Tag Archives: Choosing a codec

015 was a tumultuous year for codecs. HEVC seemed like a sure thing in January, looked to be in trouble in July, but was happily resuscitated in December, albeit with some missing productive months from its useful life. Open source codecs began the y

On Wednesday, February 3rd, 2016, Technicolor issued a press release stating that the company had decided to “license its HEVC IP portfolio directly to device manufacturers rather than through the HEVC Advance patent pool.” The release fu

Joicaster is a web-based live streaming syndication platform that takes a single live stream and pushes it out to multiple services, including YouTube Live, Ustream, and Twitch, as well as commercial sites. Joicaster is affordable, straightforward to

When HEVC Advance first proposed royalty rates and policies in July 2015, the terms were almost universally criticised, if not vilified. Recognizing that the proposed structure would slow HEVC adoption rather than promote it, HEVC Advance has issued

At the start of 2015, the future of HEVC seemed clean and green. There was a single patent pool, and royalties were capped at a reasonable rate. Meanwhile, the open source world was a mess, with multiple codecs from multiple sources, and only a hint

Over the last few years, the Moscow State University Graphics and Media Lab (MSU) has produced the most highly-respected H.264 codec comparisons available. In October, MSU released its first HEVC comparison, which promises to achieve the same signifi

This post will quickly summarize the current status of HEVC royalties. There are two existing patent pools. The first was assembled by MPEG LA and calls for royalties of $0.20/unit on encoders and decoders, after a 100,000 de minimus exception, with a US $25 million annual cap, and no royalty on encoded content. Here’s a screen grab from a presentation on the …

There has been lots of discussion about how onerous the content royalties proposed by HEVC Advance are for streaming distributors. In this article, I analyze the impact of those royalties on HEVC adoption and usage using two models, the M-Go model, for single movie rentals, and the Netflix model. Surprisingly, when you consider the bandwidth savings that HEVC delivers, switching …

HEVC Advance shook up the codec world when they announced proposed royalty policies in July, 2015, that included much higher hardware royalties then MPEG LA is seeking, without a cap, as well as royalties on content. In this article on streaming media.com, I analyze the proposed licensing terms and attempt to predict real-world numbers for actual HEVC users like Apple …

My article, The Great UHD Codec Debate: Google’s VP9 vs. HEVC/H.265, is up on Streaming Media. Here’s the intro that describes what I tried to do. As of today, the great UHD codec debate involves two main participants: Google’s VP9 and HEVC/H.265. Which one succeeds—and where—involves a number of factors and will likely differ in various streaming-related markets, which I …