Existing licensees are grandfathered.

top 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] 128 points 6 months ago (33 children)

Hope this pushes the royalty-free alternatives more. That's a crazy jump.

  • source
  • hideshow 33 child comments
  • [–] 78 points 6 months ago (10 children)

    AV1 already wins handily as a codec, and the only thing keeping it from being adopted more broadly than is currently the case is lack of hardware decoders on older hardware. This problem naturally solves itself as old hardware gets replaced.

    Even then, dav1d is a remarkable piece of software, and software decoding is pretty viable for AV1 thanks to it. Many places have already adopted AV1, and you should expect to keep seeing it get adopted as time goes on.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 10 child comments
  • [–] 24 points 6 months ago* (2 children)

    AV1 has recently gotten involved in a lawsuit by Dolby saying that they're breaking like 5 4 of their patent, so there's some issues there as well: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/av1s-open-royalty-free-promise-in-question-as-dolby-sues-snapchat-over-codec/

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 36 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    These things always happen because of how dumb software patents are. There's no guarantee the lawsuit will stick, nor do I necessarily expect it to

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 15 points 6 months ago

    It's even worse than that: the USPO abrogated their responsibility to evaluate patents for prior art and conflict with other patents to the courts.

    So they just issue patents willy nilly and expect courts to decide which ones 'win'.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 10 points 6 months ago (6 children)

    Better hardware encoder support would help, too. It's insanely inefficient to encode without that dedicated hardware, compared to h264/h265, where dedicated hardware support is there.

    I was hoping Apple would add it when they shipped the M4, and now M5, but nope.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
  • [–] 11 points 6 months ago (5 children)

    Hardware encoder support I think is generally less critical. Decoding is the process that needs to happen real-time, while most encoding can be done far in advance, unless you're live broadcasting or operating at YouTube-scale.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    While I agree, my point was that encoding needs to be more efficient, both in time, and resource consumption. That isn't quite there yet, for AV1. It is improving, albeit slowly.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    non apple chips can pretty much all hardware encode AV1 nowadays. it's really just apple doing its own thing again

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    It's too bad the GPU prices are utter insanity due to the LLM pyramid scheme poaching global RAM. I read an article yesterday that said Apple is likely eating that RAM overhead as a loss to ensure their long term strategy.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 17 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    I still wonder why video is about the only thing for which a restricted format is still the "industry standard"?

    We nowadays take photos in JPEG or WebP format, draw raster images in PNG or WebP format, vector graphics in SVG format, our documents are PDF or OOXML or ODF or HTML, all of which are (at least technically) open standards. Video is the only thing that still mostly runs on formats with restrictive patents.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago (19 children)

    Which royalty free alternatives exist?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 19 child comments
  • [–] 11 points 6 months ago (18 children)

    Theora, VP8, VP9, and AV1 are the ones that come to mind.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 18 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    Didn't Dolby just sue Snap for using AV1? Claiming it uses similar techniques to h264 or 265 or something?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Shit I hadn't heard of that. That makes me sad. I know from reading developer blogs at the time that they tried to use less established techniques in some places to try and avoid similarities. Let's hope it proves to be enough in the lawsuit. That would be horrible if some dusty encumbant can crush the new codec at a critical time of its global adotion.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (13 children)

    What about Matroska? That was open to begin with, wasn't it? Is it not good for streaming?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 13 child comments
  • [–] 18 points 6 months ago (10 children)

    MKV is a container format for bundling together streams of audio, video, and text. It does not provide the actual video compression, which is still typically h.264 or h.265.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 10 child comments
  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (9 children)

    Understood. They mentioned mpeg4 in the text, which (because of the MP4 container) got me on that route. Thanks for the clarification.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 9 child comments
  • [–] 7 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    The other answer you got hits it on the head already.

    Here's an additional piece of info you might like: The webm container format is actually a specific subset of Matroska. The big players in the web recognised that it was a very useful open container format and adopted it for the web. They took a subset to make implementation in browsers easier and more uniform.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 69 points 6 months ago (8 children)

    4500% increase

    Absolute financial parasitism. This is why we can't have nice things. People who own a license of something critical can just sit on their asses decades on end and collect unearned income from other companies who will in turn move to cost to the consumers.

  • source
  • hideshow 8 child comments
  • [–] 26 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Remember when Martin Shkreli was thrown in jail for hiking the price of medicine by 5555%? That was 2017, but when something like this happens in 2026 nobody bats an eye.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [+] 32 points 6 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)
  • [–] 12 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    dolby technologies aren't even the most advanced, they're just the most marketed, most expensive, most cutthroat in the industry

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 23 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    I thought h.264 patents are expired

    Edit: it was patented in 2003, so 20 year period is gone already

  • source
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 16 points 6 months ago

    Wikipedia covers it nicely:

    Since the first version of the standard was completed in May 2003 (22 years ago) and the most commonly used profile (the High profile) was completed in June 2004[citation needed] (21 years ago), some of the relevant patents are expired by now,[75] while others are still in force in jurisdictions around the world and one of the US patents in the MPEG LA H.264 pool (granted in 2016) lasts at least until November 2030.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Video_Coding?wprov=sfla1

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 17 points 6 months ago

    They see the stupid sony lawsuit and want in.

  • source
  • load more comments
    view more: next ›