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

QT is a metaformat..

[snillfisk]

After all, QT is a metaformat .. which isnt actually doing any compression or anything, but rather specifying which codecs to use. the biggest problem with getting an open source version that handles all QT-files nicely, is the patents and licensing on central codecs (especially the Sorenson Video codec).. more info can be found at http://www.apple.com/quicktime/specifications.html .

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.

Future?

[O2n]

Future versions of VP3 will be released under the LGPL [...] Stay tuned!

In other news, future versions of Windows will be released under the LGPL; stay tuned and don't forget to tell your children to tell their children to tell...

:)

Looks like a good thing to me.

[noser]

I have never heard of this codec, but it seems to me that this is more or less what the LGPL is intended for. Take a quick look at the LGPL and note this section:

For example, on rare occasions, there may be a special need to encourage the widest possible use of a certain library, so that it becomes a de-facto standard. To achieve this, non-free programs must be allowed to use the library. A more frequent case is that a free library does the same job as widely used non-free libraries. In this case, there is little to gain by limiting the free library to free software only, so we use the Lesser General Public License.

(Emphasis mine)

Seems to me that the people at VP3 would like as many people as possible to start working with their codec, allowing it to gain ascendancy over other codecs so that someday they will be able to make money selling their own "enhanced" version. Not a bad deal for GNU, because we get something badly needed. I hope that we start to hear more about this codec being used in some interesting projects in the future now that it has become more available.

What's with XviD?

[nutshell42]

http://www.xvid.org

XviD is based on the old OpenDivX-Codec but afaik doesn't use any of its code any longer and is completely GPled.

the codec improves at an amazing speed and already beats the shit out of VP3:
http://www.doom9.org/codecs.htm

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:I'd never trust anyone except Ogg

[JabberWokky]

DivX ;) has had a very bumpy and very forked road - primarily because it wasn't a file format so much as a hacked DLL that was a stolen Microsoft test codec, with the audio replaced with (originally) MP3. Since there was no formal definition of the file format, it's fragmented pretty heavily with different encoders producing output that works on some of the variants, and other encoders working on different variants. At least two efforts have been made to rewrite the whole thing from scratch, and at least two alternate sound codecs exist (thus the common cry of "there's no sound in that file!"). There are questions of patents being filed even now (since it was a "format" swiped from a corporation), and, all in all, the situation has been very tangled for a single, real standard to emerge.

LGPL grants the same public use that the GPL does, except you can also combine it with commercial software (you have to release source only for the modifications done to that specific part of the code). It's not a "bastard license", but rather a compromise to allow commercial software to link to fundimental system libraries and run on a Free system. YMMV on what you think of that, but for things like file formats and reference code to file formats, IMO, the LGPL is the best license around - it keeps the whole thing open, including any changes that anybody makes to it, so the standard is open for the whole world no matter who uses it in any application.

I'm personally of the opinion that an LGPL library to read a few types of XML documents (a word processor format, a spreadsheet format, a bitmap with annotations, a vector art format and a vector engineering format) should be made, and maintained by all major office suites, probably starting off with the various open source projects. Even if a company didn't use the exact code, it serves as reference code for compatability tests and extensions.

--
Evan

Excellent move

[AirLace]

VP3 is a really powerful codec. It's like a next-generation DivX -- similarly to DivX the only thing holding back from widespread use were its worrying licensing terms. Now that it's free I'm looking forward to seeing this adopted fully by the community.

This means that streaming video embedded in webpages for the Linux / Free Software clan is now a reality, but perhaps more importantly, VP3 makes it possible to eliminate adware/spyware like RealVideo and the equally obnoxious and platform-specific Windows Media. Cheers for all the great work, On2 Technologies! This is, in my opinion, one of the most important things to happen on the open source scene for quite some time.

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.

Re:ogg tarkin is somewhat dead.

[jonathan_ingram]

Tarkin is not dead.

Tarkin is in the same state that Vorbis was 3 years ago. No-one sensible thinks that it should be competing with MPEG-4/Sorensen/VP* at the moment. No-one connected with the project (only a couple of people, working in their spare time) has been promoting this project as competitive -- only some losers who hype every piece of open source software, no matter how far along in development the software it.

Come back in 2/3 years, and Tarkin will be looking much better.

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

Next generation is NOT under LGPL/GPL.

[Svartalf]

They're selling the VP4 codec and have a VP5 that's in testing right now. They plan on selling that- if they get an open sourced version of the prior generation out there that can be supported by their newer codecs, that's a win for most people (So long as they provide the decoder for the latest format for free, that is... :-) I'll be posing that question to them on the list. It's great and all, but unless we've got decoders for VP4 and VP5, it's not as good as it could be.

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.