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Firm quietly boosts H.264 streaming license fees from $100,000 up to staggering $4.5 million — backbone codec of the internet gets meteoric increase, AVC hikes follow disastrous H.265 licensing increa (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 57 points 6 months ago (41 children)

Here's why it doesn't matter:

"AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) is an open, royalty-free video coding format initially designed for video transmissions over the Internet. It was developed as a successor to VP9 by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia),[3] a consortium founded in 2015 that includes semiconductor firms, video on demand providers, video content producers, software development companies and web browser vendors."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1

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  • [–] 67 points 6 months ago (33 children)

    Here's why it does matter

    Most server hardware thats out there right now doesn't support av1 encoding, so all of those, literally tens of thousands of them in thousands of spread out data centers have to be replaced with brand new +$1,500 a pop cards that do support it before they can use it

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  • [–] 17 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Most hardware can't decode it either which is very important. Also it's currently being sued over patents

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  • [–] 8 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Most hardware is only really true if you account for older hardware in circulation, most new hardware will be shipping hardware decoder support for AV1.

    On top of this, the software decoder support is remarkable for AV1, libdav1d is a marvelous piece of software, bringing access to a plethora of devices lacking hardware decoder support.

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  • [–] 15 points 6 months ago (27 children)

    I was gonna say, I like AV1, but my Plex server says otherwise.

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  • [–] 7 points 6 months ago (11 children)

    I'm using a 15 year old i5 and a GTX 970, having no issues with AV1 video. Curious what hardware you're running.

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  • [–] 9 points 6 months ago* (6 children)

    Neither of those things support AV1 encoding or decoding. Curious how you’ve come to believe you’re having “no issues” with a codec your hardware has no support for.

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  • [–] 11 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    You don't need HW acceleration to playback AV1. Maybe they watch most of their content at 720p and are software decoding and it's been good enough.

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  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago* (2 children)

    Yeah you’re going to need HW acceleration to encode AV1 on your server “without issues”.

    Theres a world of difference between something that’s technically possible and something that will just work without issues of any kind. Something being “good enough” implies the existence of caveats. Mainly being that’d be a shitty experience lol.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    Sure, but most people don't need encode. The start of this thread talks about encoding, but the person you replied to didn't specify. My guess is they're just talking about playback.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    I doubt that it's doing real time transcoding in av1, probably just sending the file "as-is" to your client device and you're noticing as modern networks allow real time streaming of files with that size

    My server with much newer components does like 5 fps in encoding av1

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (2 children)

    were you trying the default av1 encoder in ffmpeg? that one is unoptimized try libsvtav1 I get hundreds of fps, albeit on a 9800x3d

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  • [–] -4 points 6 months ago (8 children)

    Time to switch to Jellyfin.

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  • [–] 19 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Jellyfin somehow makes his hardware support AV1?

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  • [–] -5 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    I didn't ask for recommendations.

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  • [–] -1 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Damn my bad, that changes everything! My sincere apologies!

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  • [–] -4 points 6 months ago (5 children)

    use software transcoding if thats your issue

    if plex cannot work at all with AV1, it might be time to move to a non-garbage media server like jellyfin.

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  • [–] -1 points 6 months ago* (2 children)

    jellyfin is the least functional of the trinity of media servers so that’s not the best recommendation here.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    This is only really true if you have extreme throughput requirements, a regular VOD operation can get by fine on software encoding.

    If you have the kind of throughput needs that warrant hardware encoders you're going to want to go ASIC anyway, so regular server hardware won't cut it. Like YouTube for example had to build their own ASICs because of the downright absurd scale they are running at

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  • [–] 27 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    Can't be too sure about that: https://sh.itjust.works/post/57524423

    The whole patent system should just be abolished. And if we can't achieve that, at least software patents.

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  • [–] 9 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Nah, we've seen what happens with patents. from medical, to agriculture, to automotive to software. The system isn't working even slightly as originally intended in almost all scenarios and should be dismantled

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  • [–] 13 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    The best part of the article is the very end, even if the site makes it look unrelated.

    Avanci's Video pool and Access Advance's Video Distribution Patent pool are both now seeking content royalties from streaming services for the use of HEVC, VVC, VP9, and AV1. Access Advance's rates are capped at roughly $63 million per year, and Avanci has published rates of 1.6% to 2.0% of revenue or $0.12 to $0.15 per user per month.

    $4.5 million max for H.264 is rookie numbers vs. the $63 million max for AV1

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  • [–] 10 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    How does someone seek royalties on an open, royalty-free video coding format?

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  • [–] 10 points 6 months ago

    By claiming that you own patents on technology used by said format.

    The "open royalty free" aspect applies to companies that are a part of the AOMedia group, if you're not involved with them you're not covered by the patent grants and restrictions in place, and can charge whatever the courts say is cool.

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