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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.
A better link is here.
Here's to the first post to snipe at the editors and (hopefully) get modded way up :)
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
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. .ogm? .mkv? .avi? .mov? .mp4?
.ogg or .mkv, the world's geeks are actually doing more to set back standardization of digital video than big companies and their DRM. How's that for a turnaround from the audio world where geeks chose mp3 and industry followed!
.mp4 container, provide the best quality and functionality you can get today (.mkv is nice but it doesn't do anything .mp4 couldn't with the right tools, and neither Xvid/DivX or Theora can touch h264's quality/bitrate), and they are completely standardized and free to use for distributions of up to 100,000 codecs per year afaik.
.mp3s, then the digital video world would get a lot simpler.
.mp3 today...
So basically you'll use anything *but* the actual standard MPEG-4 container that's designed to carry h264/aac streams? What's wrong with
This is a somewhat separate rant and not really directed at the parent, but it seems like between pirates sticking with their habitual use of Xvid/DivX in avi, and OSS fanatics refusing to use anything non-OSS in favor of Theora in
MPEG-4 standards, specifically h264/aac streams in an
If we'd all pick up the MPEG-4 stack the way we all standardized on
Imagine a world where every camcorder, or DVD player, or computer, or PMP, or digital camera, or cell phone, or what not, could record and play back in the same interoperable high quality/bitrate video format with no special file conversions or re-encoding, just like all of those devices support
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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
I seem to recall that some existing OSS MPEG-4 related projects distribute source code only for that sort of reason.
They distribute source code because the courts (in the USA at least) have ruled that source code is speech, as in "freedom of" and binaries are not. Thus they are a lot better protected from claims of patent infringment if they stay away from the binaries.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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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