New MPEG-4 Licensing Scheme

morcheeba writes: "EETimes is reporting that the licensing of MPEG-4 patents will be substantially different than the existing MPEG-2 licenses. The per-player fee will be substantially cheaper ($0.25 instead of $2.50), but a new "use fee" component of $0.02/hour will be charged to service providers. More on MPEG-4 in general at MacWeek; The MPEG-4 Industry Forum and MPEG LA are handling the licenses."

Comments

Just those owners making money

[drkich]

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(

If you are getting paid for the download of your MPEG-4 video data, then you have to pay. Otherwise you can distribute the video for free.

Now of course the devil's in the details, they say at the end, "(including without limitation pay-per-view, subscription and advertiser/underwriter-supported services)" Which could be taken to mean that if you have ANY advertising on your site, you have to pay.

The patent owners CAN kill DivX

[yerricde]

One thing I haven't seen asked is how does this affect DivX? That is MPEG4, right?

But MPEG4 algorithms are independent of the particular implementation. If the licensing terms for MPEG4 do not permit licensing end-user products as free software, then open DivX as we know it will cease to exist in the United States, and some of the developers will move on to Ogg Tarkin.

Just a freely developed version

That doesn't matter. Unisys has publicly declared that it will not license the LZW patents to developers of free software: "For example, the typical Unisys license for standalone software does NOT permit copying, modification, resale, use on a server or in a network, or use for Internet/Intranet/Extranet or Web site operation."

The different MPEG-4 Codecs.

[joeytsai]

The number of mpeg-4 implementations out there is pretty frightening, and so I wrote up a quick write-up of the most popular. Please let me know if you spot anything incorrect.

The ASF file format is based on Microsoft's MPEG-4 V2 codec.

The "DivX ;-)" codec is based off of Microsoft's MPEG-4 V3 codec. This is
sometimes referred to as the 3.x codec. This is the format that requires
Win32 DLLs. This is the format most people are talking about when they say
"DivX". Most movies floating around the internet are encoded in this format.
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage
http://divx.euro.ru

Project Mayo is developing an implementation called OpenDivX, which is GPL.
This is a rewrite (to lose the dependency on the Win32 DLLs, trying to make it
100% legal) and is sometimes referred to as the 4.x codec. This version is
backward-compatible with 3.x, but 3.x is not forward-compatible with 4.x
OpenDivX is under development, and still has quality and performance issues.
http://www.projectmayo.com

DivX Advanced Research Centre (DARC) has an implentation called DivX4. DARC and
Project Mayo are both part of a companly called DivXNetworks. Apparently,
OpenDivX was a sort of sandbox where DARC figured out what worked and what
didn't, and used that to create DivX4 from scratch. It is closed source, but
freely downloadable. DivX4 is reported to have very high image quality.
http://www.divxnetworks.com

3ivx has a self-named MPEG-4 implementation. They also refer to it as DivX 2.0.
Their implementation is closed source, and only the decoder is freely available
(in Windows, as a Windows Media Player or QuickTime plug-in; in Linux, as an
XAnim plug-in). You cannot play a DivX movie with the 3ivx codec.
http://www.3ivx.com

Nandub in an encoder which sports the Smart Bitrate Control (SBC) method of
encoding DivX. Nandub is a modified version of the VirtualDub program (which is
a general AVI editing and capture tool). Both Nandub and VirtualDub are
released under the GPL. SBC is not a codec, it's an encoding method based from
DivX 3.x which generally yields higher quality than normal.
http://www.nandub.org
http://www.virtualdub.org

The FFmpeg project has another rewritten from scratch MPEG-4 codec. They are
striving for real time encoding, and their code (GPLed) is written in ANSI C for
portability.
http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net

Re:Economics of the past

[Zeinfeld]

Not according to this [surrey.ac.uk] it's not. The patent was granted in 1985. 1985+20=2005. Or you could read at Unisys [unisys.com] itself.

Bzzt! The law is 17 years from issue or 20 years from filing, whichever is longer. The filing date on 4,558,302 is June 20, 1983, the issue date is December 10, 1985.

So the patent expires on the later of Dec 10, 2002 or June 20 2003.

What I don't quite understand is why anyone would use MPEG 4 under the proposed license instead of MPEG 2. Chances are that devices will have to support MPEG2 far into the future. It is not very likely that MPEG4 will offer such a devastating improvement in performance that many will be paying 2 cents an hour.

The problem with razor and blades type business models is that they are only good for the seller. Given the choice the customer will strategise to avoid razor and blades type models. Polaroid has gone chapter 11 because people prefer to pay $300 for a good digital camera that costs $0.00 per shot rather than pay $30 for a Polaroid camera and $1 for every shot they take.