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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."
Doesn't this make H.264 only free of the two patents held by Qualcomm? There has to be dozens and dozens of other patents used as AFAIK H.264 is just a profile (AVC) of MPEG-4?
And afaik again, MPEG-4 is very far from being patent encumbered.
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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The only truly, intentionally open standard I know of is Theora, and I really haven't heard much about it.
For that matter, I haven't heard any measurements lately of AAC vs Vorbis, but it seems to me that unless Vorbis is actually better, the best way to encode a video would be h.264+aac, probably wrapped in ogm or mkv, but could also work as avi or mov.
Of course, I often just keep the original DVD stream around, which means -- what -- mpeg2+aac?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
no, this is also known as mpeg-4 part 10
mpeg-4 part 2 has been around for years (ie. xvid and divx)
You have two major ones that can beat out H.264 in quality and file sizes... potentially.
They are Snow, which is a experimental codec being developed out of the FFMPEG project, and there is Dirac which is being developed by the BBC as a open standard for web-based HD content.
Both of these are based on 'wavelett' style technology which is something that is fairly unique about them. The downside though is that Snow, while being much simplier then Dirac, suffers from a lack of development and stability (not crash-iness, but change-iness). Dirac is not mature enough for use. Both of them still use WAY to much CPU to be usefull currently, but both offer possibilities of compression and quality that surpass even H.264.
Theora is completely open, having the benifit from patent donated to open source by a corporation for their codecs, but it suffers from high CPU utilization and a very serious lack of visual quality.
It's not like with Ogg vs MP3 or Flac vs whatever were those guys offer good compression, quality, and lower cpu usage as well as being open source. With Theora vs Mpeg4-related stuff (Xvid/Divx, h.264. AVC, etc) it is not realy in the same ballpack. It is more closely related to Mpeg1 in quality.
And when I mean 'quality' I mean the ability to provide high quality image at high compression, which is the whole point behind things like Theora and H.264.
Already Linux and Free software people have a good H.264 implimentation thanks to the FFmpeg people. Their mpeg4 Divx-stuff is already very high quality.. much better then anything from Xvid or Divx, they have the beginnings of very good H.264 support and have decoding and encoding speeds that rival the best propriatory codecs aviable. They need to fill out some of the H.264 features, but if this is true that H.264 is truly usable in Free software environment, then I expect that development will very quickly take off as the people become aware of this and Linux distros will want to jump on the opportunity to provide world-class HD support!
This should also pave the way for future adoption of Dirac and maybe Snow since then the use of ffmpeg libs should increase in both Linux and Windows-land. Once people get used to it and programs start shipping with ffmpeg libs then this will make it easier for these projects to gain acceptance as ffmpeg is multi-codec and will include these open source technologies as they come out.
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
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.
Unfortunately, a project being open source has no bearing on whether it is patent-encumbered.
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Surely a judge rules, not a jury? Juries render verdicts.
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
Story Errors: I would have thought that, after all these years, Slashdot editors would have learned to be editors. Often Slashdot stories are posted that show not even the simplest examination, such as this one, that references an article that does not support was said in the Slashdot story.
This is more of the real story Broadcom sees win for 'H.264' industry (January 27, 2007). However, the article does NOT say that the patents were invalidated; they have not been invalidated.
This statement from the Slashdot story is incorrect: "This ruling clears the way for H.264 to become a widely adopted open standard." If that were true, it would be important, but it is not true, for three reasons: 1) The patents have not been invalidated (yet). 2) There can be an appeal. 3) There are other patents.
I have no idea whether Qualcomm's idea rose to the ideal patent standard but I'd bet dollars to donuts the jury didn't either. Given the time constraints, they can't possibly learn enough to understand the technology to determine whether Qualcomm had a lousy patent or Broadcom was infringing. Patent enforcement decisions make about as much sense as flipping a coin.
Patents are designed by and implemented by attorneys. They're the beneficiaries of this system, not the public nor the inventor. The inventors and public just end up getting screwed.
From Wikipedia: I don't see how H.264 is related to GSM or G.729.
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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Did anyone notice that one of the spokesmen for the companies had the title of Vice-President for Intellectual Property Litigation? I don't know that I want to do away with software patents altogether (maybe, I'm not sure), but it bothers me when a company has a department, evidently important enough to be headed by a vice president, dedicated to litigation. Here's another vote for some serious reform in the patent system.