二零一七年十二月八日
By 1月时特约编辑
制作人的观点

Divideon Creates xvc, an HEVC Codec With Reasonable Pricing

It’s easy to imagine the deployment of HEVC as a case study in business and technology schools about how 不推出一项技术. Not only do you have a launch cycle that clearly limited adaption, you also have classic illustrations of two of the major problems related to standard-essential patents, 专利持枪抢劫, 和版税叠加.

Patent holdup refers to the practice of waiting to declare your patent rights until after the technology has become accepted. Early adopters choose the technology without a realistic estimate of cost, 一旦上钩, the costs of changing technologies are so high that the IP owner can charge a much higher royalty than it could at the start. The participants in the Velos Media patent pool, which launched (by my count) 4 years, 4个月, and 5 days after HEVC received first-stage approval, 是一个完美的例子.

第二个问题, 皇室叠加, describes a scenario where so many patents are involved that even if each is fair, 合理的, 和非歧视(FRAND), as standard-essential patents are required to be, 总成本变得不合理. 当MPEG LA宣布它的价值为0.20/unit, $25 million annual cap pricing, it was tough to swallow, but it felt 合理的. Then HEVC Advance launched with per-unit pricing nearly 10 times as high, 和一个接近两倍的帽子, and the combined pricing didn’t feel nearly as FRAND-ly.

当我在10月中旬写这篇文章时, Velos still hasn’t announced its rates, 所以总损失是未知的. While we know that Technicolor also claims to have other HEVC-related intellectual property, there’s actually no guarantee that there won’t be others.

大多数读者都知道这一切. 所以我为什么要叙述? Because there’s a Stockholm-based company named Divideon offering a new codec that uses technology from the HEVC and Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and a novel design to simplify and add certainty to codec pricing. 具体地说, Divideon’s xvc codec comes with a guarantee that your royalty will be fixed for the life of the contract, protecting against Velos-like surprises.

Here’s how it works: When creating the codec, Divideon traced the IP relating to each component back to its inventor. Patent holders who chose to participate registered with Divideon; if they declined to register, 他们的技术不包括在内. 编解码器设计是模块化的, 所以如果有任何侵权行为发生, Divideon can remove that technology from the codec.

If xvc licensees are approached with an infringement claim, Divideon has 60 days to license the IP (at no cost to you), fight the claimant (and bear all costs and damages), 或者从xvc中删除该IP. 当然, while this guarantees a known royalty, you may lose quality or performance if an IP owner unexpectedly appears and won’t participate, forcing Divideon to remove the IP from its codec. 我问过这个问题, and the company responded that licensees pay by the month and can discontinue anytime. 虽然这提供了一些保护, you still may be forced to convert from xvc sometime down the road if this scenario occurs, which could be seriously problematic if you’ve deployed xvc in hardware. 没有解决方案是没有风险的.

编解码器是如何执行的? From a development perspective, it’s a work in progress. However, the company prepared some test streams that I was able to compare with H.264, x265, the MainConcept HEVC codec, VP9, and AV1 files at the same data rate. It wasn’t a totally apples-to-apples comparison for many reasons, 但是在两个真实世界的文件中, XVC是质量的领导者. In the Sintel comparison, xvc trailed only MainConcept. 令人印象深刻的表现.

It’s definitely early days, but xvc appears to be a codec you should keep your eye on.

[This article appears in the November/December 2017 issue of 流媒体杂志 作为“更好的HEVC编解码器”?"]