h.266 H.266 Video Codec promises 50% size reduction over the current H.265

[WelshDdraig]

8 minutes ago, Kisai said:

snip the section replying to my post

I genuinely had no idea that's how it worked. Cheers for the lesson (and I actually mean that). To be honest, I haven't had any issues with interference, but just because I haven't, doesn't mean others will. 
It makes sense, but I still think it's stupid though that Microsoft expect you to pay for the codec, especially as you stated that:

Quote

Meanwhile Apple has always had these codecs available, at least inside Quicktime

But then again, Apple is (was?) more of a media focused company, so that kind of makes sense. 

I just think its a bit hypocritical that Microsoft:

Quote

doesn't expect, or want you to play videos on the PC

considering they released a media center focused OS in the past (back in the XP days).

But yeah, they are just my thoughts. 

[Kisai]

14 minutes ago, WelshDdraig said:

I genuinely had no idea that's how it worked. Cheers for the lesson (and I actually mean that). To be honest, I haven't had any issues with interference, but just because I haven't, doesn't mean others will. 
It makes sense, but I still think it's stupid though that Microsoft expect you to pay for the codec, especially as you stated that:

But then again, Apple is (was?) more of a media focused company, so that kind of makes sense. 

I just think its a bit hypocritical that Microsoft:

considering they released a media center focused OS in the past (back in the XP days).

But yeah, they are just my thoughts. 

Microsoft media center edition 2004/2005 was just Windows XP with a "media player" UI added to it that is easily compared to Kodi today (and Kodi was largely inspired by this.) Note what Kodi used to be called. XMBC XBox Media Center.  I had 2004, I had a laptop with a USB TV tuner. Guess what doesn't work on Windows Vista/7 ? Yup, the MCE stuff, because surprise surprise, it was proprietary. But let's also be clear here, MCE was part of a project Microsoft was working on to get IPTV out there https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ericsson_Mediaroom .

 

XP MCE and Vista MCE/Pro came with the h262 mpeg 2 codec. But the selling point of MCE was the EPG (enhanced program guide.)  Microsoft sold the mediaroom stuff off and then removed the functionality from 8.1 and 10.

 

Yet another thing Microsoft pretty much developed, sat on, and then got rid of because they were too cheap to put it in everything.

 

as a FYI, the Xbox 360 was able to communicate with the Mediaroom product, but it was up to the IPTV vendors to enable it, and new XBOX 360's were no longer able to be activated on it after a point.

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

5 hours ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Never seen that before. Figured Windows includes the more common codecs by default, unless they’re charging for a software decoder maybe? I’ve a lot of anime and shows encoded via x265 as well. 
 

Me: *uses VLC*

  

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

 For MPC-HC, there needs to be a directshow filter, and you can override things the OS has determined (that would normally be used) by installing your own filters. Normally when you install mpc-hc you install the LAVfilters which are the codecs from ffmpeg. So both VLC and MPC-HC have the same support as FFMPEG.

 

FFMPEG of course, supports the hardware acceleration API's for h264 and h265, if compiled as such. But FFDshow hasn't been updated in about 6 years, where as LAVfilters has been updated at least since last year.

 

It's not normally recommended to even install ffdshow/lavfilters for the OS to use since it will interfere with games if allowed to override the OS filters so you can use it with all other video players. Just stick to mpc-hc or vlc to play video stand-alone.

 

 

you should be using Klite codec with MPC-HC which comes pre installed with everything you need, including MADvr that helps playing HDR content on your PC without making it look washed out on non-HDR monitors.

[GumblesGrambles]

10 hours ago, spartaman64 said:

i tried to play a video yesterday and this popped up ... excuse me microsoft

 

You can get it for free, legitimately, just google it

[Master Disaster]

10 hours ago, spartaman64 said:

i tried to play a video yesterday and this popped up ... excuse me microsoft

https://codecguide.com/download_kl.htm

[Lord Vile]

H265 is bad enough. To get a video from my phone to a windows PC i had to use my mac to convert it to H264 before anything would recognise it. 

[Master Disaster]

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

Microsoft media center edition 2004/2005 was just Windows XP with a "media player" UI added to it that is easily compared to Kodi today (and Kodi was largely inspired by this.) Note what Kodi used to be called. XMBC XBox Media Center.  I had 2004, I had a laptop with a USB TV tuner. Guess what doesn't work on Windows Vista/7 ? Yup, the MCE stuff, because surprise surprise, it was proprietary. But let's also be clear here, MCE was part of a project Microsoft was working on to get IPTV out there https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ericsson_Mediaroom .

 

XP MCE and Vista MCE/Pro came with the h262 mpeg 2 codec. But the selling point of MCE was the EPG (enhanced program guide.)  Microsoft sold the mediaroom stuff off and then removed the functionality from 8.1 and 10.

 

Yet another thing Microsoft pretty much developed, sat on, and then got rid of because they were too cheap to put it in everything.

 

as a FYI, the Xbox 360 was able to communicate with the Mediaroom product, but it was up to the IPTV vendors to enable it, and new XBOX 360's were no longer able to be activated on it after a point.

I'm sorry but either I misunderstand you or you have no idea what you're talking about.

 

Kodi started out its life in very early 2002 as a closed source project called Xbox Media Player on the original Xbox. XBMP was originally being created by a single user and was written using the official (and very much illegal for homebrew) MS XDK however in mid 2002  a second author joined the dev team. XBMC was totally rewritten using code based on open source libraries by the two but still remained closed source until they moved out of beta. In late 2002 Frodo joined the team (the guy most say was the driving force behind Kodi) and XBMP V1.0 was merged with Frodos own project (called YAMP which was based on MPlayer for Linux), the results of this merge were released as XBMP V2.0. XBMP carried on being developed through 2003 until in late 2003 XBMP development was frozen and the entire project was renamed to XBMC as it had evolved into much more than the simple media player it started out as.

 

XBMP pretty much invented the concept of an all in one media device, it was the first to combine music playback, video playback, photo viewing, weather services and the ability to launch other apps from the system HDD into a single package. Part of the reason why it became so popular amongst Xbox users was because nothing quite like it had existed anywhere before it

 

By the time Windows XP MCE was released in late 2002 XBMP had already had 3 full public releases (and 6 private betas) and was already established as the gold standard for a media centre.

 

It was Microsoft who did the copying, they saw the explosion of XBMP on their own console and decided to try copy it over to the PC. Before MS had MCE they had the abysmal WebTV service which was essentially the same thing but done in a much worse way. Taking the idea of a universal media centre and sticking it into Windows was a natural progression since, as you rightly say, they were trying to push IPTV out to the masses and the one thing MCE had over XBMP/XBMC was live TV support and PVR functionality.

 

Also fun fact. I remember playing around with a very early XBMC Service in probably 2004/2005 that had the ability to stream the latest Movies, TV Shows & Sporting Events over the internet on my Xbox. Modern Kodi "Builds" can be traced directly back to this service. People who think that Kodi streaming is a relatively recent thing are very wrong.

[Kisai]

4 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

 

 

Kodi started out its life in very early 2002 as a closed source project called Xbox Media Player on the original Xbox.

Do you REALLY think Microsoft just slaps stuff together at the last minute to compete with some pseudo-open source project built on it's own technology? MCE was released in October 24 2002. There are versions of XP labeled "Media Center Edition" that were hardware/software bundles that came out in 2004, 2005 and 2006.  Xbox Media Player (XMBC, aka Kodi) has source code released in October 15th 2002.  That's a pretty wild claim that Microsoft copied something when Microsoft had been working on this since 2000 and before the original Xbox.

 

Microsoft Mediaroom was the the end game for Microsoft here, even though it's the most commonly used IPTV system, the fact that Microsoft didn't produce any STB (Set top boxes) other than the Xbox 360, pretty doomed it, and the MCE product. Kinda funny now when you realize that current generation IP-only TV boxes, AppleTV, and smartTV's have all pretty much done what Microsoft should have done in the first place. It wasn't Microsoft's first foray into this, but at least they sold it off rather than buried it. It's a pity that MCE didn't persist though, having the HTPC UI instead of the touch UI would have allowed OEM's to sell a TV product , but I guess they have to resort to Roku now.

 

And EPG's have been around long before. There was also the WebTV/MSNTV product which was not a PVR like MCE was.

[Master Disaster]

1 minute ago, Kisai said:

Do you REALLY think Microsoft just slaps stuff together at the last minute to compete with some pseudo-open source project built on it's own technology? MCE was released in October 24 2002. There are versions of XP labeled "Media Center Edition" that were hardware/software bundles that came out in 2004, 2005 and 2006.  Xbox Media Player (XMBC, aka Kodi) has source code released in October 15th 2002.  That's a pretty wild claim that Microsoft copied something when Microsoft had been working on this since 2000 and before the original Xbox.

 

Microsoft Mediaroom was the the end game for Microsoft here, even though it's the most commonly used IPTV system, the fact that Microsoft didn't produce any STB (Set top boxes) other than the Xbox 360, pretty doomed it, and the MCE product. Kinda funny now when you realize that current generation IP-only TV boxes, AppleTV, and smartTV's have all pretty much done what Microsoft should have done in the first place. It wasn't Microsoft's first foray into this, but at least they sold it off rather than buried it. It's a pity that MCE didn't persist though, having the HTPC UI instead of the touch UI would have allowed OEM's to sell a TV product , but I guess they have to resort to Roku now.

 

And EPG's have been around long before. There was also the WebTV/MSNTV product which was not a PVR like MCE was.

If you bothered to read my post you'd know that XBMP & XBMC are not the same thing, one came before the other. XBMC evolved from XBMP. XBMP had been around since very early 2002 when the first generation of modchips appeared.

 

I think its reasonable to assume that MS saw the popularity of XBMP and cloned it in around 9 months or so, yes. You got a source on the claim MS had been working on MCE since 2000?

[Kisai]

13 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

If you bothered to read my post you'd know that XBMP & XBMC are not the same thing, one came before the other. XBMC evolved from XBMP. XBMP had been around since very early 2002 when the first generation of modchips appeared.

 

I think its reasonable to assume that MS saw the popularity of XBMP and cloned it in around 9 months or so, yes. You got a source on the claim MS had been working on MCE since 2000?

https://news.microsoft.com/2002/01/07/microsoft-unveils-new-home-pc-experiences-with-freestyle-and-mira/

Quote

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 7, 2002 — During his keynote address today at the 2002 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Bill Gates, chairman and chief software architect at Microsoft Corp., previewed new technologies designed to enhance and extend the experiences delivered with the Microsoft® Windows®
XP operating system. Gates’ demonstration included an early version of a set of technologies, code-named “Freestyle,” which includes a new user interface to enable consumers to access their music, videos and photos from anywhere in the room. “Freestyle” also will enhance Windows XP to deliver new TV experiences on the PC. In addition, Gates unveiled a set of Windows CE .NET-based technologies, code-named “Mira,” designed to be included in a new generation of smart display devices such as detachable, wireless mobile flat-screen monitors and digital televisions, extending a complete Windows PC experience to relaxed settings in any room in the home.

 

https://www.itprotoday.com/2002-consumer-electronics-show-ces-reviewed 

Quote

Monday night, we attended the Gates keynote address, which wasn't as boring as many of his recent speeches. Microsoft's Freestyle and Mira technologies are genuinely exciting, though they're probably almost a year from fruition. The Microsoft employees we spoke with at the post-keynote reception were even more conservative, stating that they expected these technologies to require numerous iterations and several years before they would be mainstream. We're not so sure about that: Freestyle, especially, is pretty mature and in the same state that Windows Media Player 8 was when we first previewed it six months before it was completed.

In a Tuesday morning meeting with Microsoft, we discussed Freestyle and Mira briefly with Dave Fester, the general manager of the Windows Digital Media Division. Fester reiterated that Freestyle was designed specifically for what the company calls "the ten foot experience," and said that it was just the first generation. He noted that his Windows Media group provides the underlying plumbing for the work the eHome Division is doing. "Freestyle is just another UI for accessing the digital media features in Windows XP," one that uses a remote control.

Most of our Microsoft meeting Tuesday morning, however, concerned Corona, the next generation Windows Media technologies. Corona encompasses several components, including new versions of the Windows Media Server (which will be included in Windows .NET Server), Windows Media Player, Windows Media Audio and Video codecs, Windows Media Encoder, and the Windows Media Software Development Kit (SDK). The timeframe for Corona is somewhat vague, but we expect that all of these products will be finalized before the end of the year. Note that the Corona version of Windows Media Player will run on "several Windows versions" according to the company, though the XP version will be more full-featured because of that platform's richer feature set.
 

 

[Soppro]

20 hours ago, DuckDodgers said:

Improved compression is always better, the only downside is that the increased complexity will require new hardware codecs for GPUs and mobile SOCs. Software encoding/decoding of HVEC is already quite heavy on modern multi-core CPUs and VVC will make it only worse.

I'm sure when this codec is widespread in 5 years or more that will not be an issue

[BuckGup]

9 hours ago, TehDwonz said:

I find H.265 to be useless for movies/TV - it cuts off the shadows and highlights way too harshly to save bandwidth. Really shows on an OLED screen. Great for CCTV, for the space saving though... I expect H.266 to even more dire tbh.

Really? H.264 creates banding, blocky shadows, and distortion if the bitrate is too low for me but H.265 has none of that at the same bitrate. It's one of the reasons vimeo looks so much better than Youtube

[Doobeedoo]

Well ok interesting, will it be adopted or license issues and all will drag it. Would be great for streaming like Twitch though. They don't even use h.265 so questionable about h.266 adoption. Something tells me they may use something else. Their bitrate also needs increase. 

[Curufinwe_wins]

21 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Still a God awful codec that I hope fails spectacularly just like HEVC. Until they make it completely royalty free the MPEG can go fuck themselves. 

 

AV1 is the future. 

 

 

 

Why? AV1 I get, because of a lack or optimization in encoders and lack of hardware decoders, but VP9 is as good as HEVC. 

Not really true though...

 

Quote

In August, 2016, Netflix published the results of a large-scale study comparing the leading open-source HEVC encoder, x265, with the leading open-source AVC encoder, x264 and the reference VP9 encoder, libvpx.^[119] Using their advanced Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion (VMAF) video quality measurement tool, Netflix found that x265 delivered identical quality at bit rates ranging from 35.4% to 53.3% lower than x264, and from 17.8% to 21.8% lower than VP9.^[120]

or at least it didn't used to be. Presumably some VP9 and x265 optimizations have still been found since then.

 

 

Also obviously with tweaking those details can be changed dramatically. I still use primarily x265 for my own stuff, but should probably fiddle more with VP9

[LAwLz]

On 7/6/2020 at 5:34 PM, Benji said:

I don't get that they always push out new video codecs instead of optimising the previous encoders and decoders first.

Because once the bitstream is frozen, it's very hard to actually optimize the encoder to be more efficiency. Sure it's possible, but it's essentially like saying "I don't get why AMD and Nvidia releases new GPUs every year when they can just optimize the drivers for their old GPUs instead".

Optimizations of the encoder can only go so far.

 

 

On 7/6/2020 at 5:34 PM, Benji said:

Sure, they'll save bandwidth, but what are they worth if their adoption takes relatively long?

Yes, it's totally worth it.

 

 

On 7/6/2020 at 5:34 PM, Benji said:

I mean, there aren't even really any commonly used hardware decoders (besides apparently Samsung 8K video processor in the 8K QLED TVs) for the VP9 replacement AV1 that YouTube started to roll out some time ago, and now another party is bringing out yet another new standard that is probably "standard" in 2-3 years?

The AV1 bitstream was only frozen in early 2019. So hardware manufacturers have only had slightly more than a year to develop, manufacturer, test and ship devices to customers. Of course support will be limited, but it's coming. It usually takes around 1,5 to 2 years for hardware support to start appearing. It was the same with HEVC which became a standard in early 2013 (the actual codec was done earlier) and we started seeing some very limited hardware decoding support in late 2014.

Also, VVC is a competitor to AV1 so of course they don't want to sit and wait for AV1 to get adopted before releasing their competitor.

 

 

16 hours ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Never seen that before. Figured Windows includes the more common codecs by default, unless they’re charging for a software decoder maybe? I’ve a lot of anime and shows encoded via x265 as well. 
 

Me: *uses VLC*

Nope, Windows 10 doesn't include a license for HEVC.

VLC includes its own codec so it doesn't matter that Windows doesn't have it built in. And VLC can get around the license cost by being located in France where they do not acknowledge software patents, so the VLC team do not break any laws by implementing it without licensing.

[LAwLz]

15 hours ago, Kisai said:

The bigger problem is that these codecs that Google keeps developing, are not ending up in hardware, not even hardware running Android, so the battery life suffers on Android devices, but not Apple devices unless the source doesn't meaningfully support it on purpose (eg youtube) 

This is wrong. VP9, which I assume you're referring to, is widely implemented in hardware.

Here is a list of hardware that supports VP9 decoding in hardware:

Intel - All GPUs since Skylake and Bay Trail.

AMD - All GPUs since the RX 400 series.

Nvidia - Some GPUs in the Maxwell generation, and everything since pascal.

Qualcomm - All SoCs since the 820 in the high end, 710 in the mid-range and 660 in the low end.

 

Baiscally, if you buy anything released since 2015 you will have VP9 decoding support in fixed-function hardware.

 

 

15 hours ago, Kisai said:

Funny enough, this is one front in the war on standards that google is actually losing, and we can thank Adobe Flash for that. H264 got "in" because all these foolish companies decided to make video streaming sites based on using the flash player as nothing more than a software h.264 player, and adobe enabled it, and cut their own throat on the product.

Not sure what you mean here, but Flash did support hardware accelerated decoding of H.264. H.264 also became popular because it was far and wide the best codec at the time. That's why it got popular, not because Flash supported it. Flash also supported several other codecs.

 

15 hours ago, Kisai said:

Apple, realizing this, forbade flash from running on the iPhone. This sealed flash as a "player"'s fate. 

What? Apple did not allow Flash on iOS because it didn't behave well with touch devices, because it was full of security issues and a wide variety of other reasons. Some format war on the other hand, was not a reason why Apple didn't allow it. I mean, what you're saying doesn't make any sense.

 

 

15 hours ago, Kisai said:

So Apple has had support for hardware-supported video playback since it's inception, where as android, has not, and stubbornly refuses to (and didn't exist until Android 6.0 despite underlying hardware having support for it since 3.0) Android still does not support h.265 or VP9 as encoders.

This is wrong. Android has supported hardware accelerated decoding of video codecs, including H.264, for far longer than Android 6.0.

Hardware support for it existed long before Android 3.0 was released as well. I have genuinely no idea where you have gotten any of these ideas from.

You're also wrong about Android not supporting H.265 or VP9 encoding. They are not supported in AOSP but it is supported by various Android versions such as Samsung's version.

 

 

15 hours ago, Kisai said:

Yeah, it took 3 generations of Android devices before playing video from youtube was possible.

This is wrong. No idea where you got this incredibly wrong idea from.

 

 

15 hours ago, Kisai said:

It was actually Apple who twisted MPEG LA's arm into establishing h.264 as the HTML5 video standard, but petty differences between the browser vendors who tried to drown h.264's use on the web and the W3C's standard html5 resulted in NO standard. And thus we can blame google for yet another thing they tried to use their monopoly powers for evil. (Google Chrome and Firefox can also be blamed for the lack of http/2 support in browsers, thus not being enabled in servers by default, and the lack of any other compression algorithms being developed for compression of http connections.) 

I honestly have no idea where you get half of the stuff you write from. This is not at all what happened.

Here is what actually happened.

1) HTML5 wants to include a <video> tag in order to allow a web standard for video playback, rather than have to rely on stuff like Flash.

2) The W3C, who are in charge of web standards, need to decide which formats should be allowed. This is important because whichever format they decide on will have to be supported in browsers or else they will break web standards.

3) Apple proposes H.264 as a standard.

4) Google and Mozilla are against this because H.264 is a patented and non-free format. What this means is that a proprietary format would need to be included in browsers and thus the web would become a bit more closed. You absolutely do not want proprietary and patent riddled technologies as web standards because that means the web is no longer open.

5) As a result of this, Google bought a company who developed video codecs and made the VP8 codec free and open source and proposed that it would be the standard for <video>. Their argument was that VP8 had similar performance to H.264, but it would be free and therefore keep the Internet open without requiring any licensing.

6) Apple didn't like this (might have something to do with them owning parts of H.264 so they would get paid) so they continued to push for H.264 over VP8.

7) The W3C did not seem to be able to reach an agreement which codec should be allowed in the standard.

8 ) Finally, Cisco came in and saved the day. What had happened was that Cisco has hit the maximum amount of royalties they could pay for H.264 and as a result, they could not be charged any more money regardless of however many devices used their decoder. So what they did was go "okay everyone, here is the binary for our H.264 stuff. Feel free to implement it however you want. All licensing fees are on us because they can't charge us anymore than they already does". This is why you will find a plugin called "OpenH254 provided by Cisco" in Firefox.

9) Now that H.264 was seen as an "open" standard since anyone could implement it without having to pay, it was approved as a W3C standard. VP8 was also approved.

 

 

Here is a several year old post from me where I briefly mentioned this:

 

Apple was not the "heroes" that made H.264 get approved as a standard for <video>. Cisco were the ones who saved us all. Apple wanted to fuck the web standards by making them proprietary and make some money from everyone who used the web for video. Imagine Mozilla having to pay Apple money because Mozilla wants you (their user) to be able to watch Youtube. That's what Apple wanted. Google did not want that so they bought an entire company and released their products free for everyone to use, and Cisco released their stuff for free too.

 

 

@kirashiand @Benji I saw that you two had marked Kisai's post as "informative" so I though I'd tag you and tell you that pretty much nothing in the entire post is correct. Most of it is either made up or misconstrued by Kisai.

[Kisai]

5 hours ago, LAwLz said:

This is wrong. VP9, which I assume you're referring to, is widely implemented in hardware.

Here is a list of hardware that supports VP9 decoding in hardware:

Intel - All GPUs since Skylake and Bay Trail.

AMD - All GPUs since the RX 400 series.

Nvidia - Some GPUs in the Maxwell generation, and everything since pascal.

Qualcomm - All SoCs since the 820 in the high end, 710 in the mid-range and 660 in the low end.

 

Baiscally, if you buy anything released since 2015 you will have VP9 decoding support in fixed-function hardware.

And had you actually read the post you'd see I was talking about the encoder and decoder, which guess what:

 

- No AMD chips support VP9 in hardware, AMD removed VP9 support.

- No Apple chips support VP9 in hardware

- No Intel chips before Kaby Lake (that is skylake and prior) in hardware

- No nVidia chips at all, desktop, laptop or SoC support VP9 in hardware. Nvidia doesn't even list VP9 as an encoder. In more than one place.

- Android flagships  like the Samsung Galaxy didn't support until the S8, which is guess what only 3 years old

 

There is a fixed function IP core out there at https://www.webmproject.org/hardware/vp9/bige/ and most vendors don't even use it, and it is only good to 4Kp30.

 

 

 

Quote

 

Not sure what you mean here, but Flash did support hardware accelerated decoding of H.264. H.264 also became popular because it was far and wide the best codec at the time. That's why it got popular, not because Flash supported it. Flash also supported several other codecs.

You must be too young to have used flash, because it had the distinction of only being a software player, and highly single-threaded. It can't spit and chew bubblegum. Adobe even says as much https://help.adobe.com/en_US/as3/dev/WSe9ecd9e6b89aefd2-68d5ef8f12cc8511f6c-7fff.html

 

There's a good dozen exceptions to where it will not use hardware acceleration and pretty much all of them apply to the web browser, specifically acceleration is only available in full screen mode. And you know what usually happened full screen? the video would be cut into bands where the top and bottom would be out of sync. Don't be fooled, the hardware acceleration that flash did, wasn't meaningful and hit all the bugs in browsers in 2013 just as much as it does today. 

 

Quote

What? Apple did not allow Flash on iOS because it didn't behave well with touch devices, because it was full of security issues and a wide variety of other reasons. Some format war on the other hand, was not a reason why Apple didn't allow it. I mean, what you're saying doesn't make any sense.

 

Apple did not allow flash on the iPhone because flash burned CPU cycles to do the exact rubbish I explained above. A fixed h264 decode on the cpu is more battery efficient than allowing flash to burn your battery life on the millions of website that have flash ads on it.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/apr/29/steve-jobs-flash-ipad-letter-dead#:~:text=Steve%20Jobs%20has%20defended%20Apple's,battery%20life%20and%20user%20experience.

Quote

"Adobe has repeatedly said that Apple mobile devices cannot access "the full web" because 75% of video on the web is in Flash. What they don't say is that almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads. YouTube, with an estimated 40% of the web's video, shines in an app bundled on all Apple mobile devices, with the iPad offering perhaps the best YouTube discovery and viewing experience ever. Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic, and many, many others. iPhone, iPod and iPad users aren't missing much video."

Also consider that Adobe didn't even have hardware acceleration on OSX at the time of the iPhone's release. Hence my comment about "cutting their own throat" , here's adobe, claiming they have a huge install base, but mostly what their flash product gets used for is trash and a software video player in 2009. We've only been installing flash because of sites like Youtube, at the time, needed it, and it was also used for flash games and as an audio player on sites for largely the same reason it's used as a video player. The web browser did not support h264, mp3, aac, or anything other than raw wave files. It also continues to be an issue. https://caniuse.com/#feat=aac

 

Quote

This is wrong. Android has supported hardware accelerated decoding of video codecs, including H.264, for far longer than Android 6.0.

Hardware support for it existed long before Android 3.0 was released as well. I have genuinely no idea where you have gotten any of these ideas from.

You're also wrong about Android not supporting H.265 or VP9 encoding. They are not supported in AOSP but it is supported by various Android versions such as Samsung's version.

No, I'm 100% right here, and you're just restating exactly what I said. Go look at websites other than wikipedia. Here the Kodi project has a nice list of Android hardware : https://kodi.wiki/view/Android_hardware , the vast majority of Android hardware does not support H265 or VP9 in hardware. Note that the Tegra actually does everything in software but VP9/h265. Yet these are playback lists, not encoder lists, as Kodi devices are not used for transcoding anything.

 

 

Quote

I honestly have no idea where you get half of the stuff you write from. This is not at all what happened.

Do realize that you're spinning you wheels trying to prove anything wrong when I have more experience than you. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you need to actually read the sites I source or maybe not jump into threads you don't understand.

 

 

Quote

Here is what actually happened.

1) HTML5 wants to include a <video> tag in order to allow a web standard for video playback, rather than have to rely on stuff like Flash.

HTML5 includied a video tag in the draft specifications but it was written with the idea that any video codec or container could be used. I don't know why you are nitpicking this. W3C was not wrong in trying. https://caniuse.com/#search=h264

 

Quote

2) The W3C, who are in charge of web standards, need to decide which formats should be allowed. This is important because whichever format they decide on will have to be supported in browsers or else they will break web standards.

3) Apple proposes H.264 as a standard.

4) Google and Mozilla are against this because H.264 is a patented and non-free format. What this means is that a proprietary format would need to be included in browsers and thus the web would become a bit more closed. You absolutely do not want proprietary and patent riddled technologies as web standards because that means the web is no longer open.

5) As a result of this, Google bought a company who developed video codecs and made the VP8 codec free and open source and proposed that it would be the standard for <video>. Their argument was that VP8 had similar performance to H.264, but it would be free and therefore keep the Internet open without requiring any licensing.

6) Apple didn't like this (might have something to do with them owning parts of H.264 so they would get paid) so they continued to push for H.264 over VP8.

7) The W3C did not seem to be able to reach an agreement which codec should be allowed in the standard.

 

That is because Firefox and Google "my-way-or-the-highway"'d so all references to codecs and containers were stripped from it. No point in establishing a standard that nobody will adhere to. That's the same reason why Apple follows html5, and chrome does not. Stock web server configurations support none of this, and even to this very day there is no support for any video format that works on everything. That is entirely the fault of google. They tried to remove support for h264 in 2011 https://www.wired.com/2011/01/google-dropping-h-264-codec-from-chrome-browser/

 

Microsoft turned around and released plugins for h264 in Chrome and Firefox https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-adds-h-264-support-to-google-chrome/

 

Interestingly enough google continues to support h264 http://www.rtc.news/posts/pawtYYfpmsG6Zed3W/h-264-is-supported-in-webrtc-from-chrome-50-here-s-how-to

 

But here's really how things went down:

https://webrtchacks.com/ietf-finally-made-decision-mandatory-implement-mti-video-codec-webrtc/

 

Quote

8 ) Finally, Cisco came in and saved the day. What had happened was that Cisco has hit the maximum amount of royalties they could pay for H.264 and as a result, they could not be charged any more money regardless of however many devices used their decoder. So what they did was go "okay everyone, here is the binary for our H.264 stuff. Feel free to implement it however you want. All licensing fees are on us because they can't charge us anymore than they already does". This is why you will find a plugin called "OpenH254 provided by Cisco" in Firefox.

9) Now that H.264 was seen as an "open" standard since anyone could implement it without having to pay, it was approved as a W3C standard. VP8 was also approved.

 

https://tools.ietf.org/agenda/88/slides/slides-88-rtcweb-8.pdf

 

And note that nothing I said was false. Pretty much nothing at the time supported VP8 that wasn't a Google product, Everything else supported h264, some in software, some in hardware.

 

Note that the Cisco license is only for a software codec. So h264 support that is present, right now, is for supporting webRTC. Not HTML5. It just so happens that browsers are a popular way to "jump" into video conferencing, as we can see today with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Skype, Cisco WebEx. So relying on the browser vendors here was suicide, again. If Cisco didn't decide to take on the liability for any potential claims on h264, it would be stuck selling video conferencing hardware that only works with other Cisco hardware, and that's simply not how Enterprises do things. You can dial into a Webex call without video, you can participate with video using a web browser on any device that has hardware encode and decode h264 (though not all of them https://groups.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/discuss-webrtc/ZLrq1BGQN7E/TuGtuXT3DQAJ ), or a decent enough cpu to support it in software.

 

As noted in that thread, Chrome's encoder is the cisco software encoder, but the decoder is ffmpeg. The software encoder doesn't support anything other than main profile.

 

So what do you think is going to happen with h265 and h266? It's use case a 4K-8K video codec differs very much from it's use case as a Video conferencing product. What I expect is a repeat of what already went down with h264. Some big hardware vendor wants to sell their hardware products but they need the webRTC support in order to get all the edge cases (such as staff working from home, or on a remote work site over a low-bandwidth satellite link) and I just sincerely doubt we're ever going to get any more unified codec support in the browser. Google has the monopoly power to dictate what happens in software, but is just does not have any leverage over the SoC vendors that build Android devices, and since Samsung is the only one who builds their own SoC's, that's the only Android vendor who can. And even Samsung is not putting Android in their SmartTV devices.

 

 

[Vector0102]

On 7/7/2020 at 2:07 AM, spartaman64 said:

i tried to play a video yesterday and this popped up ... excuse me microsoft

Isn't there a free way to get the codecs for Windows 10? Jerry Barnacules explained it in his video. You can get it free straight from the store.

 

[Origami Cactus]

On 7/7/2020 at 6:12 AM, TehDwonz said:

I find H.265 to be useless for movies/TV - it cuts off the shadows and highlights way too harshly to save bandwidth. Really shows on an OLED screen. Great for CCTV, for the space saving though... I expect H.266 to even more dire tbh.

You sure you got the right stuff? The only reason i use h265 for all my movies and stuff is that it is way less blockier and less bandy than h264.

10bit h265 2GB file looks way better than h264 that is the same size.

 

22 hours ago, BuckGup said:

Really? H.264 creates banding, blocky shadows, and distortion if the bitrate is too low for me but H.265 has none of that at the same bitrate. It's one of the reasons vimeo looks so much better than Youtube

Exactly!

[Pixel5]

On 7/6/2020 at 5:31 PM, handymanshandle said:

Can't wait to see how high end PCs choke on encoding h266 video lmfao

i mean generally all PCs are always choking on encoding unless they have an hardware encoder/decoder, the reason why people dont notice these days is that basically any GPU has hardware transcoding for h264 at least up to 1080p 30fps and some higher end stuff also in 4k

just a matter of time till everything has hardware transcoding for h266

[spartaman64]

22 minutes ago, Vector0102 said:

Isn't there a free way to get the codecs for Windows 10? Jerry Barnacules explained it in his video. You can get it free straight from the store.

 

then why did windows not tell me about the free version and just send me to the paid one sounds like a scam

[Vector0102]

14 minutes ago, spartaman64 said:

then why did windows not tell me about the free version and just send me to the paid one sounds like a scam

It kinda is, lol. Jerry explains it in the video.

[nick name]

On 7/6/2020 at 3:37 PM, spartaman64 said:

i tried to play a video yesterday and this popped up ... excuse me microsoft

Here is the free version (if you haven't found it yet).

 

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/hevc-video-extensions-from-device-manufacturer/9n4wgh0z6vhq?irgwc=1&OCID=AID681541_aff_7593_159229&tduid=(ir_3bA3nzzWy1yTUMOyhMw0kQB9UkjQj1VJIVZtUQ0)(7593)(159229)()(UUwpUdUnU56397YYwYg)&irclickid=3bA3nzzWy1yTUMOyhMw0kQB9UkjQj1VJIVZtUQ0&activetab=pivot%3aoverviewtab

[Loote]

On 7/7/2020 at 3:00 PM, BuckGup said:

Really? H.264 creates banding, blocky shadows, and distortion if the bitrate is too low for me but H.265 has none of that at the same bitrate. It's one of the reasons vimeo looks so much better than Youtube

 I downloaded Endgame trailer from Vimeo and Youtube, Vimeo HQ was 720p 27.1 MiB @ x264 High@L3.2 and Yt was 1080p either 21.6 MiB @ AV1 Main@L4.0 or 25.9 MiB @ VP9 Version 4, with such difference in bitrates(at same res vimeo would be over 2 times bigger, 720p on yt was 11MiB) and various encoding settings I wouldn't use it as a comparison.

 

I agree that VP9 is inferior to H265 and the difference with H264 doesn't justify sacrificing the widespread compatibility, but at the same time many would argue that making transparent encodes is still better on h264 than on 265 and VP9 has it's place as the royalty-free option. The software encoders take a long time to mature and it isn't the right time to write off AV1, just look at who's behind it. It's a double edged sword because I believe that with such backing AV1 should win with proprietary codecs but at the same time it will smash any other open-source codec idea because there will already be one that's backed by nearly everyone except for Qualcomm(and just like with VP9, it should start supporting it at some time). Over the span of last year I saw reports of going from .5 fpm(frame per minute) to .7 fps encoding speed on single thread of R5 3600, of course some encoders are still slow or buggy, basically what Google or Netflix are doing is using the safe settings, which over time should change to much higher quality(or, unfortunately, just much smaller size). We have some hardware decoders, hopefully many to come.

The lack of news about next gen NV, AMD and Intel Hardware support for AV1 makes me sad, but I bet that if not the next, then the generation following that will have the hardware decoding support, encoding may or may not be an issue because it is designed to provide better compression rate at the cost of time, that's what profits the streaming platforms and I assume something powerful enough to compress 4k HDR 60 fps would be huge for now. Though looking at this 3990X could do it at not the most demanding settings.

[NumLock21]

On 7/6/2020 at 4:37 PM, spartaman64 said:

i tried to play a video yesterday and this popped up ... excuse me microsoft

Stop being so cheap and help Bill Gates becomes the richest man again. He's only asking for 99 cents, that's less than a dollar.