Comment on Disney+ loses Dolby Vision, HDR10+ and 3D amid patent dispute
brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks agoI’m confused about that too.
InterDigital seems to claim that the patent in question is about dynamically overlaying multiple video streams e.g. from ir.interdigital.com/news-events/…/default.aspx
The Munich Regional Court ruled that InterDigital is entitled to an injunction over Disney’s infringement of an InterDigital patent related to the streaming of video content using high dynamic range (HDR) technology. Disney can appeal the decision.
The judgment from the Munich court follows a separate decision from the same court to award InterDigital an injunction over Disney’s infringement of a patent which enables a method for dynamically overlaying a first video stream with a second video stream. It also follows a decision by a court in Brazil, to grant a preliminary injunction in InterDigital’s favor, after the court found that Disney infringed both of the InterDigital patents-in-suit.
What’s interesting is that HDR10 is still available on Disney supposedly. So it sort of sounds like the claim is that Disney is adding DV/HDR10+ dynamically during the video stream… and maybe regular HDR is pre-generated by Disney hence is not affected by the patent. The solution might be to always have multiple pre-generated copies of video before the stream even takes place…that would be a lot of extra storage space Disney would need!
I’m also curious how DV (Dolby Vision) factors into all of that. If I had to guess Disney is dynamically adding DV with HDR fallback as an extra stream in the video, so by removing that you end up with only SDR and HDR10 options… but again that’s just a guess.
Ludicrous0251@piefed.zip 2 weeks ago
I know very little but I doubt storage space is the biggest constraint on streaming infrastructure- even with today’s inflated prices, they (or their cloud provider) could add a petabyte of storage to each of their servers if they needed to for like $20k each, which is pennies in the grand scheme of things. They probably pre-encode these things anyways to save CPU resources - this isn’t a home Plex server, they’ve gotta encode for tens of millions of different devices simultaneously.
I think the bigger issue would be bandwidth - if you can’t dynamically switch streams you have to either serve them all at once or just commit to one at the start and re-buffer any time something changes.
Dragomus@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I am far from an expert, but basically HD10 is a base layer, it ecodes and thus sends HDR data “once” per whole video.
Formats like HD10+ and DV are dynamic, they send HDR (brightness) information per scene/frame over an extra transport layer.
And those layers can be sent at the same time for the tv to use which one it prioritizes.
From the info above it seems the patent is about the way both “streams” of the HDR formatted metadata are combined and transferred over the internet to the display device.
If this is the case, Disney might do some brainstorming on what is cheaper in the long run: Offer both HD10+ and Dolby Vision which is not a cheap license in itself, on top of which comes the license fee from the patent they infringe on … if they can’t find a workaround.
Or, go with a single HDR standard, in which case I can see them drop DV support altogether to save on (expensive DV) license fees.
Regardless of this, I do not think the case is a positive development.