More on MPEG4

ratajik writes: "Salon is running a story about how MPEG-LA (the alliance of companies in charge of licensing MPEG4) are planning on charging .25 cents for each copy they sell, and a .02 cent an hour "use fee" for anyone viewing MPEG4. They have a interesting slant on how this will make open-source alternatives much more attractive, and will likely kill off use of the MPEG4 standard in the long run."

Comments

absolutely ridiculous

[CmdrTaco (editor)]

This is one of the more ridiculous things I have read about MPEG-4 and digital video in general. While I agree the licensing fees the MPEG is asking for are outrageous, they know just as well that they can get away with it. Take a look at MPEG-2, which also has substantial licensing fees from its conception, although the MPEG-4 fees outweigh them by a factor of 10. But people have and will always pay extra for an accepted standard.

Take, for example, the Betamax vs. VHS incident (yes, I know it is cliched, but bare with me). Although it isn't the best comparison, at least in the U.S. VHS became the standard while BetaMax dwindled away. This is also the problem with many of the Linux distros out there, instead of allowing users to unite over one "OS," they are divided over Debian, Mandrake, RH, YDL, etc. and it will be extremely difficult to change that.

I find it much more likely that an open source codec will not become the new standard, but will become widely adopted by home users/geeks and ignored by the rest of the world. Maybe it will become the base for MPEG-7, but that fact is the MPEG will always dictate what our standards will be.

While most of the time licensing fees rub me the wrong way, I can see in a sense why we pay extra. The fact that I can take DVD with an MPEG-2 stream and play it in EVERY DVD player and DVD-ROM drive (disregarding Region encoding, but that's the MPAA, not the MPEG) is more than just a convenience, it is a necessity for the medium to be perpetuated. In a sense the licensing fees are the cost to ensure that are hardware does not become obsoleted so quickly.

Standards and the great bandwagon

[Steven_Wostoen]

As often happens, MPEG-4 will undoubtedly be widely adopted for standardisation reasons alone. Unfortunately this fact can't be changed, so we all have to look at the pros and cons of this format and compensate accordingly.

The MPEG-4 video compression algorithm employs two base techniques: block-based motion compensation for reduction of temporal redundancy, and transform-domain, or DCT, coding for reduction of spatial-redundancy. The motion compensation technique is applied both in the forward (causal) and backward (non-causal) direction. The remaining signal (prediction error) is coded using the transform based technique. The motion predictors, or motion vectors, are transmitted together with the spatial information.

There are several problems with the motion vector implementation in MPEG-4, which could lead to less than optimal compression/quality ratios, but overall the new features included in the MPEG-4 format itself compensate for this loss somewhat, or at least, that's what the MPEG proponents hope. A lot of people will have no choice but to use the format, but if enough companies break away from it, it could lead to a situation where the acceptance threshold is reached for competing format.

Should be interesting times ahead.