Maybe the owner of YouTube should address this which is not Apple. Just saying.
They can't force Apple to use an industry standard, even if it is free, stable, vetted and common.
Exactly. Google can’t force their garbage on people since they don’t rule the Internet (like they seem to think).
We don’t need another standard created by Google when there’s a perfectly good industry standard already out there in wide use (HEVC).
Good on Apple for supporting the better system and not allowing Google to act like Microsoft by imposing “their” standards on the rest of us.
Thank goodness there is another standard since HEVC was on the verge of failure with some of the contributing members insisting on excessively high royalties, leading to infighting, and Apple and others resisting license offers. Reason seems to have come to the forefront finally, greed lost, and part of the reason IMO is that there is another viable, well-supported, and well-vetted solution. Even better it's free to use.
Maybe the owner of YouTube should address this which is not Apple. Just saying.
They can't force Apple to use an industry standard, even if it is free, stable, vetted and common.
Exactly. Google can’t force their garbage on people since they don’t rule the Internet (like they seem to think).
We don’t need another standard created by Google when there’s a perfectly good industry standard already out there in wide use (HEVC).
Good on Apple for supporting the better system and not allowing Google to act like Microsoft by imposing “their” standards on the rest of us.
Thank goodness there is another standard since HEVC was on the verge of failure with some of the contributing members insisting on excessively high royalties, leading to infighting, and Apple and others resisting license offers. Reason seems to have come to the forefront finally, greed lost, and part of the reason IMO is that there is another viable, well-supported, and well-vetted solution. Even better it's free to use.
Free to use. Until someone finds some stolen IP inside.
HEVC is so expensive that apparently Apple had to raise prices on all 4K movies and charge people to update their existing movies. Oh wait....
C'mon, Apple. Do the needed negotiations/due diligence to make sure things play nice with at least the top handful of software partners that your users really use, before releasing a major software update.
Btw, in my organization, people have been told to not upgrade to iOS11 because it cannot send mail via Outlook/Exchange. Quoting from the memo, "...An error appears stating "Cannot Send Mail. The message was rejected by the server." Apple is working to resolve this, and expects a fix soon. [XYZ] recommends NOT upgrading to this version of iOS at this time."
Pathetic.
Several people I know have updated their work phones with no issues connecting to outlook servers.
Maybe the owner of YouTube should address this which is not Apple. Just saying.
They can't force Apple to use an industry standard, even if it is free, stable, vetted and common.
Exactly. Google can’t force their garbage on people since they don’t rule the Internet (like they seem to think).
We don’t need another standard created by Google when there’s a perfectly good industry standard already out there in wide use (HEVC).
Good on Apple for supporting the better system and not allowing Google to act like Microsoft by imposing “their” standards on the rest of us.
Thank goodness there is another standard since HEVC was on the verge of failure with some of the contributing members insisting on excessively high royalties, leading to infighting, and Apple and others resisting license offers. Reason seems to have come to the forefront finally, greed lost, and part of the reason IMO is that there is another viable, well-supported, and well-vetted solution. Even better it's free to use.
Free to use. Until someone finds some stolen IP inside.
HEVC is so expensive that apparently Apple had to raise prices on all 4K movies and charge people to update their existing movies. Oh wait....
Google has already stated they will be responsible for any IP claims haven't they? This isn't a new standard. HEVC members huffed and puffed and said that there might be patents infringed a few years back. Guess what? There wasn't and on top of that they agreed to a cross-license arrangement with Google with no on-going royalties for any licensee of Google's VP codec IIRC.
So no there's little likelihood any IP reading on VP9 will suddenly be discovered "stolen" nor any licensee sued for patent infringement. That's a false narrative.
Maybe the owner of YouTube should address this which is not Apple. Just saying.
They can't force Apple to use an industry standard, even if it is free, stable, vetted and common.
Exactly. Google can’t force their garbage on people since they don’t rule the Internet (like they seem to think).
We don’t need another standard created by Google when there’s a perfectly good industry standard already out there in wide use (HEVC).
Good on Apple for supporting the better system and not allowing Google to act like Microsoft by imposing “their” standards on the rest of us.
Thank goodness there is another standard since HEVC was on the verge of failure with some of the contributing members insisting on excessively high royalties, leading to infighting, and Apple and others resisting license offers. Reason seems to have come to the forefront finally, greed lost, and part of the reason IMO is that there is another viable, well-supported, and well-vetted solution. Even better it's free to use.
VP9, while having a published specification and an implementation, is not a standard in the sense of the word. It is just another proprietary format controlled by Google.
VP9 is fraught with patent liability as Google took a lot of the inventions in the MPEG standards and reverse engineered them up into a new codec and is giving it away for free. By having zero licensing fees due to this largely stolen open standard, and constant violations of copyright in their content library, this is how YouTube (and Google in general) makes a profitable business. Costs are so low because they copy IP/ software innovations and make them free to the end user (then monetize through ads). This is not news, folks.
4k/HDR on Youtube is a bit silly, though, since the quality of the content is generally garbage as well.
VP9 is fraught with patent liability as Google took a lot of the inventions in the MPEG standards and reverse engineered them up into a new codec and is giving it away for free. By having zero licensing fees due to this largely stolen open standard, and constant violations of copyright in their content library, this is how YouTube (and Google in general) makes a profitable business. Costs are so low because they copy IP/ software innovations and make them free to the end user (then monetize through ads). This is not news, folks.
4k/HDR on Youtube is a bit silly, though, since the quality of the content is generally garbage as well.
"Google Inc. and MPEG LA, LLC announced today that they have entered into agreements granting Google a license to techniques that may be essential to VP8 and earlier-generation VPx video compression technologies under patents owned by 11 patent holders. The agreements also grant Google the right to sublicense those techniques to any user of VP8, whether the VP8 implementation is by Google or another entity. It further provides for sublicensing those VP8 techniques in one next-generation VPx video codec. As a result of the agreements, MPEG LA will discontinue its effort to form a VP8 patent pool.
“This is a significant milestone in Google’s efforts to establish VP8 as a widely-deployed web video format,” said Allen Lo, Google’s deputy general counsel for patents. “We appreciate MPEG LA’s cooperation in making this happen.”
“We are pleased for the opportunity to facilitate agreements with Google to make VP8 widely available to users,” said MPEG LA President and CEO Larry Horn."
C'mon, Apple. Do the needed negotiations/due diligence to make sure things play nice with at least the top handful of software partners that your users really use, before releasing a major software update.
Btw, in my organization, people have been told to not upgrade to iOS11 because it cannot send mail via Outlook/Exchange. Quoting from the memo, "...An error appears stating "Cannot Send Mail. The message was rejected by the server." Apple is working to resolve this, and expects a fix soon. [XYZ] recommends NOT upgrading to this version of iOS at this time."
Pathetic.
There is nothing stopping Google from transcoding their 4K HDR video to support the ATV5. They do that already for many common formats.
Maybe the owner of YouTube should address this which is not Apple. Just saying.
They can't force Apple to use an industry standard, even if it is free, stable, vetted and common.
Exactly. Google can’t force their garbage on people since they don’t rule the Internet (like they seem to think).
We don’t need another standard created by Google when there’s a perfectly good industry standard already out there in wide use (HEVC).
Good on Apple for supporting the better system and not allowing Google to act like Microsoft by imposing “their” standards on the rest of us.
Thank goodness there is another standard since HEVC was on the verge of failure with some of the contributing members insisting on excessively high royalties, leading to infighting, and Apple and others resisting license offers. Reason seems to have come to the forefront finally, greed lost, and part of the reason IMO is that there is another viable, well-supported, and well-vetted solution. Even better it's free to use.
Free to use. Until someone finds some stolen IP inside.
HEVC is so expensive that apparently Apple had to raise prices on all 4K movies and charge people to update their existing movies. Oh wait....
Google has already stated they will be responsible for any IP claims haven't they? This isn't a new standard. HEVC members huffed and puffed and said that there might be patents infringed a few years back. Guess what? There wasn't and on top of that they agreed to a cross-license arrangement with Google with no on-going royalties for any licensee of Google's VP codec IIRC.
So no there's little likelihood any IP reading on VP9 will suddenly be discovered "stolen" nor any licensee sued for patent infringement. That's a false narrative.
That's an awful lot of typing to refute something I never said. I simply took a jab at Google over past issues (like you did at HEVC over their past issues). I don't recall ever saying anything you stated was false. Unless you can dig that out of the few words I typed.
Both Apple and Google are refusing to implement a standard (Google with HEVC, Apple with VP9). At the very least you would have to concede both are equally at fault. But when you look at the technical capabilities of each codec and the past history of each company, then the pendulum swings heavily to HEVC.
No problem! Just write a plug-in that can implement the Google coded and install it ... OH SNAP!
This is the fail of the approach Apple has taken with the ever taller walled garden known as IOS. It is why Google has not supported HomeKit in its Nest products. It is why Amazon Echo is a runaway success. It is why developers cannot access basic features like WiFi despite being a fully open standard. VR is still a distant promise. Developers have been warning Apple about these problems for the past decade but now it is starting to bite as Apple misses out on major markets.
Maybe the owner of YouTube should address this which is not Apple. Just saying.
They can't force Apple to use an industry standard, even if it is free, stable, vetted and common.
Exactly. Google can’t force their garbage on people since they don’t rule the Internet (like they seem to think).
We don’t need another standard created by Google when there’s a perfectly good industry standard already out there in wide use (HEVC).
Good on Apple for supporting the better system and not allowing Google to act like Microsoft by imposing “their” standards on the rest of us.
Thank goodness there is another standard since HEVC was on the verge of failure with some of the contributing members insisting on excessively high royalties, leading to infighting, and Apple and others resisting license offers. Reason seems to have come to the forefront finally, greed lost, and part of the reason IMO is that there is another viable, well-supported, and well-vetted solution. Even better it's free to use.
Free to use. Until someone finds some stolen IP inside.
HEVC is so expensive that apparently Apple had to raise prices on all 4K movies and charge people to update their existing movies. Oh wait....
Google has already stated they will be responsible for any IP claims haven't they? This isn't a new standard. HEVC members huffed and puffed and said that there might be patents infringed a few years back. Guess what? There wasn't and on top of that they agreed to a cross-license arrangement with Google with no on-going royalties for any licensee of Google's VP codec IIRC.
So no there's little likelihood any IP reading on VP9 will suddenly be discovered "stolen" nor any licensee sued for patent infringement. That's a false narrative.
That's an awful lot of typing to refute something I never said. I simply took a jab at Google over past issues (like you did at HEVC over their past issues). I don't recall ever saying anything you stated was false. Unless you can dig that out of the few words I typed.
Both Apple and Google are refusing to implement a standard (Google with HEVC, Apple with VP9). At the very least you would have to concede both are equally at fault. But when you look at the technical capabilities of each codec and the past history of each company, then the pendulum swings heavily to HEVC.
That is incredibly stupid of Apple to refuse to support free open standards.
To support it properly needs hardware acceleration, especially for 4K. If they add that to some new products, content providers would adopt it more. Then there becomes a need to support it in an entire ecosystem of products: Mac iGPUs/dGPUs, encoders, Apple TV, iOS devices, some of which they don't control:
Apple and others are supporting the best standard, Google isn't. There's not much difference between them though. Google is doing this to push people to using VP9:
They didn't end up dropping H.264 in Chrome but they are using Youtube for leverage. Their basis for this decision is to keep innovation in codecs open. Google generally likes things to be open. They still support Flash, which isn't open so they like open when it suits their business model.
Google isn't open with their back-end web services or transparency over ranking algorithms either because that's what pays their bills. They have a rallying cry for everyone else to be open but most people want to protect the IP that pays the bills just like they do. Pushing people to be open when they don't have financial backing removes their incentive to innovate. Google has a privileged position with their monopoly internet services constantly pouring money into theirs coffers. Pretty much everyone would be more open if they had the same position but they don't.
There's a valid complaint about the licensing issue with codecs as it can be a financial/legal burden for startup companies. It happened with MPEG2 and companies had to sell the codecs separately. The fundamental problem is about money, not which codec is best. People who put effort into making advanced codecs want to be paid.
The licensing companies don't make that much revenue. They have caps on revenue at less than $10m per company per year so there's a better way that this kind of IP can be rewarded while allowing for more collaborative advancement. There's an article here about HEVC licensing and attempts to resolve this:
When there are so many parties involved with conflicting interests then it's hard to reach an agreement. The per-device licensing model isn't a good model when the overall revenues are so low. The IP owners are going to make most of their revenue from the big companies anyway so they'd be as well just having a yearly fee and an agreement on how much the fee will change in future (permanent, not short timeframe). The agreements cover the IP so there can still be open source implementations, which allows people to advance the software.
It could be worthwhile having an official business model setup to support open software that contributes financial incentive (Open IP). Like the GPL/MIT/Apache licenses but with a funding/bidding pool. There are complications like who owns the rights to the developments but I think there needs to be somewhere that people who make software/IP advances can go to support their development. Companies would put bids into the pool to request advances in certain areas and the bids could include licensing requirements. When people make the advances, they claim the bid. Organizations like W3C fund themselves individually:
but having a business model produces a standard for this kind of support. Places like Wikipedia, codec groups, academia would have a default place to go to where they know they can be rewarded for their advances. If they had a codec branch, they could put challenges/bids out to every Mathematics professor in the world. They could narrow down the requirements to say they need the fastest way to solve a very specific part of the encoding algorithm and people would know what to work on and they would be rewarded from the pool. It would be a bit like how charities work where it's easy for anyone to dump money into and have some assurance that it's making a difference and there would transparent metrics over who deserves the rewards.
C'mon, Apple. Do the needed negotiations/due diligence to make sure things play nice with at least the top handful of software partners that your users really use, before releasing a major software update.
Btw, in my organization, people have been told to not upgrade to iOS11 because it cannot send mail via Outlook/Exchange. Quoting from the memo, "...An error appears stating "Cannot Send Mail. The message was rejected by the server." Apple is working to resolve this, and expects a fix soon. [XYZ] recommends NOT upgrading to this version of iOS at this time."
Pathetic.
We seen this problem in the past with outlook and exchange servers not working with new release of iOS thus the reason I usual hold off. The fact that Microsoft is migrating users and companies to 365 for mail could be the issue verses a true exchange issue or something they have done on the 365 side. I can tell in the last week I had lots of serious issue with 365 and had an actual MS tech support person (verse the local support people) on the phone for 3 hours this week trying to resolve my issues. Only to find out it was 365 server side issue they changed something which caused problems with OneDrive for Business to stop syncing properly and corrupting files or not allowing them to save properly. End up having to create an entirely new user profile and setting up my account again.
Do not be so quick to blame Apple since MS is notorious for blaming everyone else for problem they have on their end. In this case it maybe be easier for Apple to fix verse MS trying to fix and breaking something else.
(This reply is also to the handful of others that pushed back on my post).
I have passed on your responses to our IT administrators, whose email I had cut-and-pasted, asking them why the discrepancy between what they sent out and what I am hearing here.
VP9 is fraught with patent liability as Google took a lot of the inventions in the MPEG standards and reverse engineered them up into a new codec and is giving it away for free. By having zero licensing fees due to this largely stolen open standard, and constant violations of copyright in their content library, this is how YouTube (and Google in general) makes a profitable business. Costs are so low because they copy IP/ software innovations and make them free to the end user (then monetize through ads). This is not news, folks.
4k/HDR on Youtube is a bit silly, though, since the quality of the content is generally garbage as well.
"Google Inc. and MPEG LA, LLC announced today that they have entered into agreements granting Google a license to techniques that may be essential to VP8 and earlier-generation VPx video compression technologies under patents owned by 11 patent holders. The agreements also grant Google the right to sublicense those techniques to any user of VP8, whether the VP8 implementation is by Google or another entity. It further provides for sublicensing those VP8 techniques in one next-generation VPx video codec. As a result of the agreements, MPEG LA will discontinue its effort to form a VP8 patent pool.
“This is a significant milestone in Google’s efforts to establish VP8 as a widely-deployed web video format,” said Allen Lo, Google’s deputy general counsel for patents. “We appreciate MPEG LA’s cooperation in making this happen.”
“We are pleased for the opportunity to facilitate agreements with Google to make VP8 widely available to users,” said MPEG LA President and CEO Larry Horn."
Some partial licenses on patents don't make a licensee a "standard". This is the scope of the settlement that matters and that report does not carry any information about whether those licenses are full or partial. If you examine Intel's support of HEVC and VP9, you'll see that VP9 hardware implementations are considerably behind the HEVC hardware implementations and correlating that to the scope of the licensing is very plausible.
It says "techniques essential to VPx" not "techniques essential to H.265 or H.264". "We authorize you to use some of our patented techniques"... That's it.
Comments
Free to use. Until someone finds some stolen IP inside.
HEVC is so expensive that apparently Apple had to raise prices on all 4K movies and charge people to update their existing movies. Oh wait....
So so not really stupid of Apple.
So no there's little likelihood any IP reading on VP9 will suddenly be discovered "stolen" nor any licensee sued for patent infringement. That's a false narrative.
...and I was just bragging about you earlier today, saying you generally do your research before posting. Here 'ya go as it's apparently something you missed.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/07/new-patent-group-threatens-to-derail-4k-hevc-video-streaming/?comments=1&post=29440537
...which supports the first part of my claim of greed on the part of HVEC patent holders and then
https://www.techhive.com/article/3017536/streaming-media/the-leading-4k-video-format-might-not-get-ruined-by-patents-after-all.html
which supports the second part about reason winning the day, perhaps prompted by viable alternatives supported by Google and others in place of or addition to MPEG's codec.
You're welcome.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20130307006192/en/Google-MPEG-LA-Announce-Agreement-Covering-VP8
"Google Inc. and MPEG LA, LLC announced today that they have entered into agreements granting Google a license to techniques that may be essential to VP8 and earlier-generation VPx video compression technologies under patents owned by 11 patent holders. The agreements also grant Google the right to sublicense those techniques to any user of VP8, whether the VP8 implementation is by Google or another entity. It further provides for sublicensing those VP8 techniques in one next-generation VPx video codec. As a result of the agreements, MPEG LA will discontinue its effort to form a VP8 patent pool.
“This is a significant milestone in Google’s efforts to establish VP8 as a widely-deployed web video format,” said Allen Lo, Google’s deputy general counsel for patents. “We appreciate MPEG LA’s cooperation in making this happen.”
“We are pleased for the opportunity to facilitate agreements with Google to make VP8 widely available to users,” said MPEG LA President and CEO Larry Horn."
That's an awful lot of typing to refute something I never said. I simply took a jab at Google over past issues (like you did at HEVC over their past issues). I don't recall ever saying anything you stated was false. Unless you can dig that out of the few words I typed.
Both Apple and Google are refusing to implement a standard (Google with HEVC, Apple with VP9). At the very least you would have to concede both are equally at fault. But when you look at the technical capabilities of each codec and the past history of each company, then the pendulum swings heavily to HEVC.
http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/HEVC-Advance-Patent-Pool-Creates-Confusion-Lacks-Transparency-105235.aspx
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP9#Hardware_implementations
Netflix found that H.265 offered better quality than VP9:
http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/Netflix-Finds-x265-20-More-Efficient-than-VP9-113346.aspx
https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/a-large-scale-comparison-of-x264-x265-and-libvpx-a-sneak-peek-2e81e88f8b0f
Apple and others are supporting the best standard, Google isn't. There's not much difference between them though. Google is doing this to push people to using VP9:
https://www.wired.com/2011/01/google-dropping-h-264-codec-from-chrome-browser/
They didn't end up dropping H.264 in Chrome but they are using Youtube for leverage. Their basis for this decision is to keep innovation in codecs open. Google generally likes things to be open. They still support Flash, which isn't open so they like open when it suits their business model.
Google isn't open with their back-end web services or transparency over ranking algorithms either because that's what pays their bills. They have a rallying cry for everyone else to be open but most people want to protect the IP that pays the bills just like they do. Pushing people to be open when they don't have financial backing removes their incentive to innovate. Google has a privileged position with their monopoly internet services constantly pouring money into theirs coffers. Pretty much everyone would be more open if they had the same position but they don't.
There's a valid complaint about the licensing issue with codecs as it can be a financial/legal burden for startup companies. It happened with MPEG2 and companies had to sell the codecs separately. The fundamental problem is about money, not which codec is best. People who put effort into making advanced codecs want to be paid.
The licensing companies don't make that much revenue. They have caps on revenue at less than $10m per company per year so there's a better way that this kind of IP can be rewarded while allowing for more collaborative advancement. There's an article here about HEVC licensing and attempts to resolve this:
https://www.thebroadcastbridge.com/content/entry/5020/technicolor-exits-hevc-patent-pool-in-bid-to-end-advanced-codec-war
When there are so many parties involved with conflicting interests then it's hard to reach an agreement. The per-device licensing model isn't a good model when the overall revenues are so low. The IP owners are going to make most of their revenue from the big companies anyway so they'd be as well just having a yearly fee and an agreement on how much the fee will change in future (permanent, not short timeframe). The agreements cover the IP so there can still be open source implementations, which allows people to advance the software.
It could be worthwhile having an official business model setup to support open software that contributes financial incentive (Open IP). Like the GPL/MIT/Apache licenses but with a funding/bidding pool. There are complications like who owns the rights to the developments but I think there needs to be somewhere that people who make software/IP advances can go to support their development. Companies would put bids into the pool to request advances in certain areas and the bids could include licensing requirements. When people make the advances, they claim the bid. Organizations like W3C fund themselves individually:
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/fees
but having a business model produces a standard for this kind of support. Places like Wikipedia, codec groups, academia would have a default place to go to where they know they can be rewarded for their advances. If they had a codec branch, they could put challenges/bids out to every Mathematics professor in the world. They could narrow down the requirements to say they need the fastest way to solve a very specific part of the encoding algorithm and people would know what to work on and they would be rewarded from the pool. It would be a bit like how charities work where it's easy for anyone to dump money into and have some assurance that it's making a difference and there would transparent metrics over who deserves the rewards.
I have passed on your responses to our IT administrators, whose email I had cut-and-pasted, asking them why the discrepancy between what they sent out and what I am hearing here.
I'll let you know what they say.
It says "techniques essential to VPx" not "techniques essential to H.265 or H.264". "We authorize you to use some of our patented techniques"... That's it.