Apple Delays QuickTime 6 Over Proposed MPEG-4 Licenses

znu writes: "Apple announced at the QuickTime Live! conference today that there's a public preview of QuickTime 6 with full MPEG-4 support ready to ship, but the terms of the proposed MPEG-4 license are holding it back. For those who haven't been following this, MPEG wants $0.25 per encoder/decoder for MPEG-4, up to $2 million per company per year. Apple is fine with that. But MPEG also wants content distributers to pony up $0.02/hour for any content that's distributed for profit. Apple feels that determining just what is "for profit" will be problematic, and that this pricing will seriously inhibit MPEG-4 adoption. You are encouraged to complain to MPEG LA about this situation."

Comments

Another source

[clambert]

CNET's had a nice, objective article online since early this afternoon.

Tarkin

[krmt]

Tarkin is very very much in the planning phase right now, so if you've got any knowledge of video compression or wavelets in general, now's the time to hop on! If you've got the time to learn wavelet encoding and read a bunch of papers, this will be a great project. I don't have time personally to do much more than follow the mailing list (which has seen a lot of traffic in the last few days) but there's a lot of people on this project who really know their stuff. It's a good chance to learn from them.

That said, the definitions for the project aren't certain at all right now. No one knows if it's going to be for streaming video or just plain compressed video. There's even been talk of using it as a professional editing standard, but that's not likely to be a focus. Right now, Tarkin is so new it's scary. It's going to be an exciting project to follow, but don't expect anything too soon.

Re:Greedy bastards!

[Shiny Metal S.]

No one is ever going to use Ogg anything except for uber-geek OSS zealots. I know I sure as hell am not converting 1000 MP3s into .oggs anytime soon. Nor am I going to use their slow-ass encoder to encode new music.

Let me quote my old post:

The standard response is "I won't use Ogg Vorbis, because it's not popular enough" or "I won't use Ogg Vorbis, because I have already so many MP3s". People seem to forget that they can have MP3 files and Ogg Vorbis files.

I remember when the best file format for photos available was GIF. That time when I digitalized a photo I stored it as a GIF file. But when I first heard about JPEG, I didn't say "it's nice but not popular". I didn't also say that "I have lots of GIFs and I don't want to convert them". I just started saving the new pictures in JPEG format, leaving the old GIFs alone. Now I have converted those old files to PNG, because of problems with Unisys, but I didn't have to do it, I had been using old GIFs and new JPEGs for many years.

But it's totally off-topic.

We're not talking here about which audio format do you want to store your ripped CDs in. We're not even talking about which video codec do the corporations and artists want to use to publish their movies and streaming video (which by the way, is a matter of saving milions of dollars). I'm not talking about Ogg Vorbis vs. MPEG-1/2 audio layer 3 -- I'm talking about Ogg Tarkin vs. MPEG-4, in the terms of license and in the context of free software. Maybe read what I said:

Remember that even 1/100 of cent per codec makes it impossible to implement as free software. If you write a free software encoder and ten milions of people will start using it, will you just pay $2.5M to MPEG-4 guys, begging people to stop using it in more copies?

All I was talking about is free software. I thought I was clear enough.

Re:investing in open-source software pays itself

[Pathwalker]

quicktime sucks anyway with this sorenson shit - a codec you can smoke in a pipe...

Do you realize that sorenson is not the only codec that quicktime can use?

Personally, I've been using the open source vp3 codec for a lot of the videos I've encoded lately.
In my opinion, it beats the free version of sorenson at moderate bit rates, and as the source code is available, someone should be able to plug it into one of the Quicktime frameworks that run under [Free,Open,Net]BSD or Linux.

Re:but aren't we already using mpeg4?

[SpinyNorman]

Just a few points:

1) MPEG-4 is a compression standard just like MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, not a specific CODEC (implementation), so the DivX implementation is just as much MPEG-4 as are Microsoft's, Phillip's or Apple's. It's meaningless to say "it's similar to MPEG-4 but is a completely new CODEC".

2) The MPEG-4 patents cover the algorithms not the implementation (in fact the source of a reference implementation is available for free, and was the basis for the rewritten DivX implementation). There's no way around the MPEG-4 licencing - MPEG LA could one day choose to shut down the open source MPEG-4 implementations (or DivX for that matter, if they don't abide by the licencing requirements).

3) The original poster referred to "Quicktime, MPEG, AVI and DivX" as if they are comparable, but these are all different things:

- Quicktime is a file/stream container format that can use any CODEC. The most common CODEC used with Quicktime is Sorenson, but it can also use others such as MPEG-4 being discussed here, or the open source VP3.

- MPEG is a collection of standards which define two different container formats (MPEG-1/2 and MPEG-4 = Quicktime), plus the associated video and audio compresion standards (MPEG-1/2/4 video, MPEG-1/2 layer 3 audio - aka MP3, MPEG-2 AAC audio, etc).

- AVI is a non-streamable container format that like Quicktime can use any CODEC. Common CODECs used with AVI include the original ones like Cinepak, Intel Indeo, Motion JPEG, and the newer ones like Microsoft's MPEG-4 v3 (aka DivX 3) and DivX's MPEG-4 (aka DivX 4).

- DivX is nothing more than an MPEG-4 CODEC for the AVI container format, despite the marketing wizards at DivX Networks success in getting people to think of it as something else.