Keep in mind that Firefox AFAIK still relies on OS codecs for h264 because shipping it themselves is such a difficult proposition due to patents. And on Windows, if you want native HEVC or AV1 playback you have to buy it from the store, it doesn't ship with the OS.
But if you follow the link below to the Windows store, you can download it for free!
ms-windows-store://pdp/?ProductId=9n4wgh0z6vhq
Found out on Howtogeek
https://www.howtogeek.com/680690/how-to-install-free-hevc-co...
i guess the worry then is that HEVC crowds out AV1/others, and this Chrome change is setting the stage for it to become a broad tax on video? i could buy that angle.
I'd edit my original comment to note it being false, but apparently I'm outside the HN edit window :-/
a reasonable person might conclude that patents are a bad thing as a result. like it or not, HEVC is patented and that’s not changing anytime soon: but do we decide to develop tools around it, or banish it?
that any users actually went through the awful UX of downloading codecs is some evidence that mp3 support was valuable to them. is this still the case, today with HEVC, or not?
if the argument was really as simple as “HEVC is bad UX”, we wouldn’t have this discussion: nobody would use something with bad UX if they didn’t feel compelled to for some other reason. why anyone would feel compelled to, is the more interesting discussion.
(As for America, ATSC 3.0 / NextGen TV uses… HEVC. Better than MPEG-2, I guess.)
My guess is that the next shot is with a TSMC N3E chip, which _may_ debut with iPhone 15 Pro. There's been conflicting reports if N3E will be ready when Apple needs it - September 2023 if it's for iPhone 15.
N3E based M3 Macbook Pro with hardware raytracing and hardware accelerated AV1 decode/encode would be nice.
A video of just 10min would take many hours, on the other end h265 encoding is slow but doable.
If you have a newish Intel CPU they're supposed to have good AV1 hardware encoding support. See SVT-AV1. (which ffmpeg also supports: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AV1#SVT-AV1 )
https://netflixtechblog.com/svt-av1-an-open-source-av1-encod...
I'm not sure what might be wrong on your end, but it sounds like ffmpeg's default configs might not be well-optimized yet if you can't encode in real time.
But also yes, as others are pointing out, this is a problem rapidly being addressed and is not atypical for new media formats.
Here's a guide with some various options for using it with ffmpeg: https://gitlab.com/AOMediaCodec/SVT-AV1/-/blob/master/Docs/F...
This picture is a little old now but it should get across the point of why libaom isn't a meaningful speed test.
It can be set to go faster, but the default speed is only one notch faster than on this chart.
I'm rooting for AV1 just the same as everyone else, but it's still nowhere close to HEVC in terms of hardware support, or even general quality/efficiency. It's just going to take some more time.
(That said, I agree with you. I think a codec being royalty free is a very good reason to prefer it to other codecs.)
Not exclusive to HN. Humans just have different opinions.
I think maybe you're responding sarcastically to yourself while eating this burrito.
Keep in mind that upwards of 95% of people will read comments but not post any themselves (and to address an obvious retort, sure, it'll be a different 95% for each submission). So the general "tone" of the comments absolutely impacts public perception, especially now that practically no-one consumes straight-news without social media commentary.
Redditors use identical arguments: "we're different people!" when their website is the most groupthink-y of all.
Well, you know how it is, some complaints are wrong and some are right.
Just reading about the historical context of AV1 it all feels like huge dirty lawyer battles involving troves of money thrown around, with the user as a hostage indirectly footing the bill in the end so we can't just ignore all the drama.
I would want to side with Google on the open side they seem to be championing, but there's no way it doesn't come with huge side effects that we will pay sooner or later.
All to say, it's looks like a complicated enough matter that opinions will be devised and all options might not be great, some just being more acceptable than others.
Royalty-free matters less when it turns out these bad actors can punish people for it. It's a little worrying frankly.
The core problem with “software patents” in the US sense is that the patent office appear to grant them by default if they are vague, only accepts specific types of pre-existing evidence that they are not new or novel, and once a patent is granted makes it as hard and expensive as possible to challenge the granted patents, and doesn’t allow you to recover costs if you are sued for a patent that is eventually revoked.
All of those thing mean that the specifics of us patent law remain BS, but at the same time I think that everyone on HN does believe that IP should exist, and people should have rights to what they create.
Maybe, but I've never seen people protesting the idea that math can't be patented, and compression methods are pretty close.
The rationale for "you can't patent maths" is basically "you can't patent a fact".
Blanket anti-software patent people take a maximalist position: if it's a step of instructions it is maths, so should not be patentable. I think that is absolute nonsense, and it is an explicit statement that if you ever come up with anything idea, no matter how much it cost you to invent it, or develop it, it has zero value - because apparently the hard part of complex and new technology is writing code, not developing the technology in the first place. It also means you get some absurd results: the same invention would be patentable if you made a mechanical implementation, a purely electronic one, probably an ASIC, but probably not if it was an ASIC executing instructions from a builtin ROM. Because suddenly it becomes "math".
As I said originally, the problem is not patenting "software", it's that the idiocy of the US patent office means that you can make a patent document that has no information that can be used to implement the patent, and thus the patents are inherently open to abuse.
The core problem with software (and worse, process) patents is that they let you patent an idea, rather than an actual implementation of an idea, which is what physical object patents are required to do. The whole reason patents are public is so that the public can look at a patent, and use that document to implement the idea being patented, but if all you've done is patent the idea then all the public can do is see that you had an idea but didn't know how to actually build it (which is what patents are _meant_ to be for).
Why is that absurd? Here's my attempt to describe a maximalist position: If the machine actually does something then you get a valid patent for the real world. But the patent won't apply to simulations of the real world. So it doesn't really matter whether it's "patentable" or not. We could give patents to both variants, but if someone is only interested in the data the machine outputs, they can run a simulated version without violating either patent.
> it is an explicit statement that if you ever come up with anything idea, no matter how much it cost you to invent it, or develop it, it has zero value - because apparently the hard part of complex and new technology is writing code, not developing the technology in the first place
Math takes tons of effort too! Deep complicated proofs are no more "just a fact" than compression schemes are "just a fact".
> The core problem with software (and worse, process) patents is that they let you patent an idea, rather than an actual implementation of an idea
I worry that there's no good way to make a thorough guideline for what counts as idea and what counts as implementation for things that are code-based.
Though in the strictest sense you could just rely on copyright for implementations and toss out patents entirely.
There is surely a lot of low-effort GUI handbrake encodes online. But most of the """well-respected""" piracy groups put a surprising amount of effort into filtering and such to correct artifacts, both due to the compression and due to the source material itself.
A lot of these people are using tools like VapourSynth with a variety of scripts they've put together and x264 or x265 directly rather than ffmpeg. The scripts themselves are typically Python, but often rely on loads of native modules. You can see a couple of guides about some of the processes they perform:
- <https://silentaperture.gitlab.io/mdbook-guide/introduction.h...> (all video content)
- <https://guide.encode.moe> (anime-focused)
And some links to the kinds of filtering code pirates write for movies/tv/anime:
- <https://git.concertos.live/OpusGang/EncodeScripts> (MANY VapourSynth and AviSynth scripts for both live-action content and anime)
- <https://github.com/Beatrice-Raws/encode-scripts>
And while not directly related to the encoding side of things, but if any of that is interesting, in addition to the encoding side of things, pirate fansubs also get pretty complex, particularly for anime since, unlike the unstyled SRT subs most people come across for foreign movies online, anime fansubs tend to use ASS [1] subtitles with lots of styling to accomplish things like cleanly replacing Japanese text in a letter someone is reading or adding non-distracting subtitles for background text (e.g., signs on buildings, etc) [2].
To do a lot of that, though, these subtitles often pack fonts into the video container to allow the media player to render things as expected without resorting to "hardsubbing" (i.e., pre-rendering the subtitles into the video itself)—which is one of many reasons container formats like Matroska (MKV) is so popular in those communities.
An interesting thing to see come out of that is that I have noticed some fansubbing groups move to proper build tools, like Gradle, to automate portions of their workflows. As an example, SubKt, a Gradle plugin, allows them to essentially have CI/CD for their subtitling projects by doing integrity checks on the fonts, linting the subtitles/fonts to ensure the selected fonts actually have glyphs for all the text, templating and merging so that different team members can work on things like the script/timing while another does styling, and then packaging and publishing tasks to bundle everything up into an MKV at the end and upload the result to torrent sites.
If any of that is interesting, here are some links to SubKt + some real-world finished projects making use of it:
- <https://github.com/Myaamori/SubKt>
- <https://github.com/Kaleido-subs/Joshiraku>
Regarding 'why' AV1 and other codecs like VP8/VP9 or VVC haven't really been used:
1. Many of the private trackers have fairly strict rules in terms of standards (e.g., due to lack of hardware support, perceived differences in quality, etc., many don't allow <4K HEVC encodes at all, except in edge cases like when a streaming platform releases a new show in HEVC-only), so individual encoders and groups aren't always free to use whatever codecs they please.
2. Many seem to find x264 easier to tune for certain types of media than x265, and even more so compared to AV1 and others.
3. Many seem to believe that insert codec tends to produce worse results in certain circumstances or for certain content, so they will stick with x265 (or even x264 for the same reasons)
4. Many find that, to truly achieve the same picture quality produced by x265, compression ratios often end up much worse than people claim, and thus the significant slow-down in encoding speed and loss of hardware support is not worth the minor reductions in size.
#4 is likely the most common reason, as it was/is the same with those who prefer x264 over x265; HEVC video is definitely not "half the size" if you want it to look comparably good. And so, especially in the past with older hardware, it simply wasn't worth the tradeoffs; it's worth remembering that, in the case of piracy groups which distribute over P2P networks, no one is paying AWS and co. exorbitant amounts of money per terabyte of data transferred.
These sites run off of 'free' bandwidth provided by users and cheap unmetered servers from companies like Hetzner, OVH, LeaseWeb, etc -- saving 10-30% in bandwidth often is not worth it at the expense of doubling your encode times (or significantly worse than doubling, in the case of AV1 and VVC) and alienating the people watching on older hardware.
EDIT:
Also, I figured it'd be worth noting as well that RE: my points on encoding speeds and such, while hardware decoding may help adoption in the piracy communities, I don't foresee hardware-accelerated AV1/VVC encoding making much of a difference in the near future; even today, virtually none of these groups use solutions like NVENC for HEVC due to the fact that the software HEVC encoders produce better results (so pirates that encode such content typically have just come to accept the slower encodes now that good CPU compute is much cheaper than in the past).
---
[1]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubStation_Alpha>
[2]: <https://streamable.com/d21iq> (this is genuinely a toggleable subtitle and not something baked into the video!)
However, pirates do care about file size and quality, as demonstrated by the adoption of 10-bit H.265. So AV1 should be coming, eventually.
Many SoCs support hardware acceleration for VP9 decoding. http://wiki.webmproject.org/hardware/socs
For Video, H.266 / VVC is just technically superior in every single way. For Images, JPEG Xl is the best for 95%+ of use cases. For audio, we have a AAC-LC, literally as ubiquitous as MP3, true patent free, and at 128+kbps, 95% of cases as good as the state of the audio codec.
And yet we end up in a world where the only accepted choice is AV1 for video, AVIF for images and Opus for Audio.
--- ¹ good is subjective, I earn my money as a freelance audio engineer, so I should have the ears to notice anything wrong with it.
EDIT: looks like opus is actually the successor to Vorbis.
<rant>On the other, I'd prefer to not see further adoption of HEVC and instead see increased deployment of VP9 and AV1 wherever possible. Let MPEG-LA and the other HEVC patent pools+holders... well I'll leave the rest to your imagination. Future looking, no one should even touch VVC/H.266.</rant>
Unfortunately the above rant does not address the gap in hardware support between HEVC and AV1 for efficient accelerated decoding. Codec support is a difficult game to balance. I'm hopeful that by the time AVC/H.264's patent pools fully expire later this decade we'll all have moved on to newer and better (non-royalty patent-unencumbered) things.