It's been a slow process, and hence perhaps underappreciated, but it's very gratifying that over the last 15 years patent-unencumbered media codecs have won. The companies that contributed to this --- Google, Mozilla, Cisco, and others --- and especially Xiph that got the ball rolling --- deserve a lot of credit.
They have? Are we talking images only because in video mp4 and .h264 and .h265 are pretty much it. Apple/Safari still doesn't support vp8/vp9/webm/av1 for video or ogg for audio
> Are we talking images only because in video mp4 and .h264 and .h265 are pretty much it. Apple/Safari still doesn't support vp8/vp9/webm/av1 for video or ogg for audio
h265 is doomed because of the multiple patent pools that have formed and the extreme price hikes compared to h264. It's a risky technology to build on. That's the best ad that AV1 can have, and many members joined the alliance for open media for that reason after it became clear that the patent pool situation wouldn't resolve.
As for your browser support question, yes, Safari has traditionally been anti-ogg, but a few years ago Apple joined the alliance for open media and added opus support to their browsers (although only in the caf container, for some weird unexplainable reason).
Open codecs have won in the lossless audio domain (flac). There is no reason they can't win in the lossy video and lossy audio domains too (not sure about lossless videos but FFV1 seems to have lots of support by archivists who want open technology).
If your world of Video = Youtube. Then HEVC failed.
If your world of Video = Every Video usage on the planet Earth. Then HEVC isn't doing so bad, every shipping TV has had HEVC decode, most ( if not all ) Smartphone, PC, Tablet has hardware Decoder shipped.
Sure, but it was massively pushed as the successor of h264 as the new de facto video codec standard, after almost a decade in use it has clearly failed in that respect.
IMO this codec generation saw no winner, instead h264 remains the undisputed king, the next battle for the crown will likely be between AV2 (or whatever it ends up being called) and VVC (Versatile Video Coding).
Yes. And I think there is something more than licensing. x264 managed to push H.264 way beyond what anyone could imagine. It wasn't until 2017/2018 did x265 or in fact any commercial H.265 encoder had clear advantage over x264 at 8 / 10Mbps+ bitrate. For HEVC 4K it was obvious, but 4K content never really took off, and h.264 for 1080P was good enough at those bitrate.
I dont know much about AV2, but VVC is looking very promising. I just hope they dont mess this up.
Sure, because it is "good enough" for what it does. But recently, with the advent and demand of 2k and 4k videos, people realised the need of, and have started appreciating the capabilities of HEVC.
When it comes to the popularity of video encoders, my unscientific way of judging it is to look at what the pirates are using. If you look at the torrent scene, most of the popular tv series and movies are now also available HEVC encoded and they are popular too (especially the high quality 2k and 4k Blu Ray rips). It's rare to come across any VP9 videos, and HEVC is undoubtedly number 2.
Personally, even I've started re-encoding my video library with HEVC, once I discovered that the "medium" setting takes about the same time as H.264 encoding and gives an acceptable quality for (sometimes) half the file size.
I do keep an eye on encoders, and while it is good to know the work going on this field, practically speaking nearly everyone is moving on to HEVC. Nearly all the other competitors are in development and unusable because of their really slow encoding time.
> practically speaking nearly everyone is moving on to HEVC. Nearly all the other competitors are in development and unusable because of their really slow encoding time.
Forget commercial softwares, even the popular open-source video encoders like Handbrake or AviDemux or FFMpeg do not have AV1 or any other competing encoders in their release. They do support HEVC though. That itself is telling on the state of the competitors.
Note that I am in no way an advocate for HEVC (even if I sound like one :). I am just speaking from a practical point of view, as a user. If tomorrow there comes another encoder that takes less time to encode, and offers better compression, I'll immediately dump H.264 and H.265 for it.
Decoders for which the vendors still face unknown patent licensing fees.
After the HEVC licensing debacle, the industry isn't going to jump on a bandwagon with unlimited unknown downside again, not when royalty-free alternatives like AV1 exist.
It depends on what you are measuring. If we go purely by web traffic volume, then whatever YouTube is doing is what's "won". AFAICT, that's VP9 to everything that supports it which seems to be all desktops and new Androids but not Apple devices. Android devices of the previous generation fallback to VP8 where there's hardware decode support.
I wouldn't lump them together. There is a chasm between the adoption numbers for H.264 and H.265, HEVC failed gain the momentum AVC did --which is exactly the point GP is making.
MPEG-LA is indeed well connected to lobbying parties and Hollywood, which established HEVC as the codec for 4K Blu-ray discs. (I personally don't remember the last time I borrowed an optical disc to watch a movie. I actually don't even own any type of optical disc driver anymore!). However, VP9 dominates over HEVC in streamed media.
