No different than h264 in that regard. I'd rather we discuss the technical merits of this technology than have another patent debate. Not that I wouldn't agree, just that if you want to talk patent reform, it might be better suited to do so in a dedicated HN posting.
As far as encoding technology goes, this is pretty exciting. Looking forward to the first wave of 4K TVs & cell phone cameras hitting the market.
(Disclaimer: I'm the cofounder of a startup specializing in high quality cellphone videos)
Owned by the standards participants will have to be licensed on an FRAND basis.
So while it won't do Free software any good the situation won't be much worse than for AVC unless Google/Motorola or Samsung win in their current cases with Microsoft and Apple about the meaning of FRAND commitments. If FRAND commitments are weak or loose many companies may fight to get the biggest slice of the benefit which could effectively kill the standard.
H.265 will 'add' a bit more than ten years of life to the encumbrance, so in that regard it is worse.
The competitive pressure of RF formats against H.264 drove the licensing fees _very_ low (with many use-cases made no cost, but even the w/ fee cases are basically 1/10th the AAC royalty rates). H.265 looks like it will have many more patent holders too. But it will likely be several years before there exists an even incomplete H.265 pool license, so it may be a while to see how much worse (or better) the rates are compared to H.264.
That will depend on who chooses to implement which.
If hardware manufacturers choose H.265, VP9 and Daala will be marginalized purely because of performance concerns.
If, on the other hand, VP9 or Daala can be implemented in hardware cheaply enough and with good enough electrical characteristics, perhaps OEMs can be persuaded to use it.
Sadly, the best compression techniques are fairly obvious and have been patented. The economics of this space have always favored better codecs over licensing concerns. Savings in bandwidth often negate the cost benefits of a free codec. High end video recording/editing tools used by most content creators are expensive, such that a codec license amounts to only a small fraction of the cost. Pirates care about high quality and fast downloads. They don't care about licensing costs for obvious reasons.
H.265 merely standardizes on a set of the best known compression techniques that meet certain compression vs processing constraints. It just so happens that most of these techniques are patented. Which in turn is why MPEG-LA exists. This will continue to be true going forward. The only way to make a free codec viable is to fix the patent system. I'm all for patent reform, but as I mentioned elsewhere, I'd much rather discuss h265 tech here, and leave the patent debate for the numerous posts we're sure to continue to see on HN.
Yes, if 1) VP9/Daala are significantly better, and 2) they don't come out much later than h265. VP8 failed on both accounts compared to h264. To see why, read: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377 (not an unbiased source admittedly, but the technical analysis is accurate).
