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 .

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

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.

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.