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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."
What we really need is a nice, free, high quality and open source standard. Then, anyone can use it without paying the license fees, and it will be able to run on any platform. Whereas music files have converged to mainly MP3 and OGG Vorbis files, videos are heavily divided between MPEG, QuickTime, DiVX & AVI, RM, and ASF. It is really annoying to use so many different players to play simple videos, I use at least four different ones regularly. Plus, I haven't found anything that can play RM except for RealPlayer, which is unfortunate since some of them have not been displaying correctly on my computer.
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
... and contribute to work on vorbis/tarkin instead ...
If the internet has taught anyone anything over the last 20+ years it is that closed standards, or standards that require licencing do not work . Standards are developed (or at least should be) as means to an end. Packet switching is a means to send data. Data Comression is a means to transfer data more effectively. HTML is a means to simplify and "standardize" web content.
Companies that have "crate patented standards and get rich off the licencing" as part of their buisiness plan should be shunned by those who are seeking to make money by providing entertainment or information.
I personally a mystified that things like this MPEG insanity can and have survived. Open standards have reigned supreme on the internet, and nearly everywhere else, but somehow these proprietary video compression algorithms live on.
I don't pretend to be an expert on video codec's and the like, but I would like to believe that some sane individuals could develop an open video compression system and stop all of this idiocy
Comments should be like skirts. Short enough to keep your attention, but long enough to cover the subject
So, if you want to know how long Apple can afford not to release the product, the answer is "forever": they can go with some other codec and rework the product. Then they can advertise that *their* system is free for use, unlike everyone else's.
I dont know if I agree with the patent but it seems pretty moronic to license the encoder AND the decoder.
It seems with any format(audio,video,file compression) you want it out there and popular. Then only license the encoder, and the decoder is no charge. People will use the format a lot more, imho.
Apple is not in this alone. Apple is a founding member in the Internet Streaming Media Alliance, or ISMA, which is standardizing MPEG-4 for streaming. At the Fourth ISMA forum last week, the move by MPEG-LA to apply a per stream license fee was seen as pretty brain-dead.
MPEG-4 is being rolled out for set-top boxes for Cable Companies. The MPEG-LA license fee would add a charge of almost $ 15.00 per box per month to your cable bill. This would just about double my cable bill. This will kill MPEG-4 if it is not changed.
The speculation is that this is Microsoft (a member of the license pool) trying to squelch competition, without leaving any fingerprints.
Companies have to get it through their thick skulls that to achieve infrastructure-level ubiquity in the computer market your product either has to be free (beer) or licensed via a very simple, flat-rate scheme. The MPEG-4 license plan is destined to drive away companies, to everyone's detriment.
At least Quicktime is useable. I still can't stand the fact that I can't save WMP files as anything else or export the files.
Personaly, Quicktime is highly efficient. True if you want to watch MPEGS full screen, you need to register, but as you so pointed out, there are hacks availible.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Wow, people are all over the map on this one.
Simply put:
MPEG-LA is a company that represents the patent holders of technolgy used by all the parts of a multimedia standard known as MPEG-4.
MPEG-LA says that if you want to sell a codec that infringes on any of their _extensive_ patents, you need to pay $0.25 per copy sold, up to $1M per year.
MPEG-LA says that if you want to USE a codec covered by their patents, you have to pay $0.02/hr per stream.
Apple refuses to make QuickTime 6 available until the usage fee is removed.
IMHO:
This is awesome, Apple is standing up for the rights of the individual to create multimedia content and publish it royalty free. Sure, they're saving themselves some $ since they stream video too. But consumers will be the ones paying that $0.02/hr if it sticks, via their Digital Cable subscription, their DirectTV subscription, watching streaming movies on the net, etc...
The $0.25 per codec sold is fair. Many of you might not think the underlying patents are fair, but that's a different issue. If the patents are fair, then it seems fair to charge $0.25 a copy for any other products sold that infringe on the patents.
-pmb