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Comment by otterley | Hacker News Reader

No, because the market is more than happy to pay a few cents or dollars per device to get better compression and lower transmission bandwidth. This observation has held true consistently in the 3 decades since compressed digital media was invented.

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> No, because the market is more than happy to pay [...]

Is it? Because Google/YouTube, Amazon/Twitch, Netflix, Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, Facebook, Intel, AMD, ARM, Nvidia, Cisco, etc, are all part of AO Media:

* https://aomedia.org/membership/members/

The main major tech player I don't see is Qualcomm.

The use cases for video is significantly larger than a few tech companies e.g broadcast.

And most of those companies are also part of MPEG as well.

What would be a list of non-tech companies prevalent in the broadcast space?

They're part of MPEG because of legacy reasons in having to deal with H.264.

The market is rather unhappy. E.g. Win10 doesn't ship an H265 codec because it's too expensive.

At 99 cents for the add on, the decision to charge users smells more like a political decision than an economic one. The cost to Microsoft is undoubtedly far less than that. 99 cents is basically the bare minimum you can charge when you accept credit cards as a method of payment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#P...

$0.20 for MPEG-LA, $0.40 for HEVC Advance, and "call us" for Technicolor and Velos Media. $0.99 doesn't sound far off.

That's 1% of the cost of windows, for a video codec when there's already dozens of free alternatives

There’s a fixed cap on the royalty rate, so even if we assume Microsoft paid for a license for each copy of Windows sold to customers, on a per-copy basis it would be much less than 1%.

> Win10 doesn't ship an H265 codec

Very few Win10 users would want a CPU-targeted HEVC codec.

Intel, nVidia and AMD have that codec in their hardware. They are probably paying for a license to use these patents, they ship Win10 drivers for their hardware, and Microsoft publishes that drivers on Windows update.

The constantly growing list of H265 patent pool organizations with various licensing plans made even Apple to join AV1 bandwagon.

Apple is also on the list of organizations behind H.266 so it’s difficult to conclude anything beyond wanting to bet on all the horses.

that's not why Apply joined AV1. They joined AV1 because they were forced to. Netflix, Google, Amazon are all on the AV1 bandwagon. If Youtube, Netflix and Prime Video all use AV1 for future higher quality streams, Apple cannot avoid supporting it.

It works both ways: if popular devices don’t support it in decode, encoding your library in a format that is slow(er) to decode and/or more taxing on battery life isn’t a clear win.

Youtube has been vp9 only above 1080p for a long time, but Apple is adding support for VP9 only in the upcoming OS releases.

Why are we assuming H.266 is better than AV1? Or at least better enough to warrant all the trouble and cost of licensing?

I am not a fan of patent encumbered technologies, but here the assumption of being better has merit. There isn't much sense from a business prospective for a research team to publish a commercial solution that would exhibit inferior or even comparable performance to an existing free solution. As for the problem of convincing people to swallow the cost, just organize a show off campaign and leave the rest to sellers. That's how (at least) Apple does it.

I dunno, there are a lot of reasons companies choose technologies. If Fraunhofer gets this thing into hardware (by whatever means it takes), that could be the end of the debate. There's also probably a bit of "no one ever got fired for choosing Fraunhofer" going on as well.

I wouldn't evaluate the pros and cons of a technology based on decisions made by business executives. I would look at objective third-party comparisons of the encoding and decoding before deciding which is better: H.266 or AV1.

Now audio uses open codecs for the part and new video will to.

That is because Audio Encoding hasn't seen much improvement as compared to video.

Nearly 30 years after MP3, the only audio codec that could rivals mp3 at the standard rate of 128kbps at a significant lower bitrate was Opus at 96Kbps.

And MP3 is still by far the most popular codec due to compatibility reason.

This is similar to JPEG, although things are about to change.

I don't have the Netflix / Disney+ / etc containers to analyze but Youtube has pretty much totally purged mp3 from every video on the site. Billions of watch hours a day of Opus audio there at least.

Opus and vorbis have both improved on mp3, flac has improved in the lossless space, and there are other codecs that do better at very low bitrates (think 20-30 kbps).

> Nearly 30 years after MP3, the only audio codec that could rivals mp3 at the standard rate of 128kbps at a significant lower bitrate was Opus at 96Kbps.

AAC and Vorbis were doing this for years before Opus was on the scene. Opus is a further improvement on audio codecs, but not an unprecedented one.

Nah, Dolby excels at injecting itself where not needed. Blurays support 8-channel LPCM (uncompressed) audio, yet Dolby managed to push its proprietary junk codecs in there.

It's not that the market is happy to pay more, it's that there is essentially no choice.

A captive market is a happy market, no?

Not for consumers, obviously?

This is not a captive market. If someone were to invent a free codec that performed similarly and had both software and hardware reference implementations, the market would adopt it very quickly.

This is a market that is voluntarily paying for perceived value.

Please show me where I can pick between similar consumer devices where there supported codecs are easy to find, or, better yet, I can pay extra for non free codecs.

The few HNers who actually care about these things do not make a market that vendors think is worth serving, most likely because it would be unprofitable. There’s not going to be a market if sellers don’t find it profitable.

That's exactly my point: those options don't exist so there is no hard data on what people prefer. It's silly to say the market decided when it's only speculated on the most profitable path, but that doesn't make it the only profitable one.

There have been many attempts to make a market for free hardware, particularly in the mobile phone market. All have failed thus far.

Libre hardware is not the same as a device supporting only royalty free or otherwise libre codecs.

You’re splitting hairs. Customers, by and large, just do not care.

The market has plenty of choices from VP8 to Theora.

Please show me where I can purchase a roku-style devices where I can easily chose between codec support or pay extra for non-free codecs.

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