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MPEG LA Extends H.264 Royalty-Free Period
Sir Homer writes "The MPEG LA has extended their royalty-free license (PDF) for 'Internet Video that is free to end users' until the end of 2016. This means webmasters who are registered MPEG LA licensees will not have to pay a royalty to stream H.264 video for the next six years. However the last patent in the H.264 portfolio expires in 2028, and the MPEG LA has not released what fees, if any, it will charge webmasters after this 'free trial' period is over."
However the last patent in the H.264 portfolio expires in 2028, and the MPEG LA has not released what fees, if any, it will charge webmasters after this 'free trial' period is over.
I would SERIOUSLY hope there are new protocols by 2028...
Living With a Nerd
How does a patent license allow you to charge for transmitting data over the Internet? I get that the encoder requires a patent license, and the decoder requires a patent license, but sending an encoded file over the Internet? That's just absurd.
What a charming business model.
Oh well, I guess webmasters could have always used something else, right?
It's particularly nice that web masters are giving billing information 6 years early, so the company doesn't have to do much to track down the first round of suck^H^H^H^H customers to bill them for use.
There's nothing like getting your IP embedded deeply into everyones processes (with their complete acknowledgement of that fact) and then seeking rent against the cost of changing it.
I would expect that many companies don't have migration plans in place, I don't know, not my business.
Regards.
2010: DIVE! DIVE!
It's free, come and get it
2016: Up periscope. Look there's someone using it without paying the $799/Stream licensing fee.
-Arm MPEG LAwyer Torpedoes, FIRE!
looks like a ambush in slow-motion.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
I've been personally touched by MPEG LA's patent witch hunt. And not in the good way like Kathleen Fent does.
My brother in law is the CEO of a small LCD monitor company that uses H.264 decoder chips. He buys these chips from a Taiwanese maker who in turn licenses the patent for H.264 decoding from MPEG LA.
But MPEG LA has been spamming everyone and anyone vaguely connected to H.264 encoding or playback or even (in this case) sending files across the intarweb. He is expected to succeed if MPEG LA ever takes this to court since the patent is already licensed by the chip vendor and his agreement with them covers him under its indemnity clause.
However this is a really plain-as-day example of how patent trolls are ruining business for everyone.
You know, Theora video doesn't suck.
And even if it sucked, that wouldn't matter anyway :
most of video today consist of short snips on social websites of dancing cats filmed with a camera phone with crappy sensors and low quality MJPEG compression.
Arguing that Theora would need more bits to achieve the same quality as other codec is akin to arguing that Youtube should spend more bits to be better faithful to all the compression artifacts.
Theora opponents say that, for the same bits bandwidth, Theora video is blurrier. I'm saying that this blur won't hide any critical detail. It will only blur out the noise from the camera phone's crappy sensor and from the MJPEG'S 50% compression. I personally *can* live without them, if it is what it takes to have a open free/libre standard.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The MPEG patent thicket is a prime example of the real problem of software patents. If I want to write a video player, it has to play the formats that people encode videos in. The veto power of patents equates to the right to prohibit me, and everyone, from writing a functional video player. I think I already have pretty good info, but there's loads more of this story to tell. Help really appreciated in documenting this:
swpat.org is a publicly editable wiki.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
The first hit is free.
This is a rake, lying on the ground in plain sight with red markers all over it and a big sign.
Step on it at your own risk, but don't come crying when the rake hits you in the face.
After the gif debacle, you would think people would learn.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Yes, yes, I know there's $obscure_bad_interface_linux_based_device that supports Theora and Ogg.
Go to the nearest electric/computer parts shop.
Go to the shelf where all the multimedia player/harddisk enclosure are. You know : black box, you buy one, optionally slap a harddrive into it, optionally plug an ethernet cable and put it under the TV set (Kiss, Tvix, etc.).
Chance are :
- almost all of them will run some (hidden and un-advertised) Linux kernel under the hood.
- almost all of them will support Ogg Vorbis and FLAC (not always advertised)
- a huge proportion can do software Theora decoding (Theora is an older and much simplier codec. It requires less resources than H264 and can be done in software or DSP/SIMD assisted software). It's not always advertised, it might only come in a firmware upgrade. But lot's have it.
- not all of them will have painfully ugly interfaces
So the situation is a bit more easy than "there's one single model which plays it". Lots of asian noname devices manufacturer are implementing it, because it comes for free and because they can thus add an additional bullet point to the feature list.
Want hardware support ?
- There exist open theora core.
Don't want to make a custom chip ?
- There also exist a GPGPU implementation.
Given that ARM and both PowerVR (maker of the GPU core on the hyper-popular OMAP chipsets) and nVidia (maker of the GPU core on the upcoming Tegra) are members of the OpenCL committee, you can expect that hardware accelerated OpenCL-written video codecs will be the solution for lots of future devices.
The situations is similar as with Ogg Vorbis a few years before :
- it's doable.
- big brand doesn't do it, yet. because their lasy.
- noname brand are starting to pick it up. after a couple of years it will have a huge market share among the brandless device, to the point that anything except Apple's device can play it.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
we'll be using a different format. Yes, it will be encumbered by patents, DRM and a bunch of other shit we don't even know yet - but it will not be H.264. I don't really see how this extension of free licensing could be profitable to them.
Nothing lasts forever but the certainty of change.
Yeah, but it's not encumbered by patents and other legal bullshit.
Keep in mind that the HTML5 effort is much unlike the past HTML and XHTML standardization efforts. While the past efforts were driven by the W3C, HTML5 is a product of Google, Apple, Opera, Mozilla and other corporations, masquerading as a "community effort" just because their browsers are open source.
With HTML5 being implemented to suit the needs of media distribution companies like Apple and Google (ie. YouTube) who have shown a propensity towards using DRM and undocumented formats, it's not surprising at all that a better and much more open video standard would be passed over in favor of proprietary, encumbered "alternatives".
HTML5 will be one of the worst things to hit the Web in years. Sure, it'll let some folks create dinky demos using the canvas element, but it'll also be the platform through which the Googles and Apples of the Internet force DRM and proprietary media technology on basically everyone, thanks to it HTML5 being a "standard".
Keep in mind that the H264 standard and how it is implemented are two different things. Which is good, and bad, as we'll see. First, patents must be filed within 1 year of public disclose in the US, or before disclosure with PCTs. So any information you find will be unencumbered no more than 21 years after it was disclosed. Since H264 was finalized May 2003, the specification cannot be encumbered after 2024. And many aspects of it (draft specs, for example) will be available to anyone, license free, years before that. Probably some parts of it even now (though possibly such narrow, arbitrary steps that no one would care).
So the spec is available before 2028, but how about implementing it?
Well, certain implementations will be covered for many years. In fact, if you come up with a new way to encode or decode H264 today, you can still file a patent. For example: if you discover that by connecting two wires to a squirrel and sending uncompressed video into the squirrel through one wire results in H264 video out the other wire, that's patentable. Freaky, weird, but damn well worth a patent. If you figure out how to do it with a genetically altered squirrel 5000 years from now (hey, you've already go a digital squirrel, let's keep the weirdness going), then you could still get a patent. 5000 years after all the other implementations are free.
What this means is that over time, people will still file new implementations, but the older ones will also be opening up. Come 2016, there might be a way to do H264 without a patent license if someone clever figures out what pieces are free to use and figures out an alternative to the parts still under patent.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Streaming video needs an Apache. By that, I mean a very standardized server and set of protocols for delivering files encoded in a non-proprietary, free-to-use, free-to-decode, unrestricted-in-every-imaginable-sense manner.
The source of what has held this back, in my opinion, is that taking giant video files (and you should see how big raw video is) and cramming them down into small, chunkable files which can decode at the end into recognizable images is hard. Hard in the sense of "takes people with a great deal of math knowledge and computer science knowledge to pull off." It's not like HTML, where you are pushing around what are basically text files that you can open in Notepad. It takes a great deal of intellectual know-how and deep domain knowledge to pull this off on the encoding end in some reasonable fashion that doesn't take a lot of CPU cycles.
The few people who can do this take a long time to figure out a new scheme, and they have to test the living hell out of it. You can write a primitive webserver without too much fuss, it's just a specialized server which kicks out text and binary files on command, after all. Encoding video and serving it, though, is not easy. That's why so much goes into protecting the intellectual property; it was not trivial to create. Wade around in the fifteen profiles for MPEG-4 Part 10 aka AVC aka H.264 for a while and realize that this is not trivial. Hell, it had to be jointly developed by two groups, ITU's video group and MPEG. Take a look at Theora -- even its codebase is descended from something that once took real money to make.
If streaming media is to have its Apache, an investment of money must be made in finding these highly talented individuals and paying them to make a new, open standard. And code must be made available for an end-to-end implementation on many platforms, everything from encoding to serving (with authentication fun, to boot) to decoding, on Windows, on Unix/Linux, on Macs. With regression tests and tutorials. Plug-ins to be written for the top, say, ten browsers. And a decoder library for Flash. While this is going on, political battles will have to be fought to keep Microsoft, Apple, and other companies out of the loop, or they'll pull the usual and destroy or cripple the product before it reaches market, just as they managed to poison HTML5's video standards.
None of this is technically impossible, but it will be hard, and it will cost money and political tokens and time and real effort. Can it be done?
Imagine a nonpracticing entity discovering that it holds a patent that covers part of a widely used video codec, and it sues a major user of the codec for infringement of this patent. If this codec is one of the H.264 codecs, you'd get every MPEG LA member scrutinizing this patent and threatening to sue the rogue NPE for infringement of other patents that cover H.264 if it doesn't join MPEG LA. But if this codec is Theora, there isn't much of a way for patent holder On2 to retaliate against the rogue NPE because its VP3 patents underlying Theora are under a permissive license. (Well at least there wasn't before Google bought On2.)
I tried out Dirac for some of my private video collection last night and was quite impressed by the size of files output whilst still having reasonable quality. I shall be trying it out as my own preferred format for ripped DVDs but it is a standard it would be really interesting to see more uptake of. It's worth remembering that Theora is not the only open source and patent free codec out there, nor necessarily even the highest quality one.
(so, Opera is out, and Firefox on Windows and Mac is out)
Nonetheless, both FireFox and Opera are currently in the Theora camp.
If I want to use them (and I do. I use Firefox) I need Theora videos.
So Dailymotion and Thevideobay work for me. But not Youtube.
Except you really don't, as you can *right now* play h.264 with completely free software.
Free Software : yes.
Legal Software : that's a completely different can of worms. Some jurisdictions *DO* recognise software patents, and in such places - x264, ffmpeg and the like *are illegal*.
There's no legal or technical reason that Firefox can't support h.264 across Mac, Windows and Linux. The only reason it's left out is for blatantly political reasons.
Legal reason : Software patents. They happen to valid in some countries (USA and some
European countries).
Technical reasons :
- you need to be able to distribute the code, if you want a GPLv2/v3 license. But h264 decoding code might be illegal (see legal reason).
- supporting system codec is out of the question. the whole VIDEO/HTML5 idea was to escape from the dependence of binary 3rd party plug-ins. Opting for 3rd party codecs it, at best, a return to the statu quo (you replace a Flash proprietary BLOB with a codec proprietary BLOB. Meet the new master, same as the old master) and at worse, a huge step back (at least current 3rd party proprietary plugins were designed for the web (supposedly). Whereas some codecs might not be able to do proper stream/seeking nor be able to cope with malformed data without getting exploited).
- this assumes that system codec exists. whereas, such codec might be missing because no-one produces them on such a platform (all the non-x86, non-windows platforms) or because they are not packaged with the system (older windows versions, like XP)
Political reasons: someone has to do the fight for open standard. Why not the fastest growing browser with 1/4 of the market share, and the most popular embed browser ?
In short : Do you want to imagine what internet would have looked like if everyone writing or displaying HTML pages had to pay a tax to the CERN ? Mozilla and Opera are fighting so that doesn't happen in the future regarding video. I think that this is a valid reason.
Not true. First off, I'm just fine with sites providing both h.264 and Theora.
Me too, and almost everyone else.
The problem is that Firefox wants no h.264 option at all. In other words, they do not want people to be able to use the superior codec.
[citation needed]
I haven't seen a message from mozilla saying they want to forbid completely h264. The only thing I've read is about they wanting Theora to be supported, be part of the standard, and be mandatory on all browsers for html-5 compliance, so that the future web can be built on open standard. I've never seen anything saying that proprietary solution should not be offered as an alternative.
you can use x264 or ffmpeg {...} It's possible Mozilla may wish to avoid bundling x264 with Firefox in the US, but it can be easily supported as a completely open source plugin the user can install themselves
There are other countries besides the USA which recognise software patents. Sadly, this is starting to appear in Europe too (luckily, not all member states already).
And Mozilla are incorporated in the USA, which means, the law their are subjected to makes it illegal to do it.
And between trying to find contrived ways to circumvent complex patent law, and simply going for a solution which is not patented at all, I too think that the second approach is more sensible.
So, a 10% worse solution, for far, far less than 10% of the users? Doesn't sound like a net win to me.
It's a win compared to no solution at all due to broken p
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]