Jury Rules That H.264 is Not Patented 111
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."
Free ... of which patents? (Score:5, Interesting)
Doesn't this make H.264 only free of the two patents held by Qualcomm? There has to be dozens and dozens of other patents used as AFAIK H.264 is just a profile (AVC) of MPEG-4?
And afaik again, MPEG-4 is very far from being patent encumbered.
Not really (Score:4, Interesting)
For that matter, I haven't heard any measurements lately of AAC vs Vorbis, but it seems to me that unless Vorbis is actually better, 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.
Of course, I often just keep the original DVD stream around, which means -- what -- mpeg2+aac?
NO! There are ones in development though... (Score:5, Interesting)
They are Snow, which is a experimental codec being developed out of the FFMPEG project, and there is Dirac which is being developed by the BBC as a open standard for web-based HD content.
Both of these are based on 'wavelett' style technology which is something that is fairly unique about them. The downside though is that Snow, while being much simplier then Dirac, suffers from a lack of development and stability (not crash-iness, but change-iness). Dirac is not mature enough for use. Both of them still use WAY to much CPU to be usefull currently, but both offer possibilities of compression and quality that surpass even H.264.
Theora is completely open, having the benifit from patent donated to open source by a corporation for their codecs, but it suffers from high CPU utilization and a very serious lack of visual quality.
It's not like with Ogg vs MP3 or Flac vs whatever were those guys offer good compression, quality, and lower cpu usage as well as being open source. With Theora vs Mpeg4-related stuff (Xvid/Divx, h.264. AVC, etc) it is not realy in the same ballpack. It is more closely related to Mpeg1 in quality.
And when I mean 'quality' I mean the ability to provide high quality image at high compression, which is the whole point behind things like Theora and H.264.
Already Linux and Free software people have a good H.264 implimentation thanks to the FFmpeg people. Their mpeg4 Divx-stuff is already very high quality.. much better then anything from Xvid or Divx, they have the beginnings of very good H.264 support and have decoding and encoding speeds that rival the best propriatory codecs aviable. They need to fill out some of the H.264 features, but if this is true that H.264 is truly usable in Free software environment, then I expect that development will very quickly take off as the people become aware of this and Linux distros will want to jump on the opportunity to provide world-class HD support!
This should also pave the way for future adoption of Dirac and maybe Snow since then the use of ffmpeg libs should increase in both Linux and Windows-land. Once people get used to it and programs start shipping with ffmpeg libs then this will make it easier for these projects to gain acceptance as ffmpeg is multi-codec and will include these open source technologies as they come out.
Re:NO! There are ones in development though... (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually 'wavelet' [wikipedia.org] is the correct spelling (sorry to be pedantic). But you are right that wavelet applications are an interesting topic.
In short, wavelets are like Fourier transforms, but they have a location, not just a frequency. Like with the FT, you can represent spatial data by wavelets, and the localization aspect turns out to be useful in practice, in particular for codecs (but it is also useful from a theoretical aspect, wavelets were - perhaps still are - somewhat in fashion among in statistical circles).
Re:NO! There are ones in development though... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Free ... of which patents? (Score:5, Interesting)
Over-the-air free broadcast - There are no royalties for over-the-air free broadcast AVC video to markets of 100,000 or fewer households. For over-the-air free broadcast AVC video to markets of greater than 100,000 households, royalties are $10,000 per year per local market service (by a transmitter or transmitter simultaneously with repeaters, e.g., multiple transmitters serving one station).
Internet broadcast (non-subscription, not title-by-title) - Since this market is still developing, no royalties will be payable for internet broadcast services (non-subscription, not title-by-title) during the initial term of the license (which runs through December 31, 2010) and then shall not exceed the over-the-air free broadcast TV encoding fee during the renewal term.
So, nothing is owed between now and 2010 on the Intenet. However, the fee could be $ 10K per channel after then; if that's the case, then there will be trouble in 2011. Also note that it is unclear if the VOD is per download (in which case it is quite high) or per title offered (in which case, quite low).
Slashdot editors: Only pretending to be editors? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is more of the real story Broadcom sees win for 'H.264' industry [signonsandiego.com] (January 27, 2007). However, the article does NOT say that the patents were invalidated; they have not been invalidated.
This statement from the Slashdot story is incorrect: "This ruling clears the way for H.264 to become a widely adopted open standard." If that were true, it would be important, but it is not true, for three reasons: 1) The patents have not been invalidated (yet). 2) There can be an appeal. 3) There are other patents.
Re:Not really (Score:4, Interesting)
I seem to recall that some existing OSS MPEG-4 related projects distribute source code only for that sort of reason.
Another reason patents don't make a lot of sense (Score:3, Interesting)
Patents are designed by and implemented by attorneys. They're the beneficiaries of this system, not the public nor the inventor. The inventors and public just end up getting screwed.
Re:NO! There are ones in development though... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not really (Score:5, Interesting)
They distribute source code because the courts (in the USA at least) have ruled that source code is speech, as in "freedom of" and binaries are not. Thus they are a lot better protected from claims of patent infringment if they stay away from the binaries.
Re:NO! There are ones in development though... (Score:4, Interesting)
Did anyone else notice this? (Score:2, Interesting)
What Qualcomm Wants (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.qualcomm.com/mediaflo/index.shtml [qualcomm.com]
That's why they spent so much time and money
to allow them to take over part of the spectrum for mobile video transmission.
Verizon and other carriers want this so they can move video off of their
digital voice lines and on to something parallel with a different infrastructure.
An infrastructure that, no doubt, the carriers will recieve loads of federal funding
to complete (even though it won't be opened up to benefit anyone but Qualcomm financially).
I don't think this loss is much of a blow to them really. They have many other chip
monopolies to exploit.