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More than not exclusive - AAC is the audio implementation of the MPEG-4 codec, meaning that is an MPEG standard. The offerings from Apple (AAC and H.264) were impressive enough to warrant the basis of the next generation ISO/IEC MPEG standard group.

Check the official MPEG website if you don't believe me:
http://www.m4if.org/mpeg4/

Nine visual profiles have been defined in MPEG-4 Visual Version 1 [MPEG4-2]: Simple, Simple Scalable, Core, Main, N-bit, Scaleable Texture, Simple Face Animation, Basic Animated Texture, and Hybrid.

From what I can see MPEG-4 Simple Profile is going to be supported, not Advanced Simple Profile that xvid uses.

This update seems to be more for those who already have Mpeg4 compliant dvd players since those people encode for the lowest common denominator and don't turn on things like GMC when encoding.

I applaud your research and clever pulling out of context statements, although the one site was not out of context, it was just repeating myth of someone not understanding the difference between 'adopting' a technology and being the basis of the technology.

Again I will repeat this for the slow learners, MPEG4's codecs were not based on Quicktime Technology, and the original MPEG4 codec technology was written by Microsoft.

Everyone else, don't be trolled by the above post, do a simple freaking google search for yourself on: Microsoft MPEG-4 v3 or
MS-MPEG4 v3 or even Microsoft MPEG-4 v1.

I will also again repeat. DIVX is nothing more than a 'hack' of the original Microsoft of the MPEG4 codec technology.

Here, I will do a quick Google for the causal reader:

http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/codec-faq.htm
What's the difference between DivX and MS MPEG4 v3?
There's none, really. DivX is basically a step farther from the original hack of the MS MPEG4 v3 codec


http://www.am-soft.ru/fourcc.html
"Microsoft MPEG-4 V1, V2 & V3 Microsoft MPEG4 Frozen These codecs were developed by Microsoft by draft MPEG-4 specs and were available some time ago with their Windows Media Tools (WMT) and MS NetShow package. However Microsoft has restricted the functionality of these codecs so that only native tools from Microsoft could use these compressors. The DivX team made a binary hack of MS MPEG4 V3 codec and called it DivX.

And of course how about posting a link to MPEG Specifications Body itself, cause apparently that would have not allowed the above poster to distort facts:
http://www.m4if.org/mpeg4/

And now let's address your revisionist history of MSDOS and Stacker... You quote the Internet Myth regarding the lawsuit between Microsoft and Stac, but have you or any of your other drones actually read about the ruling 'specifically'.

If you had, you would see that it was a PATENT lawsuit, and NO CODE WAS STOLEN. PERIOD. (Go ahead and edit Wiki or keep saying it to yourself, it will not make it true.)

Let me repeat, MS did NOT use or STEAL any code from Stac. - Go read the lawsuit, for the love of God...

Here, let me give you a link to get you started if you want to find truth on the subject:

http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Stac_Electron ics
Stac sued Microsoft for infringement of two of its data compression patents, and won; in 1994, a California jury ruled the infringement by Microsoft was not willful, but awarded Stac $120 million in compensatory damages, coming to about $5.50 per copy of MS-DOS 6.0 that had been sold. The jury also agreed with a Microsoft counterclaim that Stac had misappropriated the Microsoft trade secret of a pre-loading feature that was included in Stacker 3.1, and simultaneously awarded Microsoft $13.6 million on the counterclaim.
While Microsoft prepared an appeal, Stac was able to obtain a preliminary injunction from the court stopping the sales of all MS-DOS products that included DoubleSpace; by this time Microsoft had already started shipping an "upgrade" of MS-DOS to its OEM customers that removed DoubleSpace

As you see, NO CODE was Stolen by Microsoft, and the reason 6.21 even had to be released was because of the injunction by Stac to 'extort' Microsoft, which worked, as Microsoft basically bought the failing company.

And if you look at the case, the only thing MS did was create a technology that 'infringed' on their PATENTS - NOT STOLE CODE as you incorrectly state.

However, Stacker Willingly used a MS Trade Secret that was disclosed to them during this time, so Stac is the company that actually STOLE anything.

And you my friend are the one that needs a history lesson, next time try to provide facts instead of bloviating about old Internet Myths...

The only reason for this container format was to try to make DivX relevant again in the face of a more capable H.264/AAC combination for content creation. Content that will play on ALL future (standard) MPEG-4 players which makes a bet on it fairly future-proof (at LEAST as future-proof as MPEG-1 was and that STILL plays on a wide variety of machines as well).

I'm not sure what you mean by "proprietary" in this case, as the PSP uses MPEG-4, which is No more proprietary than MPEG-2, your counter-example.

• Support for MPEG-4 in QuickTime (for developers) and (for end users) where they write:

  MPEG-4 provides an open playing field. As an open, industry standard, anyone can create an MPEG-4 player or encoder that will work with other manufacturer's devices.

• Microsoft and MPEG-4 where it's clearly stated that:

  while Microsoft continues to support the MPEG-4 standardization process, it is moving forward with the development of audio and video technologies that deliver superior quality and an end-to-end streaming solution for Microsoft customers

  i.e. they're not much interested in working with others on open standards. They want to license but keep it proprietary.

Apple certainly doesn't seem to have fought the MPEG-4 standard like, for example, fellow MP4IF member Microsoft did. (As an aside, Fraunhofer Institute IIS and Thomson - who hold the MP3 patents - are also in the MP4IF.) But I'd expect that the majority of the lobbying for its inclusion would have come from Dolby.

I agree that it's all about selling more Apple stuff. :)

Apple certainly doesn't seem to have fought the MPEG-4 standard like, for example, fellow MP4IF member Microsoft did. (As an aside, Fraunhofer Institute IIS and Thomson - who hold the MP3 patents - are also in the MP4IF.) But I'd expect that the majority of the lobbying for its inclusion would have come from Dolby.

I agree that it's all about selling more Apple stuff. :)

First, I'd like you to take a stab at the real standard that's being supported: MPEG4. Please note: This encompasses DivX (4.x+.. ie, all the legal versions), XviD, .mp4 files, and theoretically Quicktime 6. MPEG4 is bigger than DivX, and I'd say that this is not a fully compaitble DivX player anyway, since it doesn't play the hacked 3.11 version.

So how the hell is this bad for standards?

As is just about every major manufacturer of media player software, OSes, DVD players, cellular phones, and video cameras.

So... they've left themselves an escape route, at the very least. Or perhaps they're just prepared to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" yet another industry standard.

As is just about every major manufacturer of media player software, OSes, DVD players, cellular phones, and video cameras.

So... they've left themselves an escape route, at the very least. Or perhaps they're just prepared to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" yet another industry standard.

It affects it. DivX has been rewritten to avoid the copyright issues with the original ripped MS code, but it still is affected by the patents mentioned.

Basically, projects like mplayer could probably be shut down, but the industry may not consider it worthwhile to do so -- a la lame.

Take a look at this interesting little tidbit on the MPEG-4 Industry Forum site. (Warning, .doc format -- sorry) Look at section 4.1.2. Basically, they're saying that *any free MPEG-4 player* must pay its royalties by including spyware.

For Immediate Release
CONTACT:
Lawrence Horn
MPEG LA®
301.986.6660
301.986.8575 Fax
lhorn@mpegla.com

Terms of MPEG-4 Visual Patent Portfolio License Announced

(Denver, Colorado, US - 31 January 2002) - MPEG LA, LLC today announced that it will offer fair, reasonable, nondiscriminatory, worldwide access to patents that are essential to the MPEG-4 Visual (Simple and Core) digital compression standard under a single license to be known as the MPEG-4 (Visual) Patent Portfolio License ("License"). The License currently includes patents owned by the following companies: Canon Inc.; France Télécom; Fujitsu Limited; Hitachi, Ltd.; Hyundai Curitel, Inc.; KDDI Corporation; Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.; Microsoft Corporation; Mitsubishi Electric Corporation; Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd.; Philips Electronics; Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.; Sanyo Electric Co., Ltd.; Sharp Kabushiki Kaisha; Sony Corporation; Telenor AS; Toshiba Corporation; and Victor Company of Japan, Limited. MPEG LA convened these patent owners in December 2000 following an independent patent expert's finding that each of them owns one or more patents essential to the international MPEG-4 Visual Standard. The objective of the License is to include as much essential MPEG-4 Visual (Simple and Core) intellectual property as possible in one license for the convenience of all users. Patent holders are required to include all of their essential MPEG-4 Visual (Simple and Core) patents worldwide. In addition, new patent holders and their essential patents will continue to be added following a determination of essentiality.

"The essential patent owners are pleased that their intellectual property has made a substantial and essential contribution to the development of this exciting new technology," said MPEG LA Chief Executive Officer Baryn S. Futa. "The MPEG-4 (Visual) Patent Portfolio License manifests their desire to 'partner' with other industry participants to encourage widespread adoption of MPEG-4. The patent owners understand the risks inherent in a startup technology in which companies large and small are asked to make a pioneering investment and are sensitive to the role that their licensing model will play in that process. Therefore, the License has been specially designed so that reasonable royalties are shared fairly by a variety of industry participants in order to stimulate early, rapid and widespread MPEG-4 product investment, development, deployment and use."

Under the License terms, Licensees will pay the following royalty rates for MPEG-4 Simple or Core Products:
US $0.25 per decoder (in hardware or software) for a license to make and sell and for personal use in receiving private video (i.e., not video for which a service provider or content owner receives remuneration as a result of offering/providing the video for viewing or having the video viewed), subject to a cap of $1,000,000 per year/per legal entity.
US $0.25 per encoder (in hardware or software) for a license for personal use only to create private video data (i.e., not video for which a service provider or content owner receives remuneration as a result of offering/providing the video for viewing or having the video viewed), subject to a cap of $1,000,000 per year/per legal entity.
US $0.00033/minute or portion (equivalent to US $0.02/hour) based on playback/normal running time for every stream, download or other use of MPEG-4 video data in connection with which a service provider or content owner receives remuneration as a result of offering/providing the video for viewing or having the video viewed (including without limitation pay-per-view, subscription and advertiser/underwriter-supported services). This royalty, to be paid by entities that disseminate the MPEG-4 video data, is not subject to a cap. (In the case of MPEG-4 video for which the number of uses cannot be directly determined (e.g., video supplied as part of a basic cable service or to a transmitter for broadcasting), a surrogate (e.g., standard industry audience measurement) is under consideration.)
US $0.00033/minute or part (equivalent to US $0.02/hour) based on playback/normal running time of MPEG-4 video data encoded (for other than personal use) on each copy of packaged medium. This royalty, to be paid by the packaged medium replicator, is not subject to a cap.
For one year from the start date of the license program, parties that sign the license (or a memorandum of intent to sign a license) will be forgiven their payment of royalties for all MPEG-4 Visual Simple and Core products during and before that one year period.
The initial term of the License has not yet been finalized but when decided, will be subject to renewal on reasonable terms and conditions for the useful life of any patents in the Portfolio.

In agreeing to the foregoing terms, the patent holders considered the need for simplicity, promoting the widest possible use of MPEG-4, maximizing the opportunity for full efficient compliance with intellectual property licensing requirements and recognition of the likely business models for deploying MPEG-4 Visual Standard technology so as to assure that the License is aligned with the real-world flow of MPEG-4 commerce.
As the objective of the MPEG-4 (Visual) Patent Portfolio License is to include as much essential MPEG-4 Visual (Simple and Core) intellectual property as possible in one license, MPEG LA reiterates that any party that believes it has essential patents (Sections 9, 9.1 and 9.2 and Tables 9-1 and 9-2 of ISO\IEC 14496-2 Information Technology - Coding of Audio-Visual Objects - Part 2: Visual) and wishes to join upon successful evaluation, is invited to submit such patents to the independent Patent Evaluator together with a statement confirming its agreement with the objectives and intention to abide by terms and procedures governing the patent submission process, which may be obtained from Lawrence A. Horn, Vice President, Licensing and Business Development, MPEG LA, LLC (lhorn@mpegla.com, phone 1-301-986-6660, fax 1-301-986-8575).

# # #
Overview of the MPEG-4 Standard

MPEG-4 is an ISO/IEC multi-media representation standard developed by its Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). MPEG also developed MPEG-1, which makes possible interactive video on CD-ROM and is present on virtually every personal computer, and MPEG-2, the core compression technology underlying the efficient transmission, storage and display of digitized moving images and sound tracks on which high definition television (HDTV), Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB), direct broadcast by satellite (DBS), digital cable television systems, multichannel-multipoint distribution services (MMDS), personal computer video, digital versatile discs (DVD), interactive media and other forms of digital video delivery, storage, transport and display are based.

MPEG-4 is the result of yet another international effort involving hundreds of researchers and engineers from all over the world. Building on the successes of MPEG's earlier standards, MPEG-4 enables integration of the production, distribution and content access features of digital television, interactive graphics applications and interactive multimedia across internet protocol, wireless, low bitrate, broadcast, satellite, cable and mobile environments. With MPEG-4, all content elements can be maintained as discrete objects enabling richer interactivity and use across many different devices More information about MPEG-4 can be found at MPEG's home page http://www.cselt.it/mpeg and at the home page of the MPEG-4 Industry Forum http://www.m4if.org.

MPEG LA, LLC

MPEG LA successfully pioneered one-stop technology standards licensing, starting with a portfolio of essential patents for the international digital video compression standard known as MPEG-2, which it began licensing in 1997. One-stop technology standards licensing enables widespread technological implementation, interoperability and use of fundamental broad-based technologies covered by many patents owned by many different patent holders. MPEG LA provides users with fair, reasonable, nondiscriminatory access to these essential patents on a worldwide basis under a single license. The MPEG-2 Patent Portfolio License now has more than 360 licensees and includes more than 400 MPEG-2 essential patents in 39 countries owned by 20 patent holders. As the legal and business template for one-stop technology standards licensing, MPEG LA also provides an innovative way to achieve fair, reasonable, nondiscriminatory access to patent rights for other technology standards - the high-speed transfer digital interconnect standard known as IEEE 1394 and the terrestrial digital television standard used in Europe and Asia known as DVB-T. In addition, MPEG LA has been asked to facilitate the development of joint licenses for other MPEG-4 technologies. The company is based in Denver, CO and has offices in Chevy Chase, MD (Washington DC metropolitan area), the greater San Francisco area and London, England. For more information, please refer to http://www.mpegla.com, http://www.dvbla.com, and http://www.1394la.com.

MPEG-4 is not the panecea everyone seems to think it is. Currently MPEG-4 is heavily patent encumbered ( see http://www.m4if.org/patents/ ). The result is I doubt you will find it possible to produce a legal open source MPEG-4 codec.

The standard is also being put forth by ISO, a notoriusly shitty standards body. Do you want to pony up more than $1,000 to get a copy of the standard so you can begin making a standards compliant implementation? That's roughly what the MPEG-4 standards docs cost. Even if we disregard the patent concerns, this represents a serius barrier to entree for anyone wanting to do an open source implementation of the codec.

ISO ( and it's child the ITU-T ) are designed to be used as weapons by corporate players against each other, not to produce good clean standards that can be used by all.

Try looking at the ogg tarkin project http://www.xiph.org/ogg/index.html as a group trying to pursue a non-patents encumbered video codec with a truely open standard ( I don't consider ISO standards to be open because of the intense barriers to entree like the expense of the standards docs).

Check out the MPEG-4 Industry Forum website at http://www.m4if.org/. There are several companies supporting MPEG-4, including iVast, PacketVideo, and others.

>> DiVX Legal: No

> Based on? How is a format illegal?

With all this discussion about copyrights, we often miss patents. A format can be illegal because it uses patented methods or processes. MPEG-4 (the core technology of the DivX ;-) family of video codecs) uses numerous patents, such as MPEG audio layer 3 (Fraunhofer). License royalties ($4 per hardware or software encoder or decoder for even MPEG-2 and likely more for MPEG-4) are generally out of reach for developers of free software or free(beer) proprietary software.

Philips is offering a free MPEG-4 player.

3ivx is not Open Source yet, but they hope to make the decoder OSS eventually. The encoder may never be OSS due to MPEG4 patent issues. The MPEG4 patent people probably won't announce their license policies until Spring.

3ivx uses QuickTime because it's cross-platform and it's the official MPEG4 packaging format.

3ivx isn't truely MPEG4 yet -- that's a longterm goal. Of course, DivX ;-) isn't really MPEG4 either, and neither are any of the MS codecs.

It's just an early preview release so far. Obviously 3ivx needs major performance improvements, not to mention a sound layer, before it will be able to compete. But the developers seem confident they will get there.

DivX ;-) is probably illegal. Project Mayo is still vaporware. OpenCodex is MIA. MS's stuff is limited to Windows (and maybe Mac). So I'm not writing 3ivx off just yet.

Some info on the patents on MPEG4 is here: http://www.m4if.org/

The MPEG-4 Industry Forum:

http://www.m4if.org

Is working to that you can conveniently obtain a licence to the whole MPEG-4 patent bundle (over 200 patents), in the same way as you can for MPEG-2.

A free software imnplementation of an MPEG-4 CODEDC is available from ISO, which is linked from the M4IF site. Note that while the software (i.e. the implementation) is free, you still need to licence the patents to use it.

Still, we're all using free MPEG-2 players and encoders under Linux, so it sounds pretty good to me!

MPEG is developed by ISO; that means you have to pay for the specs and can't give copies to your neighbors, but it isn't viral, so you can at least own the code you write.

MPEG-4 is covered by so many patents that a licensing association has been set up to keep track of the whole thing. If you want to sell something that uses MPEG-4, just give them your wallet and back away slowly. :-)

Apperantly, so many patents apply that there is an attempt for a joint-licensing scheme, according to this press release of the the mpeg-4 industry forum.

Apperantly, so many patents apply that there is an attempt for a joint-licensing scheme, according to this press release of the the mpeg-4 industry forum.