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."

Comments

Re:Data transfer?

[sakdoctor]

Software patents? That's just absurd.

SS H.264 submarine patent

[denis-The-menace]

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.

Re:From TFS

[jeanph01]

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

A lot of fallout

[BadAnalogyGuy]

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.

And even if sucked

[DrYak]

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.

Re:And even if sucked

[Kohlrabi82]

At the lower bit rate end of the spectrum Theora is not bad

This is completely wrong, Theora is *escpecially* bad at low bitrates, I recently made a small comparison of Theora/Thusnelda and H264/x264 encoded 1080p videos, both looked very watchable at 4Mbit, but at 2Mbit problems for Theora/Thusnelda started, and at 1Mbit it was just plain awful. 2Mbit Theora/Thusnelda couldn't nearly reach H264/x264 quality at 1Mbit.

documenting H.264 on http://en.swpat.org

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

    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:

• MPEG video formats (including H.264)
• Harm to standards
• HTML5 and video patents

    swpat.org is a publicly editable wiki.

Re:Nice

[slim]

In 6 years time, there'll be an awful lot of iPhones/iPads (and their descendants) in the wild.

Expect H.264, and maybe some other patent-encumbered standards, to be the only video format a web site can use in order to be viewed on these devices.

The options for video websites in 2016? Pay up, or abandon iPhone/iPad users. Plus who knows how many other closed platforms.

Noname brand player

[DrYak]

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.