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Apple Delays QuickTime 6 Over Proposed MPEG-4 Licenses

Posted by timothy on from the loose-the-chickens-for-free-range-eggs dept.

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."

2 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. Re:but aren't we already using mpeg4? by MiTEG · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The previous release of DiVX was based on a hacked version of the MS MPEG-4 (actually an interesting story, I believe it originated in a beta version of a MS media encoder program that had MPEG-4 encoding support, but was later removed in the final version). The major issue with this was the fact that it was done without any licensing, meaning the entire DiVX format was illegal. That being said, paying the royalties per encoder or hour of commercial video distributed was the least of the developer's concerns. This with was fixed with the new Open DiVX/DiVX 4.0+ which supposedly were completely re-written and NOT based on the original MPEG-4, therefore bypassing the licensing technicalities. Although the original DiVX 3.11 is still much better than the newer versions, OpenDiVX is open source.

    Anyway, divx.com says "DivX is the most widely distributed MPEG-4 compatible", which I take to mean it is similar to MPEG-4 but is a completely different codec.

    I could be wrong, but that's what I've gathered from what I've read on the web. If anyone knows more about this, feel free to correct me.

    --
    The future isn't what it used to be.
  2. Re:Greedy bastards! by Cadre · · Score: 5, Interesting

    We already have proprietary Quicktime

    If you mean proprietary as in fully documented (you probably want to start in the API section) and open you'd be correct. In fact, there are several projects started that will play Quicktime movies fine under Linux.*

    Perhaps you meant the proprietary and closed Sorenson codec?

    *Of course, they won't be able to play the ones that use the Sorenson codec, which is the most popular codec to use with Quicktime

    --
    All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.