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

hmm

[MathJMendl]

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.

Re:The foolishness of licenced standards

[Jace of Fuse!]

Open standards have reigned supreme on the internet, and nearly everywhere else, but somehow these proprietary video compression algorithms live on.

Sadly, I can think of more contradictions to that statement than examples of it.

We are still using GIF, after all.

http://images.slashdot.org/title.gif {- See?

Oh, and there are a whole lot more more people using MP3 than Ogg.

Oh, and uh - Isn't Flash a pretty darn closed standard?

What about that Windows thing? I think it has a pretty wide installed user base. Doesn't it? Not to mention Internet Explorer.

Sorry, dude. I think your post was a bit off the mark. It's not that I don't agree that it would be nice if stuff was all free and opened and life was good and all, but uh -- well. It's not. Sucks plenty.

Re:The foolishness of licenced standards

[j7953]

We are still using GIF, after all.

At the time at which GIF became standard, the licensing issues were not known, so it appeared to be an open standard.

Oh, and there are a whole lot more more people using MP3 than Ogg.

MP3 might be a closed standard, but at least no license fees are to be paid for distributing players (as far as I know, they're only required for encoders) or content.

Also note that, similar to GIF, when MP3 took off, encoders were developed without paying license fees as well. The license fees were not requested before MP3 already was popular, and even then, there was a lot of discussion about whether this would stop MP3. But there was no free alternative ready at that time.

Oh, and uh - Isn't Flash a pretty darn closed standard?

No, it's not. It's documented similar to PDF. Besides, I wouldn't exactly call Flash an internet standard, it's more a marketing and salespeople standard ;-)

What about that Windows thing? I think it has a pretty wide installed user base. Doesn't it? Not to mention Internet Explorer.

The original poster didn't claim that all implementations of the standards were free, but that the standards themselves were. IP, HTTP, HTML etc. are all open standards. The fact that they're implemented by proprietary products like Windows or Internet Explorer doesn't make the standards less open.