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."

Comments

Free ... of which patents?

[rzei]

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.

Re:Free ... of which patents?

[kyousum]

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?

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.

Re:Free ... of which patents?

[novus ordo]

That's why organizations like this exist. Just because you use it in your home project doesn't mean you will get your pants sued by everybody imaginable. Not every organization is like RIAA or MPAA. However, if you intend to use it in a commercial product you should seriously weigh the advantages of licensing as opposed to litigating. Here are some of MPEG LA's licensing terms:

Royalties to be paid by end product manufacturers for an encoder, a decoder or both ("unit") begin at US $0.20 per unit after the first 100,000 units each year. There are no royalties on the first 100,000 units each year. Above 5 million units per year, the royalty is US $0.10 per unit.

# Title-by-Title - For AVC video (either on physical media or ordered and paid for on title-by-title basis, e.g., PPV, VOD, or digital download, where viewer determines titles to be viewed or number of viewable titles are otherwise limited), there are no royalties up to 12 minutes in length. For AVC video greater than 12 minutes in length, royalties are the lower of (a) 2% of the price paid to the licensee from licensee's first arms length sale or (b) $0.02 per title. Categories of licensees include (i) replicators of physical media, and (ii) service/content providers (e.g., cable, satellite, video DSL, internet and mobile) of VOD, PPV and electronic downloads to end users.

# Subscription - For AVC video provided on a subscription basis (not ordered title-by-title), no royalties are payable by a system (satellite, internet, local mobile or local cable franchise) consisting of 100,000 or fewer subscribers in a year. For systems with greater than 100,000 AVC video subscribers, the annual participation fee is $25,000 per year up to 250,000 subscribers, $50,000 per year for greater than 250,000 AVC video subscribers up to 500,000 subscribers, $75,000 per year for greater than 500,000 AVC video subscribers up to 1,000,000 subscribers, and $100,000 per year for greater than 1,000,000 AVC video subscribers.

Not really unreasonable. Especially when you consider what kind of license terms are offered for content(aka RIAA or MPAA).

Re:Did I Read the Right Article?

[mavenguy]

A better link is here.

Re:Did I Read the Right Article?

[Rashkae]

Wrong article is linked in the blurp. (But we already knew Slashdot 'editors' never actually verify this stuff) Try here

Here's to the first post to snipe at the editors and (hopefully) get modded way up :)

NO! There are ones in development though...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:H.264 = MPEG-4

[neutrino38]

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

• Two video codecs (MPEG 4 ASP and H.264) with several profiles
• Several audio codecs
• A file format
• A network transport
• etc ...

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