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Jury Rules That H.264 is Not Patented
Dr Kool, PhD writes "According to Bloomberg, a jury ruled against Qualcomm in their patent lawsuit against Broadcom. Qualcomm had sought $8.3 million in damages for patent infringement stemming from Broadcom's H.264 encoder/decoder chips. From the article: 'The patents, covering a way to compress high-definition video, are unenforceable in part because Qualcomm withheld information from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, jurors in San Diego said today after deliberating less than six hours.' This ruling clears the way for H.264 to become a widely adopted open standard."
According to the article, the case is going to the jury, and that "experts" believe that the jury will find against Broadcom, not Qualcomm. I'm not seeing anything that says that the jury has ruled on anything.
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no, this is also known as mpeg-4 part 10
mpeg-4 part 2 has been around for years (ie. xvid and divx)
No. H.264 is only PART of MPEG 4
H.264 = MPEG 4 part 10 = MPEG 4 AVC
MPEG 4 is a how framework that comprises
The guys who wrote the standards (H.264) expected that one of the profile (baseline profile) would be patent free anyway
Anyway if this jugement could free up more profile, it would be great
DVD are usually something like Mpeg2 + Ac3 for surround sound support or Mpeg2 + raw PCM (uncompressed audio) for stereo. Also you may have some with mp3 compression.
No AAC, which is Apple's baby.
The reason you use something like H.264 is because it offers much higher compression with similar visual quality as mpeg2. So you can take a DVD movie and compress it down to a third of it's original size (or more) and still keep enough quality that the difference is unnoticable.
This is important for doing things like streaming, for instance, or for downloadable media.
Also for HD content the H.264 stuff is still going to be like 20 gigs or more. In mpeg2 form it would be massive and you'd have a hard time keeping up with the bitrates nessicary to play it even at LAN speeds. Also I am told that mpeg2 has several undesirable characteristics at very high resolution when it comes to quality and such.
With Free software considurations probably your best bet will be something like OGM with Ogg container format with Vorbis audio and H.264 video. Vorbis is able to provide up to 255 different audio channels so you can provide multiple audio streams in one go for different languages or for commentary tracks or something like that. Although I don't know of anything that realy uses many multiple streams in Ogg Vorbis, most everything is just stereo. There probably has to be some work there, but it shouldn't be hard to create a standard people can use. AAC may have some slight advantage over Ogg in sound quality, but it's nothing like either of those guy's advantage over Mp3. Not a big difference to warrent realy caring about AAC when Vorbis is around and already has widespread support.
AVI container format has some nasty limitations when it comes to having things like subtitle support. I don't know how well Ogg container deals with that.
I don't know how well Ogg compares to Quicktime either.
Also it's worth not overlooking the fact that Flac and Speex (VERY high compression for speech.. usefull for VoIP) can be mixed into Ogg streams also.
It may be usefull, for instance, for VoIP to do H.264 streams combined with Speex in OGG container to get the highest compression possible for doing video confrencing.
Also we already have a nice streaming media server that supports not only OggVorbis, but can do video Ogg support also:
http://www.icecast.org/
Icecast has had Theora support for a while now. I wouldn't expect it to be difficult to extend that to support OGM format. Icecast has a veriaty of existing clients and web interfaces as well as the ability to support bandwidth-saving stuff like multicast and unicast. This can be very usefull if you want to do things like... oh.. having multiple IPTV channels aviable to students on a college campus.
For once an article actually uses some specificity to describe the correct codec involved, H.264, and it gets "corrected" to the general, way too broad name that many other articles use when they are referring to H.264, an implementation of MPEG-4 Part 10.
You could have said "otherwise known as MPEG-4 AVC" and you would have been more precise, but "MPEG-4" in general also includes DivX/XviD, 3ivx, Nero Digital, and Quicktime. Obviously the article is not referring to any of those codecs.
FYI, AAC is Dolby, Fraunhofer (FhG), AT&T, Sony and Nokia's baby.
RealNetworks, Apple and Nero (among others) just took a license on this existing (MPEG4, ISO/IEC: 13818-7) standard and built their own encoder implementations.
True. There are 20 corporations participating in the MPEG LA patent portfolio for H.264. Each of these corporations believe they have patents essential to impliment H.264(here's a long list(pdf))) and are collecting licensing fees from hundred of licensees.
but why not?
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"Icecast has had Theora support for a while now."
It has been a while since I messed with it, but I think I had Theora streaming with peercast as well.
For those that don't know, peercast does peer to peer streaming.
http://www.peercast.org/
all the best,
drew
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
Unfortunately, a project being open source has no bearing on whether it is patent-encumbered.
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Yes and no. H.264 isn't 'MPEG-4' it's MPEG-4 AVC. MPEG-4 is just a name the covers many, many codecs. H.264 is just one such codec. Even so, Qualcomm isn't th only patent holder, by far, of H.264/AVC, so the article title is misleading. From MPEG-LA, which is the primary provider of licenses for H.264 (and lots of other MPEG standards): MPEG LA's AVC Patent Portfolio License currently includes patents owned by DAEWOO Electronics Corporation; Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute; France Télécom, société anonyme; Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Foerderung der angewandten Forschung e.V.; Fujitsu Limited; Hitachi, Ltd.; Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V.; LG Electronics Inc.; LSI Logic Corporation; Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.; Microsoft Corporation; Mitsubishi Electric Corporation; Robert Bosch GmbH; Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.; Sedna Patent Services, LLC; Sharp Corporation; Siemens AG; Sony Corporation; The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York; Toshiba Corporation; UB Video Inc.; and Victor Company of Japan, Ltd. MPEG LA's goal is to provide worldwide access to as much AVC essential intellectual property as possible; new Licensors and essential patents may be added at no additional royalty during the current term. Interestingly enough, I don't even see Qualcomm in list. Considering that Qualcomm is the patent holder for CDMA and related technologies, I'm guessing that Qualcomm doesn't even have any patents in the MPEG LA pool, but instead has patented particular implementations of H.264 for use in mobile phone applications.
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Not necessarily.... juries determine the FACTS, judges interpret the LAW and handle procedure (unless you have a bench trial w/o a jury where the judge does it all). These days in civil trial in the US, many (especially in complex cases) juries are given interrogatories as verdict forms. They have to answer a series of questions about facts that the parties disputed in a sort of flow chart. "1) Do you find Mr. X did Y? If so, go to question 2. If not, STOP. 2) Do you find that any portion of Miss Z's injuries were caused by Y. If so, go to question 3. If not, STOP. 3) Do you find that Miss Z failed to mitigate the damages from Y?" You get the picture.
Article linked is yesterday's announcement that it's going to the Jury. Here's the link and text of the right article:
Broadcom sees win for 'H.264' industry
By Kathryn Balint and David Washburn
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITERS
January 27, 2007
After just six hours of deliberating, a federal jury found yesterday that chip maker Broadcom did not infringe on two patents held by San Diego-based Qualcomm and determined in two advisory votes that Qualcomm had withheld key information from a standards-making body and the patent office.
Union-Tribune file photo
San Diego-based Qualcomm lost a round in federal court yesterday against Southern California chip-making rival Broadcom.
Qualcomm, which accused Irvine-based Broadcom of infringing on two video-compression patents, was seeking $8.3 million in damages for one of the patents. It did not seek any damages for the other patent.
The San Diego jury's unanimous decision is a win for manufacturers that comply with the same video-compression standard as that used by Broadcom.
Qualcomm had argued that one of the two patents at issue was incorporated into the H.264 industry standard used in millions of consumer devices, such as high-definition DVD players and Apple video iPods.
"We're grateful for the jury's verdict - a resounding victory for Broadcom," said David Rosmann, vice president of intellectual property litigation for the company. "This is a victory not just for Broadcom, but for the entire H.264 industry."
Qualcomm had little to lose in the case but everything to win.
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If it had prevailed in its patent-infringement claims, it potentially could have asked courts to ban products that used the industry standard or sought royalty payments from their manufacturers.
Yesterday's decision does not affect Qualcomm's core business of licensing cell phone technology.
A loss for Broadcom, however, could have resulted in the ban of some of its chips and could have cost the company possibly hundreds of millions of dollars in future royalty payments.
The U.S. District Court case was just one of seven lawsuits between the two companies scheduled for trial this year.
"There certainly was a significant upside potential for us, but it was all upside, no downside," said Qualcomm executive vice president and general counsel Lou Lupin. "For Broadcom, it was all downside, no upside. It probably won't have any impact on us one way or the other. It's just the latest round in a series of battles."
The speed with which the nine-member jury returned the verdict was stunning, particularly for a case that involved more than 40 hours of testimony and evidence akin to a graduate-level college course on video compression.
Jury foreman David Ingraham, a Carmel Valley resident and retired vice president of finance and planning for McGraw-Hill, said the quick verdict came about because each jury member entered deliberations with a strong understanding of the evidence.
"I'm not going to say we were all electrical engineers, because we aren't," Ingraham said. "But people listened carefully to the testimony and took good notes - and it came down overwhelmingly on one side."
The jury did find that the two Qualcomm patents in question in the case were valid, a loss to Broadcom, which had argued otherwise.
One of the biggest blows to Qualcomm came in the form of advisory votes, sought by the judge, in which the jury questioned Qualcomm's integrity.
In one advisory vote, the jury found "clear and convincing evidence" that Qualcomm had withheld previous scientific studies on video-compression from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office when applying for one of the patents in question. The jury's advisory vote said that the patent is "unenforceable due to Qualcomm's inequitable conduct in the patent application process."
In the second advisory vote, the jury found that Q
From Wikipedia: I don't see how H.264 is related to GSM or G.729.
"Doesn't this make H.264 only free of the two patents held by Qualcomm?"
The article doesn't have many details, but since Qualcomm is (or at least used to be) an IC manufacturer among other things and Broadcom's infringing products are ICs, these patents could easily be specific only to a specific method of implementing H.264 in hardware. The MPEG-4 LA covers licensing of patents that cover the algorithm, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are additional patents out there covering specific unique implementations of H.264. i.e. the MPEG4-LA covers the MPEG-4 related patents that you absolutely can't avoid infringing if you create a compliant MPEG-4 implementation, but not necessarily implementation-specific patents.
It reminds me a lot of the article a few weeks ago where a university was suing some manufacturers of Bluetooth chipsets. Everyone on Slashdot went postal with comments like "How could they patent Bluetooth. Prior art! Prior art!", when in fact the patent was not in ANY way Bluetooth-specific at all but for a method of designing a low-cost RF receiver, a method which a number of Bluetooth silicon manufacturers happened to use in their receiver designs.
My suspicion (the article doesn't have enough details) is that this court decision has absolutely zero effect on anyone who implements H.264 in software as there is a good chance they weren't even infringing in the first place.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
It's perfectly fine to use Matroska, especially when you want to include SSA subtitles (very common in anime releases) or SRT subtitles (also common with anime due to being able to be muxed in an OGM container). Sure, GPAC (MP4Box et al.) can automatically convert SRT subtitles to Timed Text (ISO/IEC 14496-17), but that's not always desired (SSA subtitles can be styled in many different ways; TT cannot).
Also, you can't mux [Ogg] Vorbis in an MP4 container (I believe you can do that in a MOV/QuickTime container, however; also, using the private data stream hack doesn't count), and Vorbis can match, better, or come close to (dependent on source material) the quality of AAC at the same bitrates. Also, if H.264 (ISO/IEC 14496-10 for those who care) is truly now a public domain standard, then it would be far more desirable to mux H.264 video with Vorbis audio as both are open, unencumbered standards. It would also be good to do this in Matroska as that is also an open, unencumbered standard (QuickTime's file format may or may not be patented, but I'd guess it is).
Now I'd definitely recommend using MP4 if everything you're muxing is part of the MPEG-4 (ISO/IEC 14496) standard (e.g. H.264 (or even DivX/Xvid), AAC, TT) as that would make most sense, but beware the limitations of the MP4 container format. The "subtle differences" between MP4 and QuickTime/MOV are the codecs supported.
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