Slashdot Mirror
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."
By 2016 would be better.
Software patents? 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 copy pasted this info from here: http://lwn.net/Articles/372416/
These three Nokia patents look like they could be enforced against Theora:
http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=Ic0CAAAAEBAJ
http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=ieIVAAAAEBAJ
http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=zGWBAAAAEBAJ
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.
How does a patent license allow you to charge for transmitting data over the Internet?
Simple: it doesn't. However, it's a good measure of how much revenue MPEG LA expects you to be bringing in from your use of their standards, and as such is a nice way to scale up licensing fees according to your revenue.
Think of it as a way of implementing this rule: You give us X % of the revenue you bring in from your use of our standard, and in exchange, you can use our standard. If the main use of your company is to deliver solutions based on our standard, this will be X % of your revenue. If you only make incidental use of our standard, your license is going to cost you lower.
(And, of course, if you find something else that's good enough for your purposes and is free or costs less than our standard, you're free to use it.)
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 ]
The H.264 patents are method patents, not software patents.
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".