Happy Yule to you all.

!Yule Goat 2016 [External Link]

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Quoting: pleasereadthemanual

Quoting: F.UltraThey are however most likely licensed to cover only "personal and non-commercial use" since they really want to extort a license from commercial content creators as well (that is where the big license money is).

But that is no different from any other software, aka it doesn't matter if you use macOS, Windows, Adobe or whatever. If you are a content studio compressing H.264 content then you need a license regardless of what hw or sw you use.

I seem to remember MPEG-LA allowing all web content (even commercial?) to use H.264 without a license. From that time Wikipedia voted on whether to use H.264 [External Link]:

Commercial use of MP4 videos contributed to Wikimedia sites with a CC-BY-SA Creative Commons license appears to be authorized under the terms of MPEG-LA’s royalty-free Internet Broadcast sublicense, as outlined below. Since using a proprietary format would be a departure from our current practice of only using open formats on our sites, WMF has opened this Request for Comments to seek community guidance.

So it's something that is already implicitly granted by the H.264 patent pool, so NVIDIA/AMD/Intel wouldn't even need to provide a license. The link to this sublicense is dead now. I wonder what exactly the terms were. Wikimedia was also apparently offered a special deal:

Why is this happening? WMF was offered an MP4 license so attractive WMF had to consider it. The deal was so unprecedented, part of it included non-disclosure of the exceptionally beneficial WMF terms so as not to alienate its other customers (who pay through the nose for their own MP4 licenses). Commercial enterprises don't give anything away for free because they are nice, they do so only when it will lead to increased profits in the end.

To add to this, Google Chrome and recently Firefox added support for hardware decoders for H.265. Firefox in particular should not have been able to do this unless making use of hardware decoders does not require them to have a license.

I love talking about video codec patents. I always end up more confused than when I started.

Ok, but that talks specifically about non-comercial use so I guess that commercial use which I wrote about still requires a license? And I don't think that none of this means that there is no need for a patent license for the hardware since a GPU is a commercial thing and also it is the ago itself while the content is the result of the algo so to speak.

E.g MP3 there you had to have a license to be able to compress and decompress the data since both use the MP3 algo but just having a MP3 or distributing it doesn't involve the algo so that is not something that they could prohibit you from doing with any license.

But yes I'm with you that this is all hairy and I for one would gladly see software patents go, they only stifle innovation in a field that is moving way to fast for something to be locked away for 25 years.

edit: Wikipedia:

On September 29, 2014, MPEG LA announced their HEVC license which covers the essential patents from 23 companies.[48] The first 100,000 "devices" (which includes software implementations) are royalty free, and after that the fee is $0.20 per device up to an annual cap of $25 million.
...
On December 18, 2015, HEVC Advance announced changes in the royalty rates. The changes include a reduction in the maximum royalty rate for Region 1 countries to US$2.03 per device, the creation of annual royalty caps, and a waiving of royalties on content that is free to end users. The annual royalty caps for a company is US$40 million for devices, US$5 million for content, and US$2 million for optional features.
...
On November 22, 2016, HEVC Advance announced a major initiative, revising their policy to allow software implementations of HEVC to be distributed directly to consumer mobile devices and personal computers royalty free, without requiring a patent license.

So as of 2016 they see sw implementations is license-free, that to me tells that they still require a license for the hw implementation. So Firefox et al can use the hw implementation since AMD have licensed it and Firefox is not creating content, they are only using the API:s provided by e.g AMD. You for non-commercial don't have to pay a license but a commercial entity probably have to.

This is always so damn silly. The same happens in the financial industry where I work. Over here in Europe the EU have standardised to use ISIN-codes as the universal identifier for financial instruments and they are completely free to use, but in the US they use CUSIP-codes instead (and they create the ISIN by prefixing the CUSIP with "US" and then suffixing a check-digit at the end) which requires a license in every single step, aka if you issue a instrument you have to pay a license, if you distribute that CUSIP/ISIN to some one else then they also have to pay a license and if they happen to whisper that code to any one then they are also required to pay a license and so on and on.

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Quoting: soulsource

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: soulsourceI just saw this toot [External Link], and now I'm wondering if one really needs to worry about licensing if one uses those APIs...
Or, worse, if one needs to worry about MPEG licenses if one uses unrelated parts of Vulkan...

Kind of an overly alarmist take. The API being able to do it, doesn't mean you have to use it. You're not subject to patents you don't use - if they even cover this.

exactly and one cannot patent a function call. In any case nVIDIA, Intel and AMD have all licensed the MPEG patents to be able to implement the hardware decoder (since the patent covers the algorithm) so this is all covered.

Iirc the hardware and drivers don't need a license, only the software that makes the codecs available to end users. At some point Fedora even removed some Mesa features related to those video codecs because of that: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected]/thread/PYUYUCM3RGTTN4Q3QZIB4VUQFI77GE5X/ [External Link]

I see a lot of hand-waving without any evidence or proofs and just guesswork on that thread to be fair. It's the compression/decompression algorithm that is patented and if the GPU have hardware acceleration of it then the GPU manufacturer must be a patent license or nVIDIA, AMD and Intel would expose all of they customers to be sued for infringement (including themselves). They are however most likely licensed to cover only "personal and non-commercial use" since they really want to extort a license from commercial content creators as well (that is where the big license money is).

But that is no different from any other software, aka it doesn't matter if you use macOS, Windows, Adobe or whatever. If you are a content studio compressing H.264 content then you need a license regardless of what hw or sw you use.

edit: In any case I'm just happy to be in the EU since software patents are not enforceable here.

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Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: soulsourceI just saw this toot [External Link], and now I'm wondering if one really needs to worry about licensing if one uses those APIs...
Or, worse, if one needs to worry about MPEG licenses if one uses unrelated parts of Vulkan...

Kind of an overly alarmist take. The API being able to do it, doesn't mean you have to use it. You're not subject to patents you don't use - if they even cover this.

exactly and one cannot patent a function call. In any case nVIDIA, Intel and AMD have all licensed the MPEG patents to be able to implement the hardware decoder (since the patent covers the algorithm) so this is all covered.

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Quoting: XpanderIs this still even needed? The cpu governors used to be an issue like 6-7 years ago, but these days amd has amd_pstate and intel has its intel_pstate which are boosting correctly on the default governor so i dont really know whats the point of this.
I haven't noticed any difference when benchmarking stuff with this on or off at least.
Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark and Unigine Superposition.

Well the pinning should be relevant if you have a cpu with non-uniform cache and/or frequencies and the split lock mitigation for those windows games that breaks it heavily (like God of War).

At least I hope it is so the work wasn't a total waste.

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Quoting: PikoloThe patent office can't find prior art for those? How? They're all issued since 2019! The only one that even seems novel is AUTOMATED PLAYER CONTROL TAKEOVER IN A VIDEO GAME, and I'd assume someone more familiar with MMORPGs can find an example. ROUTE NAVIGATION SYSTEM WITHIN A GAME APPLICATION ENVIRONMENT is bonkers - we've had animated navigation lines for decades!

USPTO no longer looks for prior art since at least a decade back, the new regime is that they only do very basic checks and then any violations such as prior art is up for a court to decide in a future lawsuit.

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Quoting: ShmerlAbove one really looks confusing. I think you need all subpixels to be on to see the pattern.

The image I posted is from here:

https://tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/lg-27gr95qe-oled [External Link]

I see now what my issue was, I thought that your image was displaying the same pixel but with each subpixel on, checking the site you linked I now see that they purposely choose to light one subpixel per line. And that what was confused me since I know that the layout is horizontal and not vertical as the image suggested (when I looked at it too quickly).

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Quoting: ShmerlFor example, that's subpixel layout on some Lenovo laptops with OLED panels:

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And that's on LG 27GR95QE OLED display:

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And that's probably not the only ones out there.

Btw the LG one does not look correct, here is Rtings image of the same model:


The image above is with cleartype on, which is why there is the rainbow pattern.

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Quoting: Lofty

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Lofty

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: LoftyThat said, im no expert.. but would a subpixel change layout to accommodate the O(Oddball :P) LED layout for font's, (lets say on Gnome desktop) also improve the chromatic effect on video games running full screen that have nothing to do with Gnome or fonts ? Like when playing FMV for instance.

Do you mean changing the physical subpixel layout, or software like cleartype?

i guess what im trying to understand here is, does changing the subpixel layout in software fix the chromatic abberation as shown in the videos i linked where it not only affects text but actually more obviously to my eye the in game graphics.
Such as the still shot from 'horizon chase turbo' where if you look at the wheel you can see the LCD is how the image was probably drawn by the artist and how the OLED has additional chromatic abberation ( an effect i almost always disable in game).

https://youtu.be/nTRIVZPqUK4?t=562 [External Link]

I mean, im sure its not visible on a small screen like a steam deck as that is also at 10x zoom, in fact it's probably no biggie on a monitor either. But some people do seem to notice and have returned their OLED.

quite sure that anti aliasing for graphics could fix that just as it does for text, don't think that there is a single anti alias in existence that takes it into account though, could be a great idea for some one to play around with.

Quoting: ShmerlThis might be useful, someone published subpixel layout for Steam Deck OLED:

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That is indeed an outlier that explains what is seen in the video linked by Lofty. Looks to be the QD-OLED pattern. Compare that with the WOLED pattern that is on my LG that is just RWBG in that order in straight horizontal pattern quite similar to the old CRT TV or the modern LCD pattern (with the exception of the White pixel).

interesting. the old CRT did spring to mind when looking at that image.

So it seems it does depend on the particular subpixel OLED layout as to how much fringing/abberation or perceived softness is visible. The problem is that, it's not likely a regular consumer would be researching into subpixel layouts when choosing a screen whereas most LCD are just plain RGB and work better for desktop font rendering at least right now on Linux.

That is because the CRT layout looks pure chaos but if you look closer you see that it simply is RGB in that order horizontally, what makes it look more complicated is that the pattern doesn't start at the same position on every line, meanwhile the QD-OLED one have some of the pixels above a row of some of the pixels so to speak.

That layout clearly have a connection with how people who experience the effect experiences it, however just like Shmerl mentioned about the resolution also have a high effect here, a 720P screen like the one on the Deck simply have such a low resolution that the layout is more visible.

What everyone can try just for fun is to create a single pixel image (here we create a red pixel):
 
convert xc:red image.png

And then open it in a image viewer, make that full screen and make sure that zoom is 100%, then you can see just how large or small a single pixel is on your screen.

OR for more fun make a 3 pixel RGB:

 
convert xc:red image.png
convert image.png xc:green +append image.png
convert image.png xc:blue +append image.png

On some screens, if you zoom in the pixels will not look like they are in a straight line due to the subpixel layout

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Quoting: Lofty

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: LoftyThat said, im no expert.. but would a subpixel change layout to accommodate the O(Oddball :P) LED layout for font's, (lets say on Gnome desktop) also improve the chromatic effect on video games running full screen that have nothing to do with Gnome or fonts ? Like when playing FMV for instance.

Do you mean changing the physical subpixel layout, or software like cleartype?

i guess what im trying to understand here is, does changing the subpixel layout in software fix the chromatic abberation as shown in the videos i linked where it not only affects text but actually more obviously to my eye the in game graphics.
Such as the still shot from 'horizon chase turbo' where if you look at the wheel you can see the LCD is how the image was probably drawn by the artist and how the OLED has additional chromatic abberation ( an effect i almost always disable in game).

https://youtu.be/nTRIVZPqUK4?t=562 [External Link]

I mean, im sure its not visible on a small screen like a steam deck as that is also at 10x zoom, in fact it's probably no biggie on a monitor either. But some people do seem to notice and have returned their OLED.

quite sure that anti aliasing for graphics could fix that just as it does for text, don't think that there is a single anti alias in existence that takes it into account though, could be a great idea for some one to play around with.

Quoting: ShmerlThis might be useful, someone published subpixel layout for Steam Deck OLED:

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That is indeed an outlier that explains what is seen in the video linked by Lofty. Looks to be the QD-OLED pattern. Compare that with the WOLED pattern that is on my LG that is just RWBG in that order in straight horizontal pattern quite similar to the old CRT TV or the modern LCD pattern (with the exception of the White pixel).

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