170
Firm quietly boosts H.264 streaming license fees from $100,000 up to staggering $4.5 million
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2026
170 points (99.4% liked)
Technology
6507 readers
249 users here now
Which posts fit here?
Any news that are at least tangentially connected to the technology, social media platforms, informational technologies or tech policy.
Post guidelines
[Opinion] prefix
Opinion (op-ed) articles must use [Opinion] prefix before the title.
Rules
1. English only
Title and associated content has to be in English.
2. Use original link
Post URL should be the original link to the article (even if paywalled) and archived copies left in the body. It allows avoiding duplicate posts when cross-posting.
3. Respectful communication
All communication has to be respectful of differing opinions, viewpoints, and experiences.
4. Inclusivity
Everyone is welcome here regardless of age, body size, visible or invisible disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, caste, color, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.
5. Ad hominem attacks
Any kind of personal attacks are expressly forbidden. If you can't argue your position without attacking a person's character, you already lost the argument.
6. Off-topic tangents
Stay on topic. Keep it relevant.
7. Instance rules may apply
If something is not covered by community rules, but are against lemmy.zip instance rules, they will be enforced.
Companion communities
!globalnews@lemmy.zip
!interestingshare@lemmy.zip
Icon attribution | Banner attribution
If someone is interested in moderating this community, message @brikox@lemmy.zip.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
AV1 already wins handily as a codec, and the only thing keeping it from being adopted more broadly than is currently the case is lack of hardware decoders on older hardware. This problem naturally solves itself as old hardware gets replaced.
Even then, dav1d is a remarkable piece of software, and software decoding is pretty viable for AV1 thanks to it. Many places have already adopted AV1, and you should expect to keep seeing it get adopted as time goes on.
AV1 has recently gotten involved in a lawsuit by Dolby saying that they're breaking like 5 of their patent, so there's some issues there as well.
These things always happen because of how dumb software patents are. There's no guarantee the lawsuit will stick, nor do I necessarily expect it to
It's even worse than that: the USPO abrogated their responsibility to evaluate patents for prior art and conflict with other patents to the courts.
So they just issue patents willy nilly and expect courts to decide which ones 'win'.
Better hardware encoder support would help, too. It's insanely inefficient to encode without that dedicated hardware, compared to h264/h265, where dedicated hardware support is there.
I was hoping Apple would add it when they shipped the M4, and now M5, but nope.
Hardware encoder support I think is generally less critical. Decoding is the process that needs to happen real-time, while most encoding can be done far in advance, unless you're live broadcasting or operating at YouTube-scale.
On a media server encoding is typically done in real time
It depends on what the receiving unit can decode. Sometimes there will be transcoding, but it's usually something you want to avoid.
While I agree, my point was that encoding needs to be more efficient, both in time, and resource consumption. That isn't quite there yet, for AV1. It is improving, albeit slowly.
non apple chips can pretty much all hardware encode AV1 nowadays. it's really just apple doing its own thing again
It's too bad the GPU prices are utter insanity due to the LLM pyramid scheme poaching global RAM. I read an article yesterday that said Apple is likely eating that RAM overhead as a loss to ensure their long term strategy.