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HEVC Advance Announces H.265 Royalty Rates, Raises Some Hackles 184

Posted by timothy from the but-it's-only-wafer-thin dept.
An anonymous reader writes: The HEVC Advance patent pool has announced the royalty rates for their patent license for HEVC (aka H.265) video. HEVC users must pay these fees in addition to the license fees payable to the competing MPEG LA HEVC patent pool. With HEVC Advance's fees targeting 0.5% of content owner revenue which could translate to licensing costs of over $100M a year for companies like Facebook and Netflix, Dan Rayburn from Streaming Media advocates that "content owners band together and agree not to license from HEVC Advance" in the hope that "HEVC Advance will fail in the market and be forced to change strategy, or change their terms to be fair and reasonable." John Carmack, Oculus VR CTO, has cited the new patent license as a reason to end his efforts to encode VR video with H.265.
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HEVC Advance Announces H.265 Royalty Rates, Raises Some Hackles More

HEVC Advance Announces H.265 Royalty Rates, Raises Some Hackles

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  • How about this... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Frosty Piss ( 770223 ) * on Saturday July 25, 2015 @11:19PM (#50183655)

    Don't like the licensing terms? Don't use H.265...

    • Re:How about this... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Saturday July 25, 2015 @11:36PM (#50183693) Homepage Journal

      Don't like the licensing terms? Don't use H.265...

      Better: Work together with like-minded companies to create a competing standard that is designed specifically to avoid patents, and license it royalty-free.

      Obligatory xkcd [xkcd.com].

      • Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday July 25, 2015 @11:43PM (#50183711)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re:How about this... (Score:5, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 26, 2015 @01:10AM (#50183867)

          I'll just leave this here: https://wiki.xiph.org/Daala [xiph.org]

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Except, the quality of VP9 still can't compete with aging h.264 unless the baseline profile is used. Not to mention the encoder is slow as a snail on tar. I love it when people who know nothing about encoding video get into a discussion on codecs.

          • I did a little comparison myself a few months back because I was backing up a bunch of DVD's .. VP9 was on par with H.264 for targeting 1GB filesizes, but H.265 was miles ahead .. targeted 600MB/movie and it was still better than either.

        • Until your client is furious and wants to fire you because his grandma using IE 8 on XP can't view your videos on her internets.

          Or the marketing department sends you the video file made in Adobe products which are h.265 for the website whose tools can't export to vp9.

        • surely there must be a 3rd option? being screwed by H.265 patents or getting a subpar VP9 codec controlled by google that is less efficient and MUCH slower to encode with seems to be asking which would you like to be stabbed with the rusted razor blade or the filleting knife. Either way you lose.

        • I'll just leave this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ [wikipedia.org]...

          There is just one small problem.

          Industrial giants like Mitsubishi dominate the production of video hardware in all market segments from studio production to home video.

          If their UHDTV sets and other gear do not support your codec, you are dead in the water. Which is precisely what happened to the alternatives to H.264.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dgatwood ( 11270 )

            Not really. My TV takes uncompressed data. Once an encoder is available, the only things that matter these days are whether the following things support the codec:

            • Chrome
            • Safari
            • Firefox
            • iOS
            • Android
            • YouTube
            • to a lesser extent, OS X, Windows, and Internet Explorer

            If you cover those, all other clients of the codecs are lost in the noise, so it is probably safe to use it on your own site for your own content.

            It doesn't really matter at all whether the codec used to encode the content for delivery is the same as the

      • Re:How about this... (Score:5, Informative)

        by ptaff ( 165113 ) on Saturday July 25, 2015 @11:47PM (#50183719) Homepage

        create a competing standard that is designed specifically to avoid patents, and license it royalty-free

        That's exactly what Xiph does with the Daala [xiph.org] project. They're trying to implement lapped transforms for video (more or less the same principle as Opus does for audio) and since it's not based on traditional block encoding, Daala should avoid most patents. Their demos are already pretty impressive.

        • Daala should avoid most patents.

          *snort* Like that ever stopped patent lawyers.

          • Xiph and lawsuits (Score:5, Informative)

            by DrYak ( 748999 ) on Sunday July 26, 2015 @05:11AM (#50184209) Homepage

            Like that ever stopped patent lawyers.

            Total number of lawsuits lost by Xiph for Vorbis, Opus, FLAC, Tarkin, Theora, etc.: 0

            Yes, lawyer won't stop simply because it's different. They would dream to lawsuit Xiph into the ground. But so far they haven't found anything on any of the other technologies developed or taken over by Xiph.

            The people at Xiph know their shit and if they say that a codec is using a non patented alternative technique, it is non patented.

            • Total number of lawsuits lost by Xiph for Vorbis, Opus, FLAC, Tarkin, Theora, etc.: 0

              Total money that could be made by winning a lawsuit against Xiph: Zero. Why would anyone take them to court, when there is no money to be made?

              Now if you convinced Netflix, Google, Apple, Microsoft etc. to replace all their codecs with Xiph codecs, you would see patent lawsuits rolling in.

              • Now if you convinced Netflix, Google, Apple, Microsoft etc. to replace all their codecs with Xiph codecs, you would see patent lawsuits rolling in.

                Because they are BSD licensed, various Xiph codecs like Vorbis are popular for storing soundtracks of video games [wikipedia.org].

                FLAC is a popular audio codec in high-end HD-based digital autio players aimed at audiophiles.

                Google did provide Thoera variants at some point in time (I don't know if they still do).

                Nobody ever lost money following suit due on thr gound of these codecs.

                ---

                The reason that Theora isn't that popular, is that currently H264 does provide a better image quality for a given bandwith and as most of the

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward

          create a competing standard that is designed specifically to avoid patents, and license it royalty-free

          That's exactly what Xiph does with the Daala [xiph.org] project. They're trying to implement lapped transforms for video (more or less the same principle as Opus does for audio) and since it's not based on traditional block encoding, Daala should avoid most patents. Their demos are already pretty impressive.

          I do hope they have learned from Google's mistakes with VP9 and and come out early with a good specification and stable hardware reference implementation.

          I work for a fairly large video oriented service, and we would love to start supporting alternative codecs (and eventually leave H264/5) but lack of full hardware support in mobile devices is an absolute blocker. Everything needs to be working well, with battery efficiency, on mobile devices at this point. I know a lot of other services currently on the f

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Better: Work together with like-minded companies to create a competing standard that is designed specifically to avoid patents, and license it royalty-free.

        And better yet, do that work in the IETF's Internet Video Codec [ietf.org] working group, which is what Xiph [xiph.org] and Cisco [slashdot.org] are doing.

      • But when you're designing your codec with one hand tied behind your back, it's not going to work as efficiently.

        • More than one way to do thing with compression.

          But when you're designing your codec with one hand tied behind your back, it's not going to work as efficiently.

          Yup, your hand is tied behind your back, but just as you try to work anyway, standing in another corner there's this other guy with an hindu name asking you if you need a hand. or six.

          It might not work as efficiently if you try to achieve the exact same thing but are restricted in the methods you use*. But you can obtain very efficient result if you try something completely different. Then the patents won't even matter.

          The realm of DCT it a patent mine field? T

    • Which is why this is pretty stupid. H.264 is "good enough" for most things. Particularly as bandwidth continues to grow. A more efficient encoding scheme would be nice, but it isn't necessary. We can already do 1080p60 video over most net connections with reasonable quality.

      So H.265 will have to be appealing not only in terms of bandwidth saved, but in terms of cost. Companies won't move to use it if they have to pay a bunch extra for the privilege. They'll just keep using H.264 and more bandwidth.

      • Re:That may well be what happens (Score:5, Informative)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot.worf@net> on Sunday July 26, 2015 @01:07AM (#50183859)

        Which is why this is pretty stupid. H.264 is "good enough" for most things. Particularly as bandwidth continues to grow. A more efficient encoding scheme would be nice, but it isn't necessary. We can already do 1080p60 video over most net connections with reasonable quality.

        So H.265 will have to be appealing not only in terms of bandwidth saved, but in terms of cost. Companies won't move to use it if they have to pay a bunch extra for the privilege. They'll just keep using H.264 and more bandwidth.

        I can understand why the patent holders are upset with the MPEG-LA - because the MPEG-LA mandated that patent licensees will be paid for every use up to a cap (approx $6.5M/year), streaming is free (as long as viewers can watch the stream for free), and all sorts of other things. So companies like Apple, Cisco, Netflix, etc., they pay the $6.5M license fee and go about their merry way (incidentally, Cisco's fee also pays for Firefox's license).

        Which is why h.264 is the predominant codec in use today - it's relatively cheap to use, sites like YouTube and Vimeo pay $0 to host videos that anyone can watch for free (they will have to pay for those subscriber/paid videos, though, since those cannot be viewed for free) - yes, "for free" means you the viewer pays $0 to watch, not that you don't pay some other way (e.g., watching ads).

        MPEG-LA, to ensure adoption of HEVC wants similar licensing terms - a cap, free streaming for free to view, etc., But some patent holders (including the likes of GE and others) balked - hence forming the HEVC alliance and getting rid of the "thorns" - no cap to the amount you pay, streams also cost money, etc.

        There was a lot of derision about MPEG-LA's free stream policy, but they know that widespread adoption is a good thing, and there's a reason why everything's in h.264 format.

        Sadly, the greed of a few is probably going to kill HEVC - at a time when HEVC is just coming out, the last thing you want is to stifle it. I'm sure the patent holders of h.264 will probably make way more money because people will stick with what works and is well established over moving over to something that requires paying a lot of money for continually. At the very least, big companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Netflix, Vimeo etc, who probably just pay the cap every year will stick with h.264 than be subject to huge licensing fees of an unlimited cap. Either that, or HEVC will remain a niche for paid subscribers.

        • But some patent holders (including the likes of GE and others)

          I'm kind of surprised GE has patents on software video compression.

    • But it is a standard now. If you do not use it what do you propose? Flash?

      VP9? Ok now your IE users will claim it doesn't work. What kind of video editing tools out there support ogg vorbis or vp9? Any adobe products that your coworkers and rest of the industry use do?

      • What kind of video editing tools out there support ogg vorbis

        Well, given that very many games use ogg/vorbis for audio precisely because it's royalty free, I imagine there's a good commercial tools to deal with it. Fewer games use theora, but it's not nonzero and includes large ones like Diablo III.

        But anyway what? Don't people edit in lossless then transcode to a lossy format at the end anyway?

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Doesn't H.264 (aka MPEG4) which has much wider client support (browsers, hardware decoding, mobile etc) do a good enough job?

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday July 25, 2015 @11:36PM (#50183691)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Xiaran ( 836924 )
        Hate to break it to you. Justin.tv is gone.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sshir ( 623215 )
        On VP9 hardware support: many "smart" TVs have it. Google uses YouTube as a battering ram.

      • HEVC provides similar image-quality at half the bitrates as H.264

        That's the goal. Reality is not there yet, at least not for most applications. Results at the moment are more like 35-40% reduction, which is still excellent.

      • MPEG-LA claims to have full H265 patent coverage, so it'll be decided in the courts if MPEG-LA can defend their H265 claims against HEVC Advance. My guess is that MPEG-LA knows what they've got and HEVC Advance is making a big show for shareholders. Technicolor already put it in their last quarterly earnings report that they had massive profit potential from their HEVC patents. To me this looks like a fake out by companies like Technicolor to trump up the value of their patents while MPEG-LA continue

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

      This is the disadvantage of software patents.

      Also change the rules so that if something becomes a standard you can't charge a royalty for it.

      • Re:Why do we need H.265? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by stevedog ( 1867864 ) on Sunday July 26, 2015 @02:17AM (#50183965)
        IANAL, but that's essentially the idea behind FRAND patents (i.e., those which the inventors have agreed to license for "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory" terms). When you chooses to license using that model, it basically means that you can get a nominal reimbursement (because, after all, you did have to do some work to develop it) for each license, but that is pretty much it. Also, what is considered "nominal" is pretty low (as far as intellectual property goes, anyway) and strongly enforced by the courts. Furthermore, once you go FRAND with a patent, you usually can't really go back, so licensees have a guarantee that they aren't going to get it at a reasonable rate today during the adoption phase, but then see the price go up 500% when some contract runs out.

        HEVC, however, is not a FRAND patent, though they would likely see much higher adoption if they were (probably similar to H.264, since they essentially used a de facto FRAND approach).

      • This is the disadvantage of software patents.

        What does this have to do with software patents? It's about patents. There is nothing specific to software patents here. You have several patent holders, one set of patent holders who want to license their patents for cheap, and one set of patent holders who want to charge enormous amounts.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

          H.265 is a software solution. Of course you can elect to realize that through hardware gates but you can also realize it through a FPGA or pure software so - software patent problem it is.

    • At least for physical media, this paves the way for 4K video on something not much larger than current media. Sure, physical media is dead and all that. But I still buy it. It also makes streaming 4K more feasible.

    • Re:Why do we need H.265? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Dutch Gun ( 899105 ) on Sunday July 26, 2015 @12:11AM (#50183771)

      It's a better, more efficient format / encoding standard, producing similar quality at somewhere between 50-70% of the size of H.264, according to some benchmarks I've seen. Given how much bandwidth video takes, that's not a small gain in efficiency. The additional efficiency is certainly useful for reducing streaming bandwidth requirements for HD and 4K resolutions, which is growing rapidly in popularity.

      However, it seems as if the patent pool group has gotten a bit too emboldened by the relative success of H.264. Using the old "the first one's... well, not free, but cheap" model, they're hoping now to cash in by jacking the price up significantly, and broadening the scope of who has to pay as well.

      This may end up killing or at least severely delaying 4K TV and HEVC (H.265) adoption. It's pretty costly, and businesses may just stick with the older format. It's hard to see companies willing to give that much of a percentage, especially since they're now targeting *content providers* and not just hardware manufacturers. Then again, maybe there's enough money being made that they won't care. Smartphone manufacturers pay a huge amount in patent licensing fees.

      Difficult to say what will happen here. If they do suck it up and pay, it will basically mean higher costs passed along to consumers for nearly all new digital video content. Personally, I hope this blows up in their faces and everyone refuses to use the codec until more reasonable terms are presented.

      • Re:Why do we need H.265? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by bzipitidoo ( 647217 ) <bzipitidoo@yahoo.com> on Sunday July 26, 2015 @01:24AM (#50183889) Journal

        For lossy still images, JPEG2000, the successor to JPEG, is not widely used. JPEG is good enough.

        For lossless still images, PNG was created to provide a free and superior replacement for the proprietary GIF format. The only reason GIF hung on was that it could do simple animations. MNG and APNG provide animations for PNG. APNG appears to have beat out MNG, but neither was soon enough to push GIF into complete oblivion. Still, PNG has mostly supplanted GIF.

        Despite being the oldest and by far the worst quality of the major lossy audio formats, MP3 is still king, though Ogg Vorbis has claimed some niches. For instance, Vorbis is a popular format for sounds for computer games. One of the big problems Vorbis suffered was purely political. Microsoft went to war against the format, in part because it didn't have DRM. They would have also killed mp3 if it wasn't so popular. MS managed to squash Vorbis in the US so that it is very hard to find a music player that supports the format. For some players, I installed Rockbox to get support for Vorbis. For another, I learned that the same device was sold in the US and Europe, just with different ROMs. Flash the US device with the European ROM (which involved tricking the ROM installation program by switching ROM files after it did its check and before it did the install) and just like that the US device could play Vorbis. How MS bullied or bribed the manufacturer to omit Vorbis from the US ROM I don't know.

        So, yeah, H 265 could easily fail to gain widespread adoption if the licensing terms are too onerous and greedy, no matter how much better it is compared to H.264. H.262 (MPEG-2) is still kicking around, as it's the format used for DVD video.

        • MS did try to kill MP3 - they bundled Windows with a CD-ripping capability in windows media player that was only capable of saving to WMA format. It's a powerful tactic, but in this case it failed.

        • Re:Why do we need H.265? (Score:4, Informative)

          by dwywit ( 1109409 ) on Sunday July 26, 2015 @03:22AM (#50184067)

          You're mostly right, but JPEG2000 is the format specified for digital cinema encoding. Look inside that big MXF file, and it's a bunch of JPEG2000 stills. Been to the cinema lately? You're watching x frames per second of JPEG2000.

          Widely used, just not widely known.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Kjella ( 173770 )

            You're mostly right, but JPEG2000 is the format specified for digital cinema encoding. Look inside that big MXF file, and it's a bunch of JPEG2000 stills. Been to the cinema lately? You're watching x frames per second of JPEG2000.

            True, but at such massive bitrates (up to 250 Mbit/s) that pretty much anything will look good and in bandwidth-challenged areas they do physical distribution. And they only premiere a handful of movies each week, size is not a big deal. Since wavelet encoding is heavily patented I'm guessing DCI got a waterproof deal before choosing it as the digital cinema standard, with patent holders hoping this would spur adoption. Obviously it didn't and since then better formats have appeared, so it's never going mai

        • Vorbis vs. Licensing terms of WMA (Score:5, Informative)

          by DrYak ( 748999 ) on Sunday July 26, 2015 @09:02AM (#50184781) Homepage

          Flash the US device with the European ROM (which involved tricking the ROM installation program by switching ROM files after it did its check and before it did the install) and just like that the US device could play Vorbis. How MS bullied or bribed the manufacturer to omit Vorbis from the US ROM I don't know.

          The bullying was done as part of the PlaysForSure [wikipedia.org] program.

          That was microsoft's attempt to counter music stores like iTunes and co. They had a platform for selling DRM-ed music in WMA format. OEMs had to undergo a certification to be able to advertise "Microsoft PlaysForSure". That mandated certain formats (support for DRM, support for WMA). It was worded in such a way that it basically forbid manufacturer to put any other codec on the device (see the "Criticisms" section. According to MS that was due to a junior employee who wrote it. Yeah. Sure.). It think the controversy was talked about back then here on /.

          My opinion is that this probably started as an attempt to initially close loop-hole to avoid consumer playing non DRM-ed / unlicensed music (i.e.: pirated), but at the hand of MS executive quickly evolved as a way to attempt crushing competition.

          That severly limited the spreading of non-WMA formats (free like Vorbis or FLAC. Or alternative licenses like Sony's ATRAC, etc.) because OEMs probably feared that including extra formats would exclude them from WMA certification and they would lose market share to manufacturer who didn't.
          (Specially since back then, Vorbis didn't have any markets, it was mostly used for higher quality home rips. Whereas WMA had Microsoft's store and OEMs were hoping to have something against the iTunes behemoth).

          Or mostly so in the US.

          The rest of the world didn't give a damn fuck about microsoft's market (was is even available outside US ?) nor play for sure. People wanted mainly MP3 because that was the most widespread format, and adding extra formats was a way for OEM to put more tick box on their feature list. As such adding Vorbis was a win-win: it doesn't cost anything (and even had a BSD licensed integer implementation for embed available for free) and was one extra feature that they'll advertise to gain attraction. Every single asian no-name manufacturer did add it.

          In Europe nearly every player I've seen in store did have Vorbis support.

          That explains the dual ROM:
          - one ROM to placate microsoft to get access to PlaysForSure in the US market.
          - one ROM with as many features as possible cramed in to gain visibility everywhere else.

    • >Doesn't H.264 (aka MPEG4) which has much wider client support (browsers, hardware decoding, mobile etc) do a good enough job?

      I dunno. I've seen x265 encodes of video which come out at under 150MB where the x264 encode is ~1.5GB for the same quality.

      That's a huge saving in bandwidth.

  • Because that's exactly what HEVC is going to get if they pursue this.

    • On the Government is stupid enough to base your rates on "profit" which can be gamed to be zero or less.

      No, this is revenue. The top line number. And it's a lot harder to game.

  • The big test is if the big MPAA studios using HEVC for UHD Blurays will pay this new patent pool or not. The quantity of money is large enough that they'll probably either negotiate a better deal or take it to court.
    Unfortunately, if anyone pays, that'll fund them enough to be able to take everyone else to court, so the patent pool likely won't die unless there's some major court case striking down the patents. If anyone has enough sway with the US government to get software patents killed, it's the MAFIAA.

    • You know, that actually sounds halfway plausible. Wouldn't it be crazy if the entity who finally got the US patent system reformed ended up being RIAA/MPAA? Of course, in that scenario, "reformed" would probably end up meaning some scheme where any digital file produced or consumed within the US or any country that has an internet connection to the US has to pay them a fee...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dwedit ( 232252 )

      VP9 is not at all ready for prime time. It is super-slow to encode and decode, and often looks worse than VP8 at the same bitrate.

  • So glad its a HTML 5 standard (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Saturday July 25, 2015 @11:55PM (#50183739) Journal

    For those who bashed Firefox and those who supported Ogg Vorbis and vp9 or whatever the hell that other codec was called ... all I can say is TOLD YA SO!

    Notice how they waited until Flash was dying before this announcement?

    Pretty soon they will go after Mozilla for royalities fees and if you do not want to spied upon by Google or use IE you will need to install flash back. Flash is the only recourse as horrible as this sounds agaisn't this as it is a defacto standard now to use this patented technology which will require DRM I am sure too and perhaps an anti open source license agreement too forcing developers like those who make Konqueror to either violate the GPL or not work on many websites.

    So part of an open standard is owned by a monopoly and the great internet which was owned by the people is now licensed under Hollywood. Incredible!

  • Can't we just wait 20 years, and then use the codec?

    • That doesn't quite work - the patents also cover useful encoding techniques, so you have to also go through your code and make sure you aren't using any mathematical concepts discovered and patented in the last twenty years.

    • Of course! Then, when that day comes, we can all go listen to all our public domain Beatles music to celebrate.

  • VR popularity grows substantially.
    VR market is going to explode with tons of new products in Q1 2016 (an assumption based on actual product announcements) .
    VR movies (360 x 180) take at least x6 more than regular ones (less than 120 x 90 ).

    Some VR products and solutions will have to use 265, without major improvements of the infrastructures.
    Hence 265 becomes an enabler, and the license price vs. storage volume & network price begins to sound like a reasonable trade-off.

    Hence the draconian licensing term

  • The netvc Project (https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/netvc/charter/) aims to create a video codec that is royalty free and better than current codecs using technologies from multiple contributors.

    Current contributions include Daala(https://wiki.xiph.org/Daala) from Xiph and Thor(https://github.com/cisco/thor) from Cisco, both having good performance in different metrics(FastSSIM and PSNR respectively). Combined, both could achieve higher performance than a single one alone.

    If the success of the Opus cod
  • From what I gather, H264 and H265 may be supported by hardware (HW) today, and their HW decoders can be pretty efficient on portable devices. If you look at recent Apple devices, their main chips do support both decoding and encoding of both video formats. VP9 HW support is championed by Google, as far as I can see from an advert / white paper on www.deepchip.com . I assume Google will try to make all Android phones VP9 friendly, but I am not so sure what is the status right now. I suppose that VP9 is proba
  • ...why any "standard" would include patented technology. Seems like a very stupid idea. About the same as copyrighting the spelling of words.

    • ...why any "standard" would include patented technology. Seems like a very stupid idea. About the same as copyrighting the spelling of words.

      It's because you want a standard to include the best possible technology, and a lot of that is patented. But most of the time that's fine, because a standard only becomes a standard if everyone accepts it as a standard, and that only happens if licensing conditions are acceptable to the huge majority of players in the market. That's what happened with MP3 and h.264; they are free for small companies, cheap for medium sized companies and relatively cheap for big companies.

      And that's the problem here, som

  • The increasing use of the proprietary video codecs in everyday software and devices is not a good trend for consumers.

    .
    As we are beginning to see, once the codecs become an essential facility, patent fees will start to be extracted from the users.

  • 0.5% sounds fair. And it's especially fair, because it's gratis for non-commercial (possibly open source) products and sites.

  • in what way has HEVC advanced any patents on h.265 that isn't already covered in the LAMPEG HEVC license for h.265? One problem though, the 'open source' VP9 (which still is being debated if it really isn't using any patented technology) isn't nearly as good as h.265 (unless you really don't give a damn about real quality)..

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