Format/Codec Wars - AV2 vs. VVC / H.266

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Ars Technica: HP and Dell disable HEVC support built into their laptops’ CPUs (archive)
Laptops with sixth-generation Intel Core and later processors have built-in hardware support for HEVC decoding and encoding. AMD has made laptop chips supporting the codec since 2015. However, both Dell and HP have disabled this feature on some of their popular business notebooks.
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The OEMs disabling codec hardware also comes as associated costs for the international video compression standard are set to increase in January, as licensing administrator Access Advance announced in July. Per a breakdown from patent pool administration VIA Licensing Alliance, royalty rates for HEVC for over 100,001 units are increasing from $0.20 each to $0.24 each in the United States. To put that into perspective, in Q3 2025, HP sold 15,002,000 laptops and desktops, and Dell sold 10,166,000 laptops and desktops, per Gartner.
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Phoronix: Google Looks To Bring JPEG-XL Support Back To Chrome / Chromium (archive)
Back in 2022 was the surprising decision by Google that they were going to deprecate JPEG-XL image support in Chrome. By the end of 2022 they went ahead and removed JPEG-XL support from Chrome/Chromium to the frustration of many web developers and end-users interested in this image format. Now though as we get ready to roll into 2026, Google engineers are looking at bringing back JPEG-XL support to the Chrome web browser.
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Streaming Media: Rethink's Alex Davies Talks New Transcoding Report and Future of VVC, AV1, and LCEVC (archive)
The conversation opened with Ozer reminding Davies that “back in 2021, you were pretty bullish on VVC,” and asked what had changed. Davies was blunt. “It's been very disappointing, I think for the industry,” he said. When Rethink first built the model, “the methodology was to look at HEVC, look at AVC, track the historical patterns, and predict forward from there.”

That logic assumed VVC would follow the same rough trajectory as the previous generations, which hasn't happened. Davies noted, “We're five years past VVC being sort of finished, six years past when it was essentially finalized. And I think it's very telling that Qualcomm still hasn't put it into silicon.”

Why? In Davies's view, “There's no real market pull for VVC. So, companies like Qualcomm that bear the additional royalty costs won't integrate VVC into products if they don't have to. And so it's a Catch-22, or chicken-or-egg classic kind of scenario.”
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336014-Alex_codecs_1-ORG.jpg
 
TorrentFreak: Hollywood Warns: ‘Extortionary’ Codec Patent Fees Could Hike Streaming Subscription Prices (archive) (mega)
For decades, the Motion Picture Association (MPA) has been Hollywood's main protector of intellectual property rights, especially when it relates to piracy. In a recent federal lawsuit, however, the roles are reversed. Siding with Disney, the MPA calls out alleged IP abuse and "extortionary" patent demands linked to the H.264 and H.265 codecs, which they fear might inflate subscription fees of streaming services.
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MPA sees InterDigital’s aggressive patent tactics as an antitrust violation. Their brief argues that InterDigital is effectively “double-dipping” by attempting to charge streaming services for the same video transmissions device manufacturers have already paid for.
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Lol.
 
Phoronix: FFmpeg Lands Initial Support For JPEG-XS (archive)
JPEG-XS is the image/video codec optimized for low-complexity and low-latency implementation such as for streaming professional video over IP with use-cases like drones, autonomous vehicles, and more. This "XS" variant of JPEG is about being a lightweight low-latency implementation with visually transparent compression and can be supported across a diverse range of hardware.
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Phoronix: Opus 1.6 Audio Codec Adds New Machine Learning Functionality (archive)
The Speech Bandwidth Extension "BWE" is an experimental feature in Opus 1.6 that is based on a neural network trained for generating high frequency speech content for wideband speech.
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The 96Hz audio for experimental "Opus HD" support is also interesting and worth highlighting.
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Phoronix: JPEG-XL Image Support Returns To Latest Chrome / Chromium Code (archive)
Now as of yesterday they wired up the JXL decoder! The jxl-rs-powered JPEG-XL image decoding is gated by the enable_jxl_decoder build flag but it's enabled by default. The decode support is wired up with proper MIME type handling (image/jxl), there is chrome://flags UI coverage, and related bits in place for handling JPEG-XL image support returning. While built by default, you may need to set chrome://flags/#enable-jxl-image-format in the interim at run-time to enjoy this JPEG-XL image decoding. That merge is in Chrome/Chromium 145.0.7632.0.
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Phoronix: FFmpeg Merges A Number Of Vulkan Improvements To Start 2026 (archive)
 
Phoronix: The Last Of The Dolby Digital Plus "E-AC3" Patents Might Now Be Expired (archive)
For those interested in the Dolby Digital Plus "Enhanced AC-3" audio compression format for open-source software, the last of the patents for this widely-used format by streaming services and more appears to have expired.
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VideoCardz: AV2 video codec draft specs for bitstream and decoding now public
https://av2.aomedia.org/ (archive) (ghost)

The AV2 Wikipedia article has low enough activity to have let someone directly call Sisvel a patent trolling company in the latest edits.
 
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The Mass Shooter Ron Soye said:
Phoronix: JPEG-XL Image Support Returns To Latest Chrome / Chromium Code (archive)


Phoronix: FFmpeg Merges A Number Of Vulkan Improvements To Start 2026 (archive)
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Is there a single metric by which JPEG-XL is good for anything and not completely outclassed by webp? I was under the impression that it was a dead nigger baby only opined for by the same kind of trannies who love the Rust programming language, although I guess google re-adding support for it isn't exactly evidence to the contrary
 
Forprexxer said:
Is there a single metric by which JPEG-XL is good for anything and not completely outclassed by webp? I was under the impression that it was a dead nigger baby only opined for by the same kind of trannies who love the Rust programming language, although I guess google re-adding support for it isn't exactly evidence to the contrary
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webp has a lot of limitations. I'd say AVIF is the real JPEG-XL competitor (and being used a little on sites like CNN, The Guardian), if anything.

Hell, I've run into the 16,383x16,383 webp resolution limitation when making long ass screenshots, although IIRC KF/XenForo has a smaller limit.
 
Slav Power said:
I'm yet to find one program that can clip my HEVC encoded movie torrents without shitting the bed and not forcing me to re-encode the whole fucking thing in x264 just to clip it.
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Lossless Cut does a pretty good job. I've rarely had it choke on any h265 streams or have trouble clipping things. Just don't click the stupid little flower dead-center in the app on startup or it'll pop open a browser window to lecture you about whatever faggotry is still going on in Ukraine. The bug report on that on github is actually pretty funny -- pretty refreshing to see so many people saying "STFU about politics, we don't care" so publicly.
 
Big news, an Opus successor is in development:

Phoronix: AOMedia Open Audio Codec "OAC" Aims To Be The Successor To Opus (archive)
While the Alliance For Open Media "AOMedia" is most known for developing the AV1 open video codec, the associated AV1 Image File Format (AVIF), and the next-generation AV2, they are now working on the Open Audio Codec (AOC).

I was tipped off this morning to the formation of the Open Audio Codec (OAC) becoming public this week. The Open Audio Codec is based off the Opus audio codec and intended to be its successor.
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opus-problems.webp
https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/oac/commit/c821cd260fbcf81062399a8373dbf0b0d68f6b89 (archive) (mega)


Phoronix: FFmpeg Lands Experimental xHE-AAC MPS212 Decoding Support (archive)
In response to a ticket requesting support for it in handling various Internet radio stations, Lynne responded at the time:
"Not really a priority right now.

The MPEG-H spec is a different dimension of cursed."
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Phoronix: Intel ANV Driver Sees Several Vulkan Video H.265 Encode Fixes (archive)
 
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On an update to the JPEG-XL front, Mozilla seems to have considerably improved support for JPEG-XL in Firefox as JXL support is now in Firefox Labs. I've also noticed that there is now better support for wide gamut, progressive decoding, and animations since I last checked a few months ago on the test page when I saw that the aforementioned appeared to be borked/not implemented. By the bug tracker, it seems the push had been spurred from the stable release and integration of jxl-rs 0.4 so I'm hoping that the major browsers will pick up interest/steam to getting the format to release at some point this year if the rate of progress is any indication.
 
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