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Microsoft WMV In Patent Trouble?
thpr writes "According to rethink,
Microsoft may be violating patents in their Windows Media software. Apparently, the VC1 standard (from The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers), which has been pushed by Microsoft, depends on patents owned by other companies - more than likely, those that have patents used in the previous MPEG standards. According to the sources in the story, both Sony and Philips may take the case to court, rather than continuing negotiation. As they point out in a later update, Sony might be pleased to have a say in the competing HD-DVD format. Is this a 'major speed bump to Microsoft's dominance of digital media markets'?" Well, the answer, IMHO, is probably not - this is a negotiation issue. But this is a wonderful example of how intertwined legal & software issues can become.
Patent issues never stopped them before.
A friend of mine used to work at Dolby, and there were rumours there that a number of people thought Microsoft were infringing on several patents with WMV. This was a good couple of years ago, too.
Whomever wrote the original article is pretty fuzzy on a lot of details.
Just to clear things up a bit:
VC-9 was based on Windows Media Video 9, which is the commercial release version of the WMV codec, plus the Advanced Profile extensions. It was later renamed VC-1. No difference between the two.
H.264 and VC-1 do have significant technical differences (I go worried when he described his research on this point as "Another source told us recently that they had had the codec explained to them, and confirmed that it did "pretty much" the same as H.264." Well, pretty much in the same way that MPEG-1 and RealVideo do pretty much the same thing. They're both codecs, but have significant differences with real-world differences. For example, VC-1 uses larger blocks than H.264, which helps with some content and hurts with others. H.264 supports multiple reference frames, which can improve compression, but slows encode and decode.
Lastly, these issues aren't that unusual - I doubt it would even be possible to build a competitive codec without stepping on a whole lot of patents. Microsoft has IP in H.264, after all. It's still not possible to build a patent free MPEG-2 decoder.
My video compression blog
The obvious strategy is to go after the small guys, establish precedent, then go after the big guys.
But some patent outfits do go after the big guys straightaway. They know it will get them publicity, and perhaps investment: Just follow SCO's strategy of PR/FUD, but combine it with actually having a case.
VC-1, like MPEG-2, is standardized as how to parse and decode the data stream. The encoding is not actually standardized or defined. Infact, compression gets better every year, even for old-school codecs like MPEG-2, because of new encoding technology.
;)
I suspect that there may be fewer patent problems with the standardization of VC-1 than there are with the implementation of VC-1 (or any kind of WMV). Things like efficient algorithms for determining motion estimation vectors is where you would find the serious patents, these are encoding issues.
(BTW, I am at the SMPTE meeting in Pasadena right now, but I probably won't be attending much of S22. Nor would I talk about it if I did