MPEG LA Extends H.264 Royalty-Free Period 260
Sir Homer writes "The MPEG LA has extended their royalty-free license (PDF) for 'Internet Video that is free to end users' until the end of 2016. This means webmasters who are registered MPEG LA licensees will not have to pay a royalty to stream H.264 video for the next six years. However the last patent in the H.264 portfolio expires in 2028, and the MPEG LA has not released what fees, if any, it will charge webmasters after this 'free trial' period is over."
From TFS (Score:3, Insightful)
However the last patent in the H.264 portfolio expires in 2028, and the MPEG LA has not released what fees, if any, it will charge webmasters after this 'free trial' period is over.
I would SERIOUSLY hope there are new protocols by 2028...
Re:From TFS (Score:5, Informative)
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By 2010 would be better.
Re:From TFS (Score:5, Informative)
I copy pasted this info from here: http://lwn.net/Articles/372416/ [lwn.net]
These three Nokia patents look like they could be enforced against Theora:
http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=Ic0CAAAAEBAJ [google.com]
http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=ieIVAAAAEBAJ [google.com]
http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=zGWBAAAAEBAJ [google.com]
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Fact is no software is safe with software patents. Especially in the US where everything is just let though.
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Second one... that's the prediction patent. I'd love to own this one since it is practically the foundation of the greatest improvement made in H.264 over
And even if sucked (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, Theora video doesn't suck [xiph.org].
And even if it sucked, that wouldn't matter anyway :
most of video today consist of short snips on social websites of dancing cats filmed with a camera phone with crappy sensors and low quality MJPEG compression.
Arguing that Theora would need more bits to achieve the same quality as other codec is akin to arguing that Youtube should spend more bits to be better faithful to all the compression artifacts.
Theora opponents say that, for the same bits bandwidth, Theora video is blurrier. I'm saying that this blur won't hide any critical detail. It will only blur out the noise from the camera phone's crappy sensor and from the MJPEG'S 50% compression. I personally *can* live without them, if it is what it takes to have a open free/libre standard.
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most of video today consist of short snips on social websites of dancing cats filmed with a camera phone with crappy sensors and low quality MJPEG compression.
...and TV shows and movies.
Besides, have you seen the output from decent consumer-grade camcorders recently?
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Besides, have you seen the output from decent consumer-grade camcorders recently?
Not very often, no. Mostly because the vast majority of the videos made publicly available on the internet (that is, the ones we'd actually see) are short snips on social websites of dancing cats filmed with a crappy camera phone with crappy sensors and low quality MJPEG compression, like the GP said, and most people don't film dancing cats with the same attention to detail and memorable preservation that they do for things they would use their digital camcorders for.
Why do sprite comics still exist? I me
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I've got a 61" TV, and playing stuff back from my Canon HF-100, you can't see any pixellation. You can barely even make out individual pixels when it's paused.
Re:And even if sucked (Score:5, Insightful)
However Theora is working. Its mere existence is forcing MPEG LA to address license concerns. If Theora wasn't around, we would even be having a serious "open codec" debate, we be asking how much is licensing html 5.0 going to cost.
Re:And even if sucked (Score:5, Interesting)
At the lower bit rate end of the spectrum Theora is not bad
This is completely wrong, Theora is *escpecially* bad at low bitrates, I recently made a small comparison of Theora/Thusnelda and H264/x264 encoded 1080p videos, both looked very watchable at 4Mbit, but at 2Mbit problems for Theora/Thusnelda started, and at 1Mbit it was just plain awful. 2Mbit Theora/Thusnelda couldn't nearly reach H264/x264 quality at 1Mbit.
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obligatory: Abstraction
http://www.xkcd.com/676/ [xkcd.com]
Re:And even if sucked (Score:5, Insightful)
most of video today consist of short snips on social websites of dancing cats filmed with a camera phone with crappy sensors and low quality MJPEG compression.
By volume, sure. By amount of time people spend watching? I'm not so sure. The two places I mainly stream videos from are iPlayer and the company I rent DVDs from. Both of these have DVD-quality or better sources. YouTube comes a distant third after these two. These aren't short clips, they're episodes of TV shows or films, so 30 minutes is about the minimum length and 45 minutes to two hours is fairly common.
No, sorry, you don't convince me. (Score:3, Insightful)
(so, Opera is out, and Firefox on Windows and Mac is out)
Nonetheless, both FireFox and Opera are currently in the Theora camp.
If I want to use them (and I do. I use Firefox) I need Theora videos.
So Dailymotion and Thevideobay work for me. But not Youtube.
Except you really don't, as you can *right now* play h.264 with completely free software.
Free Software : yes.
Legal Software : that's a completely different can of worms. Some jurisdictions *DO* recognise software patents, and in such places - x264, ffmpeg and the like *are illegal*.
There's no legal or technical reason that Firefox can't support h.264 across Mac, Windows and Linux. The only reason it's left out is for blatantly political reasons.
Legal reason : Software patents. They happen to valid in some countries (USA and some
European countries).
Technical reaso
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Why is Theora more susceptible to submarine patents, or indeed granted patents that simply have not yet been enforced, over the technology of h264?
Assured destruction of rogue NPEs (Score:3, Interesting)
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Device support for Theora does suck. And for me, that's the deal breaker.
Yes, yes, I know there's $obscure_bad_interface_linux_based_device that supports Theora and Ogg.
Noname brand player (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, yes, I know there's $obscure_bad_interface_linux_based_device that supports Theora and Ogg.
Go to the nearest electric/computer parts shop.
Go to the shelf where all the multimedia player/harddisk enclosure are. You know : black box, you buy one, optionally slap a harddrive into it, optionally plug an ethernet cable and put it under the TV set (Kiss, Tvix, etc.).
Chance are :
- almost all of them will run some (hidden and un-advertised) Linux kernel under the hood.
- almost all of them will support Ogg Vorbis and FLAC (not always advertised)
- a huge proportion can do software Theora decoding (Theora is an older and much simplier codec. It requires less resources than H264 and can be done in software or DSP/SIMD assisted software). It's not always advertised, it might only come in a firmware upgrade. But lot's have it.
- not all of them will have painfully ugly interfaces
So the situation is a bit more easy than "there's one single model which plays it". Lots of asian noname devices manufacturer are implementing it, because it comes for free and because they can thus add an additional bullet point to the feature list.
Want hardware support ?
- There exist open theora core [xiph.org].
Don't want to make a custom chip ?
- There also exist a GPGPU implementation.
Given that ARM and both PowerVR (maker of the GPU core on the hyper-popular OMAP chipsets) and nVidia (maker of the GPU core on the upcoming Tegra) are members of the OpenCL committee, you can expect that hardware accelerated OpenCL-written video codecs will be the solution for lots of future devices.
The situations is similar as with Ogg Vorbis a few years before :
- it's doable.
- big brand doesn't do it, yet. because their lasy.
- noname brand are starting to pick it up. after a couple of years it will have a huge market share among the brandless device, to the point that anything except Apple's device can play it.
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The market for these devices is quite small compared to that for Blu-ray players, HD satellite receivers, Android/BlackBerry/Apple mobile phones, full-size PCs, etc.
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Does any of that help me run video on my cellphone (or whatever device) today? H264 is already supported in hardware. Why should I or anyone else go through a bunch of fuss to get Theora to work (likely only in software)?
Sure maybe in the future Theora will be common.. That does nothing for us now. By the time it does happen it'll be too late.
Re:Noname brand player (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, maybe some of them support Theora. But *ALL* of them support h.264. And this completely ignores devices that use batteries. Hardware h.264 wins hands down in this regard.
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Device support for Theora does suck. And for me, that's the deal breaker.
[Bad?] car analogy: There are less mechanics that can properly service a Skoda than a Ford. If you give away Skoda's to everyone on the internet then very shortly you'll find that the after "sales" market and the support services for Skoda soon outstrip those for Ford (at least in quantity!). Indeed you'll find that modders develop optimisations too.
Re:From TFS (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry to say this, but This just isn't true. Ogg/Theora holds up quite competitively against H.264, demonstrably, TODAY. [xiph.org] I don't know why this FUD gets spread around, but having the Internet move to H.264 as a "standard" is akin to shooting ourselves in the collective foot.
Ogg/Theora is here today, it's competitive with H.264, and isn't encumbered like H.264. The extension of "free" is just MPG group trying to submarine it into widespread use before they come in with terms. I swear, sometimes, we all live with the battered wife "Stockholm" syndrome. We've seen this before, and we're about to get it again.
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This comparison shows that Theora is close to Google's speed-optimized H.264 encoder at 500 kbit/sec. Not better. The author of the page tries to confuse the issue, but admits, "In the case of the 499kbit/sec H.264 I believe that under careful comparison many people would prefer the H.264 video."
HTML5 is a dangerous "standard". (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, but it's not encumbered by patents and other legal bullshit.
Keep in mind that the HTML5 effort is much unlike the past HTML and XHTML standardization efforts. While the past efforts were driven by the W3C, HTML5 is a product of Google, Apple, Opera, Mozilla and other corporations, masquerading as a "community effort" just because their browsers are open source.
With HTML5 being implemented to suit the needs of media distribution companies like Apple and Google (ie. YouTube) who have shown a propensity towards using DRM and undocumented formats, it's not surprising at all that a better and much more open video standard would be passed over in favor of proprietary, encumbered "alternatives".
HTML5 will be one of the worst things to hit the Web in years. Sure, it'll let some folks create dinky demos using the canvas element, but it'll also be the platform through which the Googles and Apples of the Internet force DRM and proprietary media technology on basically everyone, thanks to it HTML5 being a "standard".
Re:From TFS (Score:4, Insightful)
You know, Theora video doesn't suck [xiph.org].
<sarcasm>
Oh boy oh boy, a comparison on xiph.org. I'm sure that this will be unbiased in any way. From the conclusion:
The primary challenge is that all files at these rates will have problems, so the reviewer is often forced to decide which of two entirely distinct flaws is worse. Sometimes people come to different conclusions. That said, I believe that the Theora+Vorbis results are substantially better than the YouTube 327kbit/sec. Several other people have expressed the same view to me, and I expect you'll also reach the same conclusion.
I'm totally convinced with such strong arguments. He's clearly gone his way to show flaws in both codecs, instead of just encoding a video with two codecs and letting the audience decide.
</sarcasm>
Re:From TFS (Score:4, Insightful)
New protocols for 2028? (Score:2)
Problem is, do you think that protocols using only ideas from before 2008 will be optimal for whatever hardware and software systems we'll be using in 2028?
While you're thinking about that, please support campaigns to abolish software patents [endsoftwarepatents.org].
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No need to try and recruit me...I despise software patents already ;-)
Data transfer? (Score:3, Interesting)
How does a patent license allow you to charge for transmitting data over the Internet? I get that the encoder requires a patent license, and the decoder requires a patent license, but sending an encoded file over the Internet? That's just absurd.
Re:Data transfer? (Score:5, Insightful)
Software patents? That's just absurd.
Re:Data transfer? (Score:5, Informative)
The H.264 patents are method patents, not software patents.
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Semantics. This is just one of the tricks one uses in writing patent applications. The method is performed using software (or possibly hard coded in a special chip) on a computer.
Re:Data transfer? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, hold on. How is performing a method using wires carrying electrons to carry a digital signal different from performing a method using wires carrying electrons to carry an analogue signal (e.g. an FM radio receiver)?
Should a mechanical device that performs a task be patentable but an integrated circuit that peforms the same task not be patentable?
But in any case, the point is that the patents involved have been granted in all sorts of jurisdictions that don't allow "software" patents. This is bad from the point of view of open-source projects that want to use H.264, for sure. But it seems to me that the fundamental idea of patenting the methods used in H.264 is sound, assuming the idea of patents is sound at all. This last is up for debate, of course.
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Re:Data transfer? (Score:4, Interesting)
> In the EU if i make a hardware player, then yes i need a license for H.264
See, the thing is.. what makes a hardware player? Is an FPGA programmed to decode H.264 a "hardware player"? What about an FPGA not thus programmed that comes with the software to so program it?
I'm not quite seeing how one can draw a legal distinction here given that I can't even draw a _technical_ distinction.
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Decoding per byte. It's a simple rental model, like the old processor charges in the 60s & 70s on mainframes.
Re:Data transfer? (Score:5, Informative)
How does a patent license allow you to charge for transmitting data over the Internet?
Simple: it doesn't. However, it's a good measure of how much revenue MPEG LA expects you to be bringing in from your use of their standards, and as such is a nice way to scale up licensing fees according to your revenue.
Think of it as a way of implementing this rule: You give us X % of the revenue you bring in from your use of our standard, and in exchange, you can use our standard. If the main use of your company is to deliver solutions based on our standard, this will be X % of your revenue. If you only make incidental use of our standard, your license is going to cost you lower.
(And, of course, if you find something else that's good enough for your purposes and is free or costs less than our standard, you're free to use it.)
Nice (Score:5, Insightful)
What a charming business model.
Oh well, I guess webmasters could have always used something else, right?
It's particularly nice that web masters are giving billing information 6 years early, so the company doesn't have to do much to track down the first round of suck^H^H^H^H customers to bill them for use.
There's nothing like getting your IP embedded deeply into everyones processes (with their complete acknowledgement of that fact) and then seeking rent against the cost of changing it.
I would expect that many companies don't have migration plans in place, I don't know, not my business.
Regards.
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Re:Nice (Score:5, Interesting)
Six years? Six years is a very long time in CODEC evolution. Six years makes computers sixteen times faster. Network connections will be much faster. By 2016, I doubt there'll be many computers around that can't play back VC-2 (based on Dirac, patent free) in use and VC-2 hardware acceleration, which is just starting to be deployed, will be much more widespread. Remember the CODECs we were using six years ago?
MPEG-1 didn't last six years as a standard for Internet video. Neither did RealVideo. Neither did Sorenson (in QuickTime or Flash containers). I'd be surprised if H.264 does.
Re:Nice (Score:5, Insightful)
In 6 years time, there'll be an awful lot of iPhones/iPads (and their descendants) in the wild.
Expect H.264, and maybe some other patent-encumbered standards, to be the only video format a web site can use in order to be viewed on these devices.
The options for video websites in 2016? Pay up, or abandon iPhone/iPad users. Plus who knows how many other closed platforms.
Re:Nice (Score:5, Informative)
It's much more than just Apple's portable devices; they just happened to include H.264 first. H.264 decoders exist in:
Re:Nice (Score:4, Informative)
Though some of those are relevant too, the important point about the Apple devices is not so much that they support H.264, but that they don't support anything else (at least, nothing else relevant to the Web)
Outside of the Web, I care less. The Web is meant to be somewhere where creating/publishing is free to all (ignoring physical hosting costs).
Re:Nice (Score:4, Informative)
Most of these devices have the same limitations as Apple devices; they decode a few things in hardware and nothing else:
Apple devices use the same hardware decoders as other companies do.
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All of these devices are relevant. The same H.264 program can be streamed by a HTML5 client, by Flash, by a video player program, etc. It would be wasteful to have two separate copies of video for devices that support HTML5 and devices that do not.
Many devices supporting video playback share hardware; for example, the chips found in many standalone media streamers were designed for use in Blu-ra
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...Plus who knows how many other closed platforms.
It's not really about "closed platforms". iPhone/iPads have hardware for decoding h264. They don't have hardware support for Theora.
Re:Nice (Score:4, Informative)
Why would they?
Apple will be raking in the royalties when MPEG LA (of whom they are members) start charging.
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Please, dude... I know you loooove Apple more like your (non-existing? this is /. after all ;) girlfriend. And that’s all good. Do whatever makes your happy.
Way to completely miss my point that Apple's choices in the client world -- where they do have a lot of influence -- will be forcing the hands of web site owners. For this reason I do not "looooove" Apple.
But please keep it down with using the Apple brand name for every type of product out there. Ok? :) ;)
I hate to tell you, but: Reality does not equal Apple!
You could just as easily have said the factually correct thing:
In 6 years time, there’ll be an awful lot of smart phones / mobile computers in the wild.
Currently Safari Mobile has ~60% of the mobile browser market. [getclicky.com]. Even if that drops to, say, 20%, do you reckon web sites would feel empowered to drop H.264 support, if that meant abandoning those users?
Plus, as I said, other popular mobile platforms are just as likely to be closed and locked down to H.264
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> Remember the CODECs we were using six years ago?
You mean H.264 (standardized in 2003)?
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Just because it was standardized doesn't mean it was in use. MPEG-1 was standardised in 1993, but it wasn't until around '98 that people were recommending it as the de-facto standard for Internet video (it was the thing all browsers could play at the time). The computer I had in 2003 was brand new and couldn't even play 720p H.264 without dropping frames, especially with the decoders available at the time. It wasn't until around 2008 that most computers were fast enough for H.264 playback. A few people
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Remember the CODECs we were using six years ago?
If you count DivX ;-) 3.11 alpha as MPEG4 ASP compliant which isn't quite true but later DivX/Xvid versions were, we've been using the same codec since 1998 only slowly phasing it out with H.264. As for VC-2, there's no wikipedia page for it, the first hit on google has nothing to do with it, the fifth hit is a blog post from 2008 where the last comment says it'll be a near lossless production/archival codec unsuitable for Internet use. So if you ignore all the evidence to the contrary, I guess you could be
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HTML4 has been with us since 1997. There's not much reason to think that HTML5 will be around for less than 6 years.
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Google seems to be changing video on Youtube to use HTML 5 pretty quickly. Why can't other people?
Because they feared the charges in 2011.
Now they can fear the charges in 2016 instead.
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They are using H.264 to do the encoding. I think they are using the free trial and that might be why they are buying On2. They want so be sure that Youtube can free itself from H.264 some day.
Re:Nice (Score:4, Informative)
You're a bit confused. HTML 5 is a markup language, not a codec. YouTube's HTML 5 site is still in H.264, it's just not using Flash to play it.
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I was thinking that maybe the stuff posted to Google Video was encoded in Theora and it gets cross-posted to YouTube, while the stuff posted directly to YouTube gets encoded in H.264, but thats just a guess (it could also be that it doesnt bother to covert theora encoded uploads of the correct size)
Re:Nice (Score:4, Informative)
I was thinking that maybe the stuff posted to Google Video was encoded in Theora and it gets cross-posted to YouTube, while the stuff posted directly to YouTube gets encoded in H.264, but thats just a guess
Don't guess [diveintohtml5.org]. In HTML5:
To support Safari, you have to use H.264 (OK, you can add Theora support to Quicktime, but let's assume very few users do this, and nobody wants to be the arsehole site that forces them to do so)
To support Mobile Safari, you have to use H.264
To support Firefox, you have to use Theora. (hence YouTube currently doesn't support HTML5 for Firefox)
Chrome handles both formats.
Opera: definitely handles Theora, not sure about H.264
To be viewable in all HTML5 browsers, you're going to have to encode twice. The Theora encoding/streaming is going to be free. The H.264 encoding/streaming is going to be gratis until 2016. But once you've started, it's going to be awfully difficult to stop.
SS H.264 submarine patent (Score:5, Insightful)
2010: DIVE! DIVE!
It's free, come and get it
2016: Up periscope. Look there's someone using it without paying the $799/Stream licensing fee.
-Arm MPEG LAwyer Torpedoes, FIRE!
looks like a ambush in slow-motion.
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It's Compuserve GIF all over again.
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Hey, don’t mod him troll! He’s right with what he meant.
Even though he got H.264 (the patented codec) and x264 (the open implementation) mixed up.
PNG was a problem back then. Since it could not do any animation. Which was important back then. Other than that it did not have any relevant size or transparency improvements is 8 bit mode, and just was too large in 24 bit (lossless) mode.
Also, H.264 factually is the best codec out there right now.
But frankly, I think it will be just like with GIF: NO
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So your argument is that whilst MPEG LA are going to screw everyone over and demand money to license their codec we should continue and use it but just not pay them.
Nothing wrong with that argument provided you can get it embodied in the law that people/companies are immune to prosecution for non payment of license fees wrt the relevant patents.
Unisys did collect money on LZW use in GIF if they'd not been bothered about PR they could have collected far more extensively.
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And for those claiming that another codec will be dominant in six years, while that may be possible, MPEG-2 has been around since 1996 and is still one of the most popular video formats 14 years later.
A lot of fallout (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been personally touched by MPEG LA's patent witch hunt. And not in the good way like Kathleen Fent does.
My brother in law is the CEO of a small LCD monitor company that uses H.264 decoder chips. He buys these chips from a Taiwanese maker who in turn licenses the patent for H.264 decoding from MPEG LA.
But MPEG LA has been spamming everyone and anyone vaguely connected to H.264 encoding or playback or even (in this case) sending files across the intarweb. He is expected to succeed if MPEG LA ever takes this to court since the patent is already licensed by the chip vendor and his agreement with them covers him under its indemnity clause.
However this is a really plain-as-day example of how patent trolls are ruining business for everyone.
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The MPEG LA are hardly patent trolls. The term is so often applied to "anyone who has a patent and dares to enforce it" when it really doesn't mean that at all.
Re:A lot of fallout (Score:5, Insightful)
However this is a really plain-as-day example of how patent trolls are ruining business for everyone.
Please don't dilute the term "patent troll." It has a specific meaning and certainly doesn't apply to a patent pool packager like MPEG-LA. Everybody adopted h.264 with full knowledge that it was covered by several patents. This is certainly not a case of some junk firm patenting prior art and suing everybody. Nobody coerced anyone into using h.264; it just happened to actually be a good codec, so it was adopted by the industry. Nor is it "ruining business for everyone," so I'm not even sure what your point is. Your own anecdotal evidence doesn't lead to this conclusion.
Is it disappointing that we didn't have a comparable patent-free codec at the time when people started adopting h.264? Yeah, it's too bad. Unfortunately, no amount of sour grapes is going to change what happened.
documenting H.264 on http://en.swpat.org (Score:5, Informative)
The MPEG patent thicket is a prime example of the real problem of software patents. If I want to write a video player, it has to play the formats that people encode videos in. The veto power of patents equates to the right to prohibit me, and everyone, from writing a functional video player. I think I already have pretty good info, but there's loads more of this story to tell. Help really appreciated in documenting this:
swpat.org is a publicly editable wiki.
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The veto power of patents equates to the right to prohibit me, and everyone, from writing a functional video player.
Yep, that's pretty much what patents are for.
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Yep, that's pretty much what patents are for.
Not really. Back in the day, if somebody patented a cotton gin, that didn't stop me from making another machine that cleans cotton which works on a different principle. The existence of the original machine in the market was irrelevant to new competitive entries.
Today, a good deal of software is subject to the "network effect". That makes it just about impossible to operate in many software markets without being compatible with the most popular protocols, formats or standards. If those things happen to be p
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Thing is... the H.264 patents are method patents, not software patents.
And the methods used seem eminently patentable to me: novel, non-obvious, etc, etc.
The only issue is that the setup doesn't play well with cases where the marginal unit cost of an encoder or decoder is very close to 0. This is not a software-specific problem, per se; if we had star-trek-like synthesizers available for physical items it would be a problem there too.
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Right, that's why there are no functional video players that support H.264. Except for Windows Media Player, which comes free with Windows. And Quicktime/iTunes, which comes free with OS X and are free for Windows. And VLC, which is free and usually comes free with Linux distributions. And MPlayer. And PowerDVD. And Totem. In fact there are at least 20 such players [wikipedia.org], some free, some proprietary. Every modern OS comes with a free, functional video player and there are several options if you don't like
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Re:Software patents on video codecs didn't start with H.264. MPEG-1 was patented, so was MPEG-2. Royalties were sought in both cases. That didn't stop free and open source encoders and decoders from being produced, and nobody got sued or shut down.
Back then DMCA was not in existence and ATCA was something the RIAA and MPAA would dream about and forget the next morning. Once ACTA comes to life, They will find a way to kill VLC and anyone who dares to slowdown their cash flow.
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Back then DMCA was not in existence and ATCA was something the RIAA and MPAA would dream about and forget the next morning. Once ACTA comes to life, They will find a way to kill VLC and anyone who dares to slowdown their cash flow.
The DMCA has nothing to do with patents. It's the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Furthermore, decoding H.264 has nothing to do with circumventing DRM, so the DMCA wouldn't apply anyway.
As for ACTA, well, because of the secret nature of the negotations we don't know what exact
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That's why there are patent consortiums. MPEG-LA is one, 3C Entity (and 5C Entity) ar
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Personally I think that we should consider whether the government should be able to exercise eminent domain for patents in cases like this. The purpose of patents was to encourage people to invest in devising new technology, and so I don't think it's horrible to think the people behind the technology in H264 deserve to have their investment pay off to some degree. On the other hand, H264 being the defacto standard while being patent encumbered is an unacceptable situation.
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Personally I think that we should consider whether the government should be able to exercise eminent domain for patents in cases like this.
Exercising eminent domain in a patent case is usually a bad idea. The compensation the government has to pay for the taking is the value of the patents over their entire term, which in this case is likely to be billions of dollars (for example: Thomson, which is just one member of the MPEG LA patent pool, receives a few hundred million dollars a year in licensing revenu
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not it isn't. a trap is hidden (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a rake, lying on the ground in plain sight with red markers all over it and a big sign.
Step on it at your own risk, but don't come crying when the rake hits you in the face.
After the gif debacle, you would think people would learn.
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This is the rake you describe lying completely across a narrow path, where to by pass it, you must scramble up some very steep rocky embankments to proceed around it.
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Tried & True business model... (Score:5, Insightful)
The first hit is free.
By 2016 (Score:2, Insightful)
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we'll be using a different format. Yes, it will be encumbered by patents, DRM and a bunch of other shit we don't even know yet - but it will not be H.264. I don't really see how this extension of free licensing could be profitable to them.
You are missing the forest for the trees. The MPLA makes money on licensing fees for encoders and decoders. By offering royalty free streaming for a time, the format becomes popular which means that more encoders and decoders are sold which generates more income.
It is possible that they may continue to offer free licensing of for distribution through further extensions. Doing it this way rather than just offering blanket permission to stream give them a few advantages:
1. It allows them to track how many
Good enough (Score:2)
A few years will buy some time for the open source communities to develop some really good codecs.
Ogg Theora doesn't really have any benefit over mpeg4/h264 except its licen
Won't matter much anyway (Score:2)
Google will open source VP8 from On2 in a few months, and H.264 will soon be history.
Patents expire before and after 2028 (Score:3, Informative)
So the spec is available before 2028, but how about implementing it?
Well, certain implementations will be covered for many years. In fact, if you come up with a new way to encode or decode H264 today, you can still file a patent. For example: if you discover that by connecting two wires to a squirrel and sending uncompressed video into the squirrel through one wire results in H264 video out the other wire, that's patentable. Freaky, weird, but damn well worth a patent. If you figure out how to do it with a genetically altered squirrel 5000 years from now (hey, you've already go a digital squirrel, let's keep the weirdness going), then you could still get a patent. 5000 years after all the other implementations are free.
What this means is that over time, people will still file new implementations, but the older ones will also be opening up. Come 2016, there might be a way to do H264 without a patent license if someone clever figures out what pieces are free to use and figures out an alternative to the parts still under patent.
We keep repeating the same mistakes (Score:3, Insightful)
Streaming video needs an Apache. By that, I mean a very standardized server and set of protocols for delivering files encoded in a non-proprietary, free-to-use, free-to-decode, unrestricted-in-every-imaginable-sense manner.
The source of what has held this back, in my opinion, is that taking giant video files (and you should see how big raw video is) and cramming them down into small, chunkable files which can decode at the end into recognizable images is hard. Hard in the sense of "takes people with a great deal of math knowledge and computer science knowledge to pull off." It's not like HTML, where you are pushing around what are basically text files that you can open in Notepad. It takes a great deal of intellectual know-how and deep domain knowledge to pull this off on the encoding end in some reasonable fashion that doesn't take a lot of CPU cycles.
The few people who can do this take a long time to figure out a new scheme, and they have to test the living hell out of it. You can write a primitive webserver without too much fuss, it's just a specialized server which kicks out text and binary files on command, after all. Encoding video and serving it, though, is not easy. That's why so much goes into protecting the intellectual property; it was not trivial to create. Wade around in the fifteen profiles for MPEG-4 Part 10 aka AVC aka H.264 for a while and realize that this is not trivial. Hell, it had to be jointly developed by two groups, ITU's video group and MPEG. Take a look at Theora -- even its codebase is descended from something that once took real money to make.
If streaming media is to have its Apache, an investment of money must be made in finding these highly talented individuals and paying them to make a new, open standard. And code must be made available for an end-to-end implementation on many platforms, everything from encoding to serving (with authentication fun, to boot) to decoding, on Windows, on Unix/Linux, on Macs. With regression tests and tutorials. Plug-ins to be written for the top, say, ten browsers. And a decoder library for Flash. While this is going on, political battles will have to be fought to keep Microsoft, Apple, and other companies out of the loop, or they'll pull the usual and destroy or cripple the product before it reaches market, just as they managed to poison HTML5's video standards.
None of this is technically impossible, but it will be hard, and it will cost money and political tokens and time and real effort. Can it be done?
No, you can’t do that with H.264 (Score:2)
http://bemasc.net/wordpress/2010/02/02/no-you-cant-do-that-with-h264/ [bemasc.net]
Here is the lead paragraph:
A lot of commercial software comes with H.264 encoders and decoders, and some computers arrive with this software preinstalled. This leads a lot of people to believe that they can legally view and create H.264 videos for whatever purpose they like. Unfortunately for them, it ain’t so.
The article goes on to discuss the limitations on H.264 use in actual practice using examples of actual licenses. As I read it, the authorized software used to encode H.264 videos places strict limits on the use of the resulting video.
Want to see Dirac uptake! (Score:3)
I tried out Dirac for some of my private video collection last night and was quite impressed by the size of files output whilst still having reasonable quality. I shall be trying it out as my own preferred format for ripped DVDs but it is a standard it would be really interesting to see more uptake of. It's worth remembering that Theora is not the only open source and patent free codec out there, nor necessarily even the highest quality one.
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Unfortunately I don't have much confidence of that happening, gif still remains pretty common despite how long the superior png format has been arround.
With video and audio things are even worse with major vendors outright refusing toe support the unencumbered option (unlike png which has wide support).
Personally I think there is more chance of internet bandwidth increasing to a level where we can revert back to a format where the patents expire sooner than there is of a new unencumbered format taking hold.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that was due to the extremely short window between when compuserv started going after gif offenders and when the patent for gif actually ran out. IIRC, png wasn't even supported in IE until after the patent on gif ran out, further hampering its adoption.
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png wasn't even supported in IE until after the patent on gif ran out
I'm pretty sure it was supported in the sense that non-transparent images and palleted images with binary transparency were supported even as far back as IE4 long before the patent ran out.
Full support took a lot longer (it was finally added in IE7) and unfortunately while that wasn't really a problem for those replacing gifs with pngs misunderstandings and exaggerated claims about it almost certainly did impact png adoption.
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My understanding is that, somewhere in the 2006-2008 region, all credible