Apple Delays QuickTime 6 Over Proposed MPEG-4 Licenses

Posted by timothy on Tuesday February 12, 2002 @07:31PM 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)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Quicktime 6 Links by Metrollica · 2002-02-12 19:46 · Score: 2, Redundant

Apple Press release

MPEG-4 licensing plan

Plan for fees

--

--Metrollica
Re:Greedy bastards! by Shiny+Metal+S. · 2002-02-12 20:51 · Score: 1, Redundant

You know, I don't really have a problem with them charging $.25 per codec.
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?
I think I'll just wait for Ogg Tarkin.

--
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$