VP3.com: Future VP3 Releases To Be LGPL

sudog writes: "According to this vorbis-dev posting and The VP3 Homepage VP3 (QT5-type movie compression scheme) is now under the LGPL! What's not clear is whether they intend to offer it guaranteed royalty and patent free to the community. They're actively looking for help, too. Does this mean that we no longer need the OGG-Tarkin to save us from our movie-less, video-app-less emulating?" Of course, they don't say starting when, exactly.

Comments

Patent protection - from Vorbis mailing list

[SpinyNorman]

___ Dan Miller
(++,) CTO and founder, On2 Technologies

On Wed, 27 Mar 2002 volsung@asu.edu wrote:

> On Wed, 27 Mar 2002, Daniel B. Miller wrote:
>
> > Hi fellow Ogg-oids --
> >
> > I wanted to let everyone know that VP3, our open-source video codec that
> > is commonly used with QT5, is being re-released under the LGPL. We are
>
> Really!?! All I can say is wow. What about the patent issues? Are you
> granting royalty-free license to the required patents along with the license
> to the code?

That's a requirement of the LGPL, so, yes.

Re:Patent protection - from Vorbis mailing list

[AVee]

Hey, stop it, that was my post. ;-)
Well I'll post the link then...

Re:Patent protection - from Vorbis mailing list

[Rentar]

Wow! I defintely think this is basically a good thing, but I got two objections (or rather questions, or ideas that got something to do with it, or ... whatever):

• How do they stay in buisness? Re-licensing it for money? Support? If so: Good luck, you'll need it!
• I hope this won't prevent the tarkin-folks from trying to come up with their own new-and-improved codec.

Re:Patent protection - from Vorbis mailing list

[AVee]

How do they stay in buisness? Re-licensing it for money?
Read this: The power of this codec has been validated by the fact that it has been licensed by both RealNetworks and Apple for their internet video players.

They do license it right now. They might get in to trouble with this though, since they can't forbid anybody to use the LGPL'ed version or make them pay for it once it is released to the public. So they might get a lot of support from the OSS community, wich will improve their software, but likely not their income...

Speaking of quicktime...

[xtermz]

...The latest issue of Linux Journal (remember that mag? ) has a good article on the various quicktime players available for Linux, and how to install/use them ...

Check them here : Linux Journal

XVID, a GPL video codec

[BoBInO]

For those bitter about Divx, have a look at XVID (www.xvid.org). This a GPL video codec based on the source of OpenDivx.
This codec give me excellent results compared to Divx 3.11Alpha and Divx5...

With XVID video and OGG sound all in a OGM file (OGg Media) i get fully legal DVD-Rip !!! :)

Re:XVID, a GPL video codec

[Skuto]

>With XVID video and OGG sound all in a OGM file
>(OGg Media) i get fully legal DVD-Rip !!! :)

That's assuming XviD doesn't rely on any external MPEG4 patents, and as far as I know, it does.

It's in a similar situation as LAME. The code is GPL, but not legal to use in most countries due to patents. This is why the binaries are usually found on a Russian or Brazialian server.

--
GCP

A couple of points clarified

[AirLace]

• But the code is still patented? No! A post from Dan Miller, CEO of On2 Technologies on vorbis-dev:
  
  > Really!?! All I can say is wow. What about the patent issues? Are you
  > granting royalty-free license to the required patents along with the license
  > to the code?
  That's a requirement of the LGPL, so, yes
  
  
• But what about VP4? It's a better codec, and it's proprietary. VP3 is old news. This is in fact the business model taken by some of the leading self-sustaining free software projects like GhostScript, which releases a non-commercial-with-source version and a GPL'd version of GhostScript that's about a year old. Thus, the GPL'd version comes with Linux distributions, non-commercial entities can make use of the latest GhostScript, the company makes money selling licenses to perpetuate the development of the Free Software version, and everyone's happy.

VP3 is overrated.

[inquis]

Doom9's site is the premiere site on the web for video encoding. Doom9 actively tries to get his hands on the newest encoding tools, and periodically he tests them to see which codecs give the best results.

It used to be that along with the lastest versions of DivX, he tested WMV and VP3; he doesn't anymore: WMV and VP3 consistently lost and lost badly to div3 sbc, div4, and xvid. You can't say that VP3 is "the next DivX" when it's can't outperform the ancient div3, much less div4 or the newly released div5 / xvid.

[shameless plug]

I really, really, /really/ like xvid. It's an open source reimplementation of Project Mayo, the project that led to the development of div4. Development is fast; I have realized significant gains in quality and usability in even the past two weeks. The codec is fast; on my crappy windows machine it crunches frames faster than div4 and div5 and its playback filter (w/postprocessing!) uses fewer CPU cycles than div4 or div5's.

If you want to play around with xvid, the easiest way to start is to go to the xvid forums at doom9.org and read about what the codec can do for you.

[/shameless plug]

-inq

Not so...

[Svartalf]

Yes, it may not perform as well as xvid, but xvid has a severe drawback, that you should be giving consideration to- patent licenses.

There is not an aspect of MPEG4 (which is what xvid is a codec for...) that is not covered by patents that need to be licensed. Nobody has a royalty free license to any MPEG4 patents for free software implementations so distribution of the codec is violating the patent rights of several companies.

You may not care now, but they're stepping up enforcement efforts of all this stuff and you may well find yourself without a codec or in trouble because you're violating the rights too.