens to be at the heart of HEVC.
 
AtticusLake said:
The problem here is that the patent system is so badly broken that you can patent just about anything.
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Like rounded corners, putting music on a server, buying something in an app, saving your credit card and shipping address for next time, or making something within an email clickable, like a hyperlink, so that you don't have to copy and paste the address.

Yes, they really are that broad and obvious, they really were granted official patents by the United States government, and this post probably infringes on several dozen patents.
 
Staying on the internet meme - Comcast has announced today that they will be rolling out a 2 Gbps symmetrical (both upload and download) fiber-to-home service very soon, starting with the Atlanta market.

This should make a 4K/8K stream just a tad livelier.
 
Wow, that's interesting. Thanks for the update, combatentropy!

World War III of Video Codecs?

Here's an interesting quote from the article:

When MPEG LA announced its HEVC/H.264 licensing terms, it charged no royalties for streaming-media use. But in July, a second patent licensing group called HEVC Advance arrived with a demand for 0.5 percent of all streaming-media revenue delivered with HEVC/H.265. Some companies, including Sony, Panasonic, Sharp, Toshiba and LG Electronics, don't offer patents through either MPEG LA or HEVC Advance yet, and Frost & Sullivan analyst Dan Rayburn said a third HEVC/H.265 patent licensing pool is on the way.
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What a mess. A classic "goose that laid the golden eggs" scenario.
 
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