Jury Rules That H.264 is Not Patented

Dr Kool, PhD writes "According to Bloomberg, a jury ruled against Qualcomm in their patent lawsuit against Broadcom. Qualcomm had sought $8.3 million in damages for patent infringement stemming from Broadcom's H.264 encoder/decoder chips. From the article: 'The patents, covering a way to compress high-definition video, are unenforceable in part because Qualcomm withheld information from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, jurors in San Diego said today after deliberating less than six hours.' This ruling clears the way for H.264 to become a widely adopted open standard."

Re:Not really

[Anonymous Coward]

the best way to encode a video would be h.264+aac, probably wrapped in ogm or mkv, but could also work as avi or mov

Dear God No. h.264 and AAC are MPEG-4. For the love of all that is good and holy please use MP4 as the container.

Ruling?

[NekoXP]

Surely a judge rules, not a jury? Juries render verdicts.

Re:Not really

[RalphBNumbers]

the best way to encode a video would be h.264+aac, probably wrapped in ogm or mkv, but could also work as avi or mov. .ogm? .mkv? .avi? .mov?
So basically you'll use anything *but* the actual standard MPEG-4 container that's designed to carry h264/aac streams? What's wrong with .mp4?

This is a somewhat separate rant and not really directed at the parent, but it seems like between pirates sticking with their habitual use of Xvid/DivX in avi, and OSS fanatics refusing to use anything non-OSS in favor of Theora in .ogg or .mkv, the world's geeks are actually doing more to set back standardization of digital video than big companies and their DRM. How's that for a turnaround from the audio world where geeks chose mp3 and industry followed!

MPEG-4 standards, specifically h264/aac streams in an .mp4 container, provide the best quality and functionality you can get today (.mkv is nice but it doesn't do anything .mp4 couldn't with the right tools, and neither Xvid/DivX or Theora can touch h264's quality/bitrate), and they are completely standardized and free to use for distributions of up to 100,000 codecs per year afaik.

If we'd all pick up the MPEG-4 stack the way we all standardized on .mp3s, then the digital video world would get a lot simpler.

Imagine a world where every camcorder, or DVD player, or computer, or PMP, or digital camera, or cell phone, or what not, could record and play back in the same interoperable high quality/bitrate video format with no special file conversions or re-encoding, just like all of those devices support .mp3 today...

Re:Not really

[Srin Tuar]

There is no reason to avoid matroska containers and vorbis audio streams.
Why let the patent mongers lead us around by the nose?

Instead, once a free replacement is available for h.264, then we'll have a complete solution that the industry can follow. (or if the patents on it are ruled invalid)

You seem to think that the patent terms are "reasonable" which shows your shortsightedness on this issue.