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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."
CNET's had a nice, objective article online since early this afternoon.
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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
The 25 cents per encoder/decoder is bad enough, but then charging by the hour as well?
You know, I don't really have a problem with them charging $.25 per codec. The developers of the MPEG-4 standard deserve to be compensated for their time, and money is a pretty good universally understood medium (popped popcorn is often too bulky to mail in mass quantities, and oral pleasure from each purchaser could be difficult -- and in today's epidemiological climate, hazardous). So more power to 'em, I say.
The $.02/hour scheme does seem a little tough to enforce, though. I mean, if I'm selling for-profit movies (and really, there's only one type of movie that's truly profitable on the World Wide Pr0n Repository), don't you think it would be in my best interests to lowball the estimate just a teensy bit? "Well, I'm going to sell movies encoded in MPEG-4, but only, um, three hours' worth. Yeah, that's the ticket! Three hours -- here's your six cents. Bye!"
Seems to me like this is yet another case of greed being foiled by stupidity.
They that would sacrifice their
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."
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.
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.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
We're not talking here about which audio format do you want to store your ripped CDs in. We're not even talking about which video codec do the corporations and artists want to use to publish their movies and streaming video (which by the way, is a matter of saving milions of dollars). I'm not talking about Ogg Vorbis vs. MPEG-1/2 audio layer 3 -- I'm talking about Ogg Tarkin vs. MPEG-4, in the terms of license and in the context of free software. Maybe read what I said:
All I was talking about is free software. I thought I was clear enough.~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
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.
No, Flash is a very open format. See: http://www.openswf.org/.
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.
Just a few points:
1) MPEG-4 is a compression standard just like MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, not a specific CODEC (implementation), so the DivX implementation is just as much MPEG-4 as are Microsoft's, Phillip's or Apple's. It's meaningless to say "it's similar to MPEG-4 but is a completely new CODEC".
2) The MPEG-4 patents cover the algorithms not the implementation (in fact the source of a reference implementation is available for free, and was the basis for the rewritten DivX implementation). There's no way around the MPEG-4 licencing - MPEG LA could one day choose to shut down the open source MPEG-4 implementations (or DivX for that matter, if they don't abide by the licencing requirements).
3) The original poster referred to "Quicktime, MPEG, AVI and DivX" as if they are comparable, but these are all different things:
- Quicktime is a file/stream container format that can use any CODEC. The most common CODEC used with Quicktime is Sorenson, but it can also use others such as MPEG-4 being discussed here, or the open source VP3.
- MPEG is a collection of standards which define two different container formats (MPEG-1/2 and MPEG-4 = Quicktime), plus the associated video and audio compresion standards (MPEG-1/2/4 video, MPEG-1/2 layer 3 audio - aka MP3, MPEG-2 AAC audio, etc).
- AVI is a non-streamable container format that like Quicktime can use any CODEC. Common CODECs used with AVI include the original ones like Cinepak, Intel Indeo, Motion JPEG, and the newer ones like Microsoft's MPEG-4 v3 (aka DivX 3) and DivX's MPEG-4 (aka DivX 4).
- DivX is nothing more than an MPEG-4 CODEC for the AVI container format, despite the marketing wizards at DivX Networks success in getting people to think of it as something else.
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.
At the time at which GIF became standard, the licensing issues were not known, so it appeared to be an open standard.
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.
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 ;-)
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.
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