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Theora Development Continues Apace, VP8 Now Open Source
SergeyKurdakov writes "Monty 'xiphmont' Montgomery of the Xiph Foundation says the latest action-packed, graph- and demo-clip-stuffed Theora project update page (demo 9) is now up for all and sundry! Catch up on what's gone into the new Theora encoder Ptalarbvorm over the last few months. It also instructs how to pronounce 'Ptalarbvorm.' Ptalarbvorm is not a finished release encoder yet, though I've personally been using it in production for a few months. Pace on improvements hasn't slowed down — the subjective psychovisual work being done by Tim Terriberry and Greg Maxwell has at least doubled-again on the improvements made by Thusnelda, and they're not anywhere near done yet. As a bonus Monty gathered all Xiph demo pages in one place."
Also on the video codec front, and also with a Xiph connection, atamido writes "Google has released On2's VP8 video codec to the world, royalty-free. It is packaging it with Vorbis audio, in a subset of the Matroska container, and calling it WebM. It's not branded as an exclusively Google project — Mozilla and Opera are also contributors. Builds of your favorite browsers with full support are available."
An anonymous reader points out this technical analysis of VP8.
Free Software projects are not likely to be a target in this particular patent battle. Patent lawsuits are expensive, and Free Software projects are unlikely to have the resources to make them workable targets. After all, how do you prove millions in damages from a project given away for free? More importantly, there are plenty of well-funded entities with an interest in protecting Free Software projects in general, and these codecs in particular, from patent attacks. My guess is that if you were sued by MPEG-LA (or whoever) for using of VP8 or Ogg Theora that there would be plenty of companies with deep pockets that would be willing to help pay for excellent legal representation.
You don't honestly think that Google will allow MPEG-LA (or Microsoft, or Apple) to get a precedent setting patent case against some piddly Free Software project that was merely using VP8 (or even Ogg Theora) without at least offering world class legal assistance? It doesn't matter who gets sued over these codecs. Google is going to make sure that whoever it is that gets sued has the best lawyers that money can buy. Suing a Free Software project just guarantees that the patent holders suing 1) look like horrible thugs in front of a jury 2) limit the amount of damages that they can ask for (because the Free Software guy is likely to be much poorer than Google).
In short, there is no upside to suing the little guy, only downside. So if there is a lawsuit it will be against Google, and MPEG-LA (or Apple or Microsoft) would have to be desperate to get to that point.
Talk, on the other hand is cheap. I fully expect a FUD-storm very reminiscent of the one that Microsoft leveled against Linux. Just because Microsoft, Apple, or MPEG-LA say that there are problems, however, does not mean that they are willing to risk a patent war with Google, and that's what it would take to actually back up any threats.