Amazon EC2 推出 VT1 Instance

看到 Amazon EC2 推出新機種 vt1,專門為影片壓縮而推出的 family type:「New – Amazon EC2 VT1 Instances for Live Multi-stream Video Transcoding」。

主要是透過 Alveo U30 Data Center Accelerator Card 這張卡加速,號稱比 GPU 機器還要省 30% 的費用 (CPU 的話可以到 60%):

These VT1 instances feature Xilinx® Alveo™ U30 media accelerator transcoding cards with accelerated H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC codecs and provide up to 30% better price per stream compared to the latest GPU-based EC2 instances and up to 60% better price per stream compared to the latest CPU-based EC2 instances.

看規格支援 H.264H.265,不過看起來沒支援 royalty-free 的 VP9AV1...

另外這跟 AWS Elemental MediaConvert 以及 AWS Elemental Live 好像稍微有點打對台?另外專利的費用不知道怎麼算...

Cisco 開發新的 Video Codec:Thor

Cisco 開發新的 Video Codec 與 HEVC (H.265) 競爭,專案名稱叫做 Thor:「World, Meet Thor – a Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec」。

沒什麼意外,專利問題是主要的原因:

Unfortunately, the patent licensing situation for H.265 has recently taken a turn for the worse. Two distinct patent licensing pools have formed so far, and many license holders are not represented in either. There is just one license pool for H.264. The total costs to license H.265 from these two pools is up to sixteen times more expensive than H.264, per unit. H.264 had an upper bound on yearly licensing costs, whereas H.265 has no such upper limit.

不過一開頭寫到 VP9 是 proprietary 的描述讓人很不解:

There are two of note – Google’s proprietary VP9 codec, and the industry standard H.265 (HEVC) codec, which is the successor to H.264 (AVC).

往下拉 comment 看果然就有人提出來:

How exactly is VP9 more "proprietary" than Thor? Both are open sourced under BSD license, both are royalty free, both are intended to be unencumbered by patents. Are you defining "proprietary" as "not controlled by Cisco"?

不知道在搞什麼鬼...

想要取代 JPEG 的 BPG (Better Portable Graphics)

雖然是有點久的消息了,但還是拿出來講:「BPG Image format」。

在「BPG Image Comparison」這頁可以直接看到一些比較,在「BPG/JPEG comparison on the Lena picture」可以看到經典的萊娜圖比較。

很明顯 BPG 比 JPEG 好很多,而又比 WebP 更上一層樓。但是看到這個部份就皺眉了:

Based on a subset of the HEVC open video compression standard.

最後面也有提到 HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) 的專利問題:

Some of the HEVC algorithms may be protected by patents in some countries (read the FFmpeg Patent Mini-FAQ for more information). Most devices already include or will include hardware HEVC support, so we suggest to use it if patents are an issue.

繼續觀望下去 :o