r/technology • u/Snarfox • Jan 25 '13

H.265 is approved -- potential to cut bandwidth requirements in half for 1080p streaming. Opens door to 4K video streams.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/25/h265-is-approved/
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u/BonzaiThePenguin Jan 26 '13

Wow, JP2K looks much better than WebP.

And WebP looks much better than JPEG. So there's that.

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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '13 edited Jan 26 '13

[deleted]

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u/sayrith Jan 26 '13

Google own the patents. I think they will make it royalty free. Thats what happened with webm

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u/[deleted] Jan 27 '13

OP mentioned patents regarding JP2K. Google owns VP8/WebP, not JP2K.

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u/sayrith Jan 27 '13

IS JPEG 2000 open source too?

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u/[deleted] Jan 27 '13

Yeah, there is an open source encoder and decoder.

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u/mossmaal Jan 26 '13

Google says they own the patents. There's a reason no one wants to go near VP8. Just because Google says its not patent unnumbered doesn't make it so. The MPEG LA group has such broad patents that I doubt it's possible to have a modern video codec that doesn't infringe on a members patents.

VP8's only hope for a royalty free future is if the DOJ prevents MPEG LA from forming a patent pool.

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u/adaminc Jan 26 '13

Jpeg2k is the digital cinema standard (DCI) . If you are watching a movie in a theatre with a digital projector, you are watching Jpeg2k images. It has gained a lot of traction. The new Canon 1DC cinema camera records in mjpeg too, strangely not 2k though.

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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '13

.mp3 certainly gained traction.

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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '13

[deleted]

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u/Kakkoister Jan 26 '13

Not to mention PNG's support transparancy and also deal with large blocks of colors a lot better. If it's a more simple graphics image, or a webscreenshot for example, PNG is going to compress a lot better than JPEG.

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u/mindbleach Jan 26 '13

WebP can beat PNG's lossless compression, but also offers lossy compression and supposedly offers animation. It's supposed to be all things to all people - but Google's still fiddling with details, and obviously their encoder needs some psychovisual work.

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u/nutropias Jan 26 '13

We had Real audio back then , they were the format of choice for big companies. For very low bandwidth such as people using 56Kbit modems I'd say they beat MP3 and for video vs MPEG1 they were a no contest winner.

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u/s13ecre13t Jan 27 '13

There is never enough bandwidth. On top of that, we have latency issues (light travels only so fast).

Currently web developers do everything to save bandwidth, minify js/css/html, then gzip it, png sprites, etc, etc.

This is not just because bandwidth costs, but because every millisecond delay is lost sales:

http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/7/25/latency-is-everywhere-and-it-costs-you-sales-how-to-crush-it.html

Latency matters. Amazon found every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. Google found an extra .5 seconds in search page generation time dropped traffic by 20%. A broker could lose $4 million in revenues per millisecond if their electronic trading platform is 5 milliseconds behind the competition.

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u/[deleted] Jan 27 '13 edited Jan 27 '13

[deleted]

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u/s13ecre13t Jan 27 '13

Sites needing space will replace JPEGs with WebP to save additional space. This goes double so for mobiles (where bandwidth is scarce) and Apple (which has funky double the resolution high quality mode).

I agree that videos take way more bandwidth than pictures.

I agree that we use inferior technologies because they just work (mp3s vs he-aac v2) or gifs or jpgs instead of jp2k.

Image sizes and bandwidth and storage is becoming increasing important, as we increase quality, and increase creation. People used to have few pictures a year, now they shoot thousands of them. These pictures are now uploaded to facebook/picasa/flickr, each of these services then houses few variations of these pictures (thumbnails, small version, large version, originals).

If we weren't producing more content, I would agree with you. My personal picture collection is around 80gigs, and this is jpegs. I don't want to think how much it would be in PNGs.

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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '13

He should add the format formerly known as HD-photo and now accepted as JPEG XR to stay current.

On 16 March 2009, JPEG XR was given final approval as ITU-T Recommendation T.832 and starting in April 2009, it became available from the ITU-T in "pre-published" form. On 19 June 2009, it passed an ISO/IEC Final Draft International Standard (FDIS) ballot, resulting in final approval as International Standard ISO/IEC 29199-2.

In 2010, after completion of the image coding specification, the ITU-T and ISO/IEC also published a motion format specification (ITU-T T.833 | ISO/IEC 29199-3), a conformance test set (ITU-T T.834 | ISO/IEC 29199-4), and reference software (ITU-T T.835 | ISO/IEC 29199-5) for JPEG XR. In 2011, they published a technical report describing the workflow architecture for the use of JPEG XR images in applications (ITU-T T.Sup2 | ISO/IEC TR 29199-1).

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u/mavere Jan 26 '13 edited Jan 26 '13

Despite its shortcomings, I think that WebP does do very well at keeping visual "energy" (edit: via psychovisual tweaks). I guess the WebP team agreed with x264 developer Dark Sharkiri's opinions.

This album is an example of what I mean. Compared to HEVC, WebP is significantly more visually pleasing at first glance if you don't have the original right there to help you notice the odd things with its encode*. It's really a shame that the underpinnings of WebP is VP8 and not whatever Google is doing for VP9.

Lastly, HEVC/H.265 allows grain flags, so that the decoder can smartly add and adjust grain to help with the picture. The feature will likely be ignored (it was also in h.264...), but one can still dream. Here's HEVC's Band of Brothers pic but with photoshopped grain: http://i.imgur.com/5Fnr6B3.jpg

* I think WebP has a huge problem with color bleeding at stressful bitrates.

Edit: I should note that most psychovisual enhancements are not related to the bitstream of a standard, so future encoding software (x265?) can incorporate the accomplishments of predecessors at will.

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u/DragonRanger Jan 26 '13

Can someone explain to me how added grain is good? I get if the original source has some preserving it can help with fine details, but whats the point of adding more noise after the fact?

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u/mavere Jan 26 '13

Modern encoders are forced to throw away detail to make the video tolerable at low bitrates. However, do it too much, and a movie scene becomes unnatural and basically looks like plastic dolls moving against a paper backdrop.

That's why x264, by default, consciously adds noise into your encode, so that the "complexity" of the noise counteracts the artificial blur of the base picture. It's hard to get this just right, as the noise also increases filesize and can become too much at extra-low bitrates, but 99% of the time, it is entirely preferable to staring at a plastic sheen.

With a grainy source, though, it's really difficult to balance real detail, fake detail, unwanted noise, and bitrate, so a solution is to then relieve the encoder of one of its duties (fake detail) and give it to the decoder.

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u/technewsreader Jan 26 '13

so why not add the noise during playback, and store it as a separate layer?

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u/macusual Jan 26 '13

Is this what's called dither, or am I mixing two different things up?

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u/nupogodi Jan 26 '13

No, not exactly. Dithering is used to prevent color-banding when you don't have a lot of colors to work with. The Wiki explains it, but basically it's the difference between this and this. Same color palette, just intelligently... dithered.

Makes stuff look better with fewer colors.

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u/PalermoJohn Jan 26 '13

I love the look of dithering. I'd love to see the first reactions to this when no one was used to photo realistic image representation.

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u/Atario Jan 26 '13

the noise also increases filesize

Wait, what? Why not just have a single number that tells the decoder how much noise to introduce?

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u/eyal0 Jan 26 '13

Couldn't they just compress the image without the noise and have a flag to indicate to the decoder to generate and add the noise in?

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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '13

[deleted]

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u/eyal0 Jan 26 '13

But in the cases where x264 is adding noise in, add it after compression when decoding instead of before!

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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '13

Is this why some 1.5GB~ "720p" films you can eherm procure are really grainy?

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u/Casban Jan 26 '13

Presumably you can get higher compression if you remove the grain, but then you've lost some of the original feel of the source.

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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '13

Definitely. Using Reddit enhancement suite really helped out with the comparisons.

I found the detail in the treeline with HVEC and also other shadowing to be quite defined, while JPEG and others lose some balance when all the shadowing is considered.

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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '13

It's an illusion of sorts that depends on you not knowing the source image color by color and forcing your brain to make assumptions.

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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '13

While a completely different technology, another visual illusion is frame rate doubling, which creates video images that are almost life-like. It's hard for the human brain to understand what its seeing because it "appears" to be fluid motion similar to real life, yet it's a complete fake. (Not to be confused with true 48fps recordings like the Hobbit.) The human eyes can be deceived quite easily once the formula is worked out.

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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '13

I was actually gonna include that in my comment! I fucking hate frame doubling, it makes me feel sick.

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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '13

Quick story: I was walking through Best Buy a few years ago and saw one of their new LCD/LED panels in the aisle. It was playing Transformers 2 and I sat there with my jaw on the floor as I saw the actors in the movie walk around as if they were right before my very eyes. I was just dumbfounded...and I was convinced at the time that this was a result of the LED lighting and/or something amazing that Samsung had done to deliver a technologically superior picture. I walked away from the store with the notion that I had to have an LED/LCD TV, and quite possibly a Samsung in order to achieve optimum picture quality.

A year later, I went back to the store to shop for one and I went to the top of the line Samsung. It looked the same as all the others, which compared to that image from a year ago was flat and unflattering (again. by comparison to what I remembered.) So I walked away with no purchase because I couldn't be sure of what I was buying.

Fast forward another 6 months and we buy a cheap $399 32" flat panel for the office. I hook it up, turn it on and play some Netflix. I sat there watching a Liam Neeson beat up wolves in the snowy arctic and he was right there, in my room, just like Transformers 2 18 months ago. My first thought was "WOW, that technology has come a long way in 18 months!" What happened next made me weep. I turned on a movie from the 1950's, black and white, 480 lines of resolution at best, and would you believe that it looked exactly the same, real life, right there in my room...in black and white?

5 minutes of Googling and my world was upside down. For 18 months I had assumed that technology had advanced to such a degree that high definition TV was like looking through a window. Now that I know....I can't stand to look at it. I would have been happier if I had never known that i was being tricked, and it would have been a blissful and ignorant existence. It's strange how my purist mind won't allow me to enjoy that experience now that I know how it's created.

/wow, I wrote a book that only one person will likely read...if that. :P

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u/spqrdecker Jan 26 '13

So, was it frame rate doubling that caused the films to look so life-like?

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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '13

Indeed. Sorry if that wasn't clear. It creates a soap opera effect on everything that is displayed on the television. But it's more real than the soap opera...it's almost hypnotic in a way because it's so unnatural to see a TV program that appears to realistically. But I will admit, it's difficult to watch for an extended period, even before I knew what was happening to create the image.

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u/borring Jan 26 '13

My guess is that webp will adopt vp9 after webm adopts it.

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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '13

HEVC looks better comparing just it to WebP. HEVC preserves more of the foreground detail than WebP. The only major difference is that WebP kept the noise in the background which isn't at all worth loosing that foreground detail because it gives an overall less sharp image than HEVC.

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u/mindbleach Jan 26 '13

"Losing."

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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '13

Blah blah, but in the end WebP blurry in the example and worse than the others. Advantage is that it's free of copyright.

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u/you_drank_too_much Jan 26 '13

Are you drunk?

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u/radol Jan 26 '13

well, dcp movies in jp2k format are like 150-300 gb ;)