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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."
Will the greed ever end? The 25 cents per encoder/decoder is bad enough, but then charging by the hour as well??? Give me a break
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
CNET's had a nice, objective article online since early this afternoon.
mailto:<?=implode("@", array("chris", implode(".", array("php", "net"))))?>
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
Sounds like the same accounting nightmare than governs licensing between the record companies and radio stations.
The site seems to be all about MPEG-2...
But you can send them a message here explaining that a per-use licence is morally wrong and will stifle early adoption of MPEG-4
smile, it makes everyone else wonder what you're up to
Apple Press release
MPEG-4 licensing plan
Plan for fees
--Metrollica
... 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
No, 25c per copy. $2M is the cap. If you sell one copy for $1 you give them $0.25 and pocket the rest. Woo-hoo! 75c! Yummy!
It's nice to be liked, but it's better by far to get paid
The "official" version of DivX ;-) (the one that the company that makes the playa owns) is no longer open source, so there's no reason they can't start charging for the encoding tools sometime in the future (almost no one can get away with charging for a decoder). DivX ;-) and the forthcoming Ogg Tarkin may be excellent codecs (more so the latter), but try to face the fact that the big-name content is going to be in big-name codecs, so if we can get a patented standard, it is better than having patented, undocumented formats.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
It seems to me that nickle and diming the customers on a per-stream basis for what they download is a very quick way to kill VoD on the internet. Seems like the Television Network approach would be much better suited. "This content comes from our sponsors."
Then they can go as far as to order merchandise for that show. "Click here to purchase a Transformers: Robots in Disguise Optimus Prime Toy for your kids." The can reward me for watching commercials. "Click now and we'll give you $1.00 off your next burger." They can even do things like broadcast a show live, just like TV does today for free. But if you want to see earlier episodes, you have to pay for a subscription to access them.
The idea of saying 'your time on the net is metered' scares me. Using the Internet for entertainment is a luxury, not a need. If the market thinks the price is unfair, then programs like Morpheus will suddenly reign supreme.
"Derp de derp."
Can someone explain what the DiVX codec is if its not mpeg4? I was told it was a modified mpeg4 codec?
or is this just a myth ?
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
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.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
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.
truly a bizarre idea if you think about it, right? Money for information...
Dude, get over it. Information is valuable. Otherwise, you wouldn't give a shit about this issue, right? Things which are valuable are, by definition, worth money. Got it?
BTW I'm curious who provides the food you eat and the roof over your head.
MPEG can charge whatever they want, and Apple can tell them to shove it. That's what the free market is all about. I'll be happy to buy your fucking one-way ticket to China if you don't like it.
Sites with content only available to links from authorized referers is going to stop search engine spiders from getting at a good percentage of porn videos on various websites. The same goes for any content protected in this fashion. Those spiders don't need to be looking at that sort of stuff anyways!
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
"the forthcoming Ogg Tarkin may be excellent codecs, but try to face the fact that the big-name content is going to be in big-name codecs"
Bullcrap. If all the media playing software supports both patented MPEG-4 codecs AND Tarkin, which one do you think content producers are going to use? The one they have to pay hourly royalties on?! And when Apple and Microsoft release media players that support this finalized MPEG-4 standard, are they going to charge people $0.25 to download them or just absorb the cost for a free download? Or would *most* people actually hastle with going through an online payment system for such a small amount just so they can see the latest gee-wiz streamed content? I highly doubt it. And you don't really have a standard unless everyone's using it.
There is a very real opportunity here to take over the codec scene. But first we need a completed Tarkin codec and enough content that people will begin clamouring for it to be supported by default in Quicktime and Windows Media Player.
Probably the exact reason why they don't produce it for Linux. You've got Windows lying around.
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.
Changing a few words and a whole new world of hypocrisy is opened up and a whole new meaning to expression corporation tax.
"The marketplace recognizes the role that intellectual property rights play in the development of these technologies, and the good news is that the market understands the need for it to be respected and paid for."
"The citizens recognizes the role that taxation play in the development of these public services, and the good news is that the populous understands the need for it to be respected and paid for."
Or
"The serfs recognizes the role that levies play in the development of my kingdom, and the good news is that they understand the need for me to be respected and paid for."
Is there a company named MPEG? What am I thinking, critizising articles here on slashdot?! Oh well, "Greed is good".
Meanwhile, Microsoft is raking in all those licensing fees for Windows Media Player.
Yep. All those "warez" guys are actually Linux users. Not a single one of those "appz" are Windows or MacOS.
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.
You are encouraged to complain
Complain? Why? The longer these greedy thieves continue there scratching and in-fighting the better. Let MPEG4 die a slow expensive death for all involved.
This will give time for competitors (Ogg Video) to prove themselves, without the "Intellectual Property" bull$hit.
Despite what they claim, vp3 is not open source. The license forbids modification of the software in any way that is incompatibile with the data format of the original codec, which (for example) completely rules out using any of the technology in it to form the basis of a new and better codec. It is also completely at odds with the Open Source definition, as found on opensource.org, and the free software definition, as found on gnu.org.
You may think I'm being pedantic, but the term "open source" gets devalued every time somebody uses it to describe a license that is not truly "open source". Next thing you know, the Sun Community Source License will start being accepted as "open source", which is even worse than the vp3 one. Then anything which provides the source but doesn't let you modify it.
The Open Source definition was written for a reason: to specify a minimum set of requirements for licenses that are open enough to allow the code to be used for anything, by anyone, in perpetuity. The vp3 license ain't it.
Stuart.
Better just use something that actaully exists like VP3. Tarkin is little more than a research project right now, and the direction is just using wavelets rather than the DCT.. the compression they'll achieve will at best be of the same ballpack as MPEG-4.
Tarkin's goal of an open source licence free CODEC is fine, but something like VP3 (source available, competetive compression, no licencing requirements - just a restriction that derived works still be able to decode VP3) is really good enough. If you look at the audio/video components of high quality A/V files then you'll notice that quality audio takes up at least as much - if not more - space as the video. Using conventional transform (DCT/wavelet) techniques to make video smaller is really a waste of time - the only break through will come from another approach (most likely overcomplete specification methods), and the overall savings in A/V file size are limited by the audio anyway.
The free Quicktime Streaming Server 4 has been released today and its open source companion the Darwin Streaming Server (has the same features, but it does run on Linux, BSD and Windows). It already supports Mpeg-4:
"MPEG-4 Support: now you can serve ISO-compliant hinted MPEG-4 files to any ISO-compliant MPEG-4 client, including any MPEG-4 enabled device that supports playback of MPEG-4 streams over IP. You can serve on-demand or live MPEG-4 streams, and reflect playlists of MPEG-4 files."
I'll bet they tried to mention MPEG-4 as many times as possible.
You can now also stream MP3's with it, set up your own radio station! The streaming uses the standard Icecast streaming format so any MP3-player that supports streaming should work.
The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi
So I'm wondering... why doesn't Apple just dump mpeg4 and spend less money support vorbis/tarkin? Developing a free, open-sourced video format would only be good for Apple, probably save Apple money, and hell, Apple is already doing Open Source work with OS X.
They are going to absorb the cost; they mentioned that in the story and the press release. That's why you have to put up with those QuickTime Pro reminders; Apple buy licenses to several codecs that you get in the free download of QuickTime.
If all the media playing software supports both patented MPEG-4 codecs AND Tarkin, which one do you think content producers are going to use?
And when is that going to happen? ;) It's not that I don't like Tarkin and the other open codecs; I have half a dozen or so of them on my machine, and often they are a good choice for encoding video for my personal storage, but I don't expect to be able to distribute content with them. OTOH, there's no reason Tarkin can't make a plug-in that lets you use the codec in QuickTime; many other new codec makers have done it, like 3ivx; if they were willing to have Tarkin encoded data in QuickTime format files, they could even set it up so that the QuickTime player would automagiacally download the Tarkin codec if the user tried to play a Tarkin encoded file, but I doubt the people at Ogg would do that. Apple is all for having as many formats supported in QT as possible, but the push will be for everyone to use the standard, since that's where you'll be able to reach the largest audience, and with MPEG-4, it includes many devices other than computers; they had an MPEG-4 streaming to a cell phone at QT Live.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
What does fullblown MPEG 4 bring to this that we dont already have?
It brings a documented standard to the table. DivX and WMA are undocumented hacks that MS threw together before the MPEG4 codec was completed. So, while it will cost $0.25 per encoder/decoder anyone can get a copy of the standard and write their own code. (Note: I believe there's a fee that must be paid to get a copy of the standard, but it is for sale atleast.)
I think Apple's beef is that it could really hit their customers hard. Every Mac comes with FireWire and iMovie. If a group of suits starts defining "for-profit" differently, suddenly millions of Mac users would have to be paying royalties.
By moving the cost to the company, Apple doesn't have to worry about its user base going through licensing hell.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
A)It will reduce long term costs i.e. NOTpaying royalties
b)Gets the Apple name and quality out to many different platforms
c)points a and b will help sell there hardware.
d)Other companies are giving there's away, and there codecs suck, but will become dominate.
e)will help apple move into the DVD market.
Of course, you can't see that can you? I'm mean flying off the handle like that just shows your blinded by your nawrrow knee-jerk mentality.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
as a compressionist, I've been dealing with these questions day to day for YEARS, if only the Slashdot crowd had some inkling how utterly pathetic QuickTime's competitors are, you'd see why all this stuff pisses me off so much. QT is open, enormously well documented, amazingly extensible and versatile, the MPEG standards take different - but equally valid - approach. Microsoft's approach is nothing less than an outright attempt to kill Apple, MPEG and Real by predatory pricing (exactly the same as the Netscape scenario), and it looks like Real WILL eventually die because of it - despite being the only system where streaming is REALLY solid, and despite0 doing innovative things such as licencing audio codecs from Sony and working hard with SMIL integration. And as for Apple "moving into" the DVD market, well I hardly know where to start except to say that ALL of the DVD video and audio tracks that we compress are from QuickTime source movies using the Digital Voodoo 10bit video codec, and PCM audio.
That was classic intercourse!
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
So who pays their salaries? Where does that party get the money with which they do so?
Well, I say greedy bastards, and hope the open source community comes up with something better.
Even if they do, it probably won't matter. What you and many other technologists can't seem to acknowledge is that the hard part usually isn't coming up with new technologies, but rather getting those technologies into the hands of users in a convenient and usable form. By the time the open source community catches the MPEG-4 taillights, there will already be a load of content out there in MPEG-4 form, and no users are going to want to futz with a new format.
Apple didn't say anything about QT Broadcaster needing QT Pro, so I'm guessing that MPEG-4 encoding will be in all editions of QuickTime.