nwgat – yes – they certainly did join the alliance 🙂

and the whole graphics card market (AMD and NVIDIA)

also ARM is pretty huge (if they can make it simple to implement hw designs for oems)

btw why mozilla is a part of the rebel alience? well many of the xiph people aka those that does theora, vorbis, flac and opus (yes that one with skype/microsoft) are employed by mozilla

Thanks Lawrence 🙂

FYI, I also found the following external article on the topic interesting: http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/Commentary-The-Streaming-Industry-Gangs-up-on-HEVC-with-the-Alliance-for-Open-Video-106115.aspx

A group effort.

Patents can usually find their way into standards if the patent owner is willing to share it via a mechanism called FRAND – essentially saying he will license that patent to anyone who wants it at a fair price (fair=not discriminating one company versus others).

H.26x is a hugely popular family of codecs that have patents on them. They are also supported by most hardware acceleration of video codecs out there.

Up until recently, the mere idea of a patent-free or non-royalty-bearing video codec was ridiculous at best.

Do other propriety codecs are supporting hardware acceleration?
if so, how come they are patent protected? how can someone write a patent on an algorithms that were already implemented by hardware vendors?

Thanks Roey.

VP8 is nice, but it is on par with H.264 for the most part.
The next generation of codecs are better – while they eat more CPU, they compress more so enable you to send video with better quality for less bitrate.

The challenge with VP8 is hardware acceleration today – support for it is still scattered. If we want the next video codec to work, we need hardware support for it from the start.

great article!

I wonder how this subject affect companies who build their own webRTC networks.

also, if i understand right, google already own V8 and everyone may use it… so why the sudden need in a new open source codec?

Well… VPx aren’t really a mainline codecs (yet). They are also designed already to avoid a whole swath of patents.

This statement sounds untrue to me. AFAIK, one of Daala’s main selling points is the fact that it uses completely different (barnd-new or old-but-never-really-used-for-video) technologies from mainline codecs (including VPx and H.26x), thus simultaneously having a chance to deliver better compression without increasing complexity *and* avoiding whole swaths of patents. I’ve never heard one word said about any VPx connections in Daala.