ITU Approves H.264 Video Standard Successor H.265

An anonymous reader writes "The H.265 codec standard, the successor of H.264, has been approved, promising support for 8k UHD and lower bandwidth, but the patent issues plaguing H.264 remain." Here's the announcement from the ITU. From the article: "Patents remain an important issue as it was with H.264, Google proposing WebM, a new codec standard based on VP8, back in 2010, one that would be royalties free. They also included it in Chrome, with the intent to replace H.264, but this attempt never materialized. Mozilla and Opera also included WebM in their browsers with the same purpose, but they never discarded H.264 because most of the video out there is coded with it. MPEG LA, the owner of a patent pool covering H.264, promised that H.264 internet videos delivered for free will be forever royalty free, but who knows what will happen with H.265? Will they request royalties for free content or not? It remains to be seen. In the meantime, H.264 remains the only codec with wide adoption, and H.265 will probably follow on its steps."

Re:So who won?

[Goaway]

Nobody "won". Companies weren't making proposals for complete replacements for h.264. They were making proposals for incremental improvements on h.264. h.265 is a collection of those different improvements. Each one is small in itself, but they add up.

Re:Dhurum

[rsmith-mac]

Nothing more than H.264 had. DRM is implemented at the container level, not the bitstream level.

Re:So who won?

[Kjella]

Then whose patents have now become gold mines and/or roadblocks?

The H.264 patent pool has 30 licencors and the list of patents is 59 pages long, so the short answer is: Most of the industry. Apart from Google with WebM and previously Microsoft with VC-1, there is surprising unity. My predictions are as follows: HEVC is as dominant in hardware as H.264, there will be an open source encoder like xvid/x264 and those who can't or won't use that will use WebM despite the somewhat larger size because Google will probably fight to back it as a free codec. Anything else will be never go anywhere outside geek circles like Vorbis or Theora.

Re:So who won?

[Tough Love]

Anything else will be never go anywhere outside geek circles like Vorbis or Theora.

Please watch those overly broad claims. Vorbis is now well established in a number of niches, notably video game sound content.

Re:time to transcode again

[tlhIngan]

I don't think anyone is waiting for lossless codecs to get smaller, they are waiting for the hardware to get bigger. It happened to compressed formats for music in the 90s and video in the 00s, now the teens may start to see losslessly compressed formats rule.

The storage is already here - 4TB drives can hold a useful amount of lossless video. A 1080p video frame is around 6MB uncompressed, at 30fps that's 180MB/sec. If you want true 1080p60, that's 360MB/sec, or about 3 seconds a gigabyte. A minute takes 20GB, 1TB can hold 50 minutes. 4TB can hold 200minutes, or just over 3 hours worth of uncompressed 1080p60 video.

The big problem has been the bandwidth required - lossless video requires a ton of bandwidth - it's why 4K cameras use SSDs for storage - spinning rust cannot maintain sufficient data rate. Or why video editors tend to be the biggest users of RAID-0 (striping, no redundancy) storage.

And most cameras don't use lossless to begin with - a 4K frame quaruples the data rate (turning our 4TB drive into a still-useful 50 minutes of video storage), but we're talking about a massive 1.4GB/sec. The ever-popular RED cameras use SSDs, and proprietary REDcode codecs in order to be able to keep datarates down enough for an SSD.

Want to go lossless? You'll need to go back to film.