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MPEG LA Announces Permanent Royalty Moratorium For H264
vistapwns writes "MPEG LA has announced that free h264 content (vs. paid h264 content which will still have royalties) will be royalty free forever. With ubiquitous h264 support on mobile devices, personal computers and all other types of media devices, this assures that h264 will remain the de facto standard for video playback for the foreseeable future."
Is this one of those soft "pledges" that's not worth the paper it's written on, or is this something legally binding?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Ok. Looks like Google wins this one. Basically, for ~100 million, was it, for On2, they get some tech that might possibly be interesting, and they get a bargaining chip that just made youtube immune to MPEG LA royalties.
Subject says it all.
Now can Microsoft, Firefox and Opera finally add H.264 support to their browsers?
I'm sure what they mean to say is "it'll be royalty free forever or until we change our minds, whichever comes first".
Comerical usage will still be subject to royalities. This is basically to get the people hooked on h264 so that streaming sites in the future need to pay roaylities. This is a common problem with "defacto" standards.
Having a free-as-in-beer-for-the-data-consumer-user-and-hobbyist-data-creator is a good thing.
Removing an incentive to support alternative codecs including unencumbered ones, not so much.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Can you imagine the amount of paperwork and people hours to license every free POS on the internet? Problem solved.
I'm going to go with Admiral Ackbar on this one and assume that it's a trap.
saying that MPEG LA will change it's mind, but my understanding from someone knowledgeable about this subject on arstechnica is that it would be illegal for them to do so, so this is the real deal it seems. I think this will be a very good thing for everyone and the web in general.
"...I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease." - Linus Torvalds
IANAL, but when you make a well documented public claim, I think that claim can be presented to a judge in court, and may have the weight of a contract or license. In any case, there must be an actual written license which will go along with this claim, and whatever that license says, would have weight in court.
What's the difference between x264 and H264?
This announcement changes little. First, it is still uncertain whether videos served on pages will be required to pay royalties, so YouTube may very well still be required to pay royalties. More importantly, developers of H.264 encoders/decoders are still are required to pay patent licenses, regardless of whether they make money or not. This makes it impossible to have legal open source implementations of H.264 in the US anywhere that respects our patents. That is the complaint that Mozilla and Opera had against H.264 and so this minor licensing change will have no affect on the appropriateness of H.264 as an web standard.
The MPEG LA hasn't announced a "permanent royalty moratorium for H.264" at all. They've announced that they will not collect royalties for one particular use case. You still need to pay royalties for the encoder. You still need to pay royalties for the decoder. You still need to pay royalties for streaming commercial video. Since the MPEG LA wasn't yet collecting royalties on video streamed for free nothing has changed here. Recognise this for what it is: the usage of open, royalty-free video is rising on the web and the MPEG LA is worried about that. I don't have Flash installed anymore because increasingly I don't need it. I only ever used it for web video and these days I watch all web video in Ogg Theora or WebM natively in my browser.
I know one company who are in professional video business does use x264 (donated too) and ffmpeg (again, donated) but they keep licensing h264 commercially to stay on "lawyer happy" legal grounds. Are they big fan of open source? No but ffmpeg and x264 scales amazingly well in their server farm and can be scripted.
BTW; I really think different about WebM and H264 (patents) and it is completely unrealistic to "give up h264" but I got my lesson here a while back. So, not going into it. I just say, I keep wondering why people treat to Google like FSF or even BSD which they aren't.
I'm trying to decide what the appropriate pop culture reference will be for when they inevitably change their mind and start charging if/when WebM is killed. Admiral Ackbar is a true classic, but "It's a trap!" is more of a warning to prevent people from falling for it. I'm thinking Dark Helmet's "Fooled you!" would be a better, if obscure fit.
Unless I misunderstand (which sure is possible), us freewheeling schmoes using this shit will not have much chance suddenly makinhg a business out of our hobby of some sort of streaming video shit. Gotta keep the have-nots out of the haveses pockets!?
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
h264 and mpeg SP are in virtually every satellite box/smart phone and even dumb phone (e.g. Nokia S40, SE non smart stuff). It must be well over billion installed territory.
What kind of plan exist to have these devices support WebM? Will Google do it? For example, they simply ignored a 32bit/64bit processor architecture from their -once- partner while releasing Chrome. Yes, I talk about PowerPC. It isn't really 80286 running MS-DOS you know.
Lets also talk about TV World where, you _must have_ something, a huge plus to have something replaced by newer one. It is not "trendy developers abandoning older devices" area. TV business has happily run with PAL/NTSC standard/variants for decades until "HDTV" came along. It was the day when MPEG/H264 showed millions/billions of dollars in savings thanks to great compression without noticeable loss of quality.
H264 is still at "growing" phase and as some companies/academics/organizations spent billions of dollars while creating it, sorry gmail users, they will want to go even at least.
Unless Google has some kind of undocumented power to plant "webm decoder chip" to billions of devices.
TV&Video&Movie territory is way more different than "web". They should have consulted or at least visited a professional/high end studio to see what kind of workflow they are dealing with.
"I am giving free, die you evil codec" doesn't really work. It is not mail.
While the H.264 licensing summary might lead you to think otherwise, the MPEG-LA has made it clear that licensing is based purely on the number of units, not the amount of money made, and is absolutely required for free software.
All my devices support h264 on hardware and I don't have a single bit tendency to upgrade a working device just because some ideological organization has unrealistic plans to go patent free without doing any real life/hard work.
I believe Google really means something when they release a "WebM" player, accelerated/asm one to all the competitor platforms to Android. Just like I started to take MS Silverlight a bit serious when they released the first mobile beta on Symbian, their competitor.
"We have done it, now use it" doesn't really work for an advanced video codec. I am not living in Google's dream world where everyone moves to android/gmail/youtube and has 14 pictures of them to let Google spy on them.
De facto means basically an ad hoc standard which is the standard is as it is, instead of being defined. That is not the issue here, and not just because WebM is only defined by an implementation right now (the spec for VP8 was never written).
The alternative to de facto is de jure, which means by law. Essentially this means it is declared. H.264 is a declared standard.
I don't know what you meant to say by "defacto". Just that it isn't fully gratis?
If you're making money you should be paying for the tools you use.
I don't think anyone is seriously debating that. (well, some are but mostly not the people actually making money) But you're missing the important question which is "how much are those tools worth"? I can think of lots of tools where the asking price is more than I'm willing to pay. I can also think of tools where I'd be willing to pay more than is being asked. It is also honest business to negotiate the amount you are willing to pay for a technology. Just because someone asks a price doesn't mean I am being unethical in offering a lower price in return. What you regard as a low price might very well be an absurd price to me. There is no way for you to know how much something is worth to me unless I tell you.
It might be that any price higher than free is higher than people's willingness to pay. We are after all talking about technology (software) which can be replicated for a marginal cost of approximately zero and which is used primarily for entertainment purposes. That doesn't mean the creators aren't entitled to ask for whatever they like but we're all well aware that most costs to them have already been incurred. I think Youtube is nifty and all but would I pay to use the technology? Not for many personal uses I can think of. It's a non-essential technology for me so my willingness to pay any sort of royalties (directly or indirectly) is low to begin with. (I don't subscribe to cable tv for instance because the cost is too high for the amount of utility I get from it) Saying you should pay for tools you use is fine but you HAVE to follow up with how much? If the price is too high you won't be making money anymore.
More importantly, developers of H.264 encoders/decoders are still are required to pay patent licenses, regardless of whether they make money or not. This makes it impossible to have legal open source implementations of H.264 in the US anywhere that respects our patents.
Canonical licenses H.264 for distribution to its OEM Ubuntu partners.
Explain to me how "open source" translates as "free-as-in-beer."
The fee is scarcely a back-breaker:
For branded encoder and decoder products sold on an OEM basis for incorporation into personal computers as part of a computer operating system, a legal entity may pay for its customers as follows: 0 - 100,000 units/year = no royalty (available to one legal entity in an affiliated group); US $0.20 per unit after first 100,000 units/year; above 5 million units/year, royalty = US $0.10 per unit. The maximum annual royalty ("cap") for an enterprise (commonly controlled legal entities) is $5 million a year in 2010. SUMMARY OF AVC/H.264 LICENSE TERMS
I know many Slashdotters have backgrounds in the PC industry, which does not have a history of respecting standards but rather prefers ad hoc monopolies, but audio video has been ISO-standardized for 20 years in consumer electronics and H.264 is part of the latest generation of that and it is already 8 years old itself. It is your responsibility if you publish video to publish in the ISO/IEC standard. The PC industry is being absorbed by CE, but H.264 is not some interloping monopolist, it's a real honest-to-goodness vendor-neutral open standard.
if exist (best option) buy it,
else build it;
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
`Paid' and `Free' subject to future profitable redefinition.
I'm sitting here, dying sooner, and this is the best you can come up with?
I am hoping that VP8 buries these MPEG LA clowns. This announcement does not seem to be very specific and doesn't address the patent issues on implementation which hinder Opera/Firefox. Overall I'd like to see them crushed so that VP8 becomes the standard and is freely implementable on open source/closed source software.
This doesn't seem to cover license-claims for implementations of H264, which most of the debate has been about lately? What happens to that, has it too been extended?
> this assures that h264 will remain the de facto standard
> for video playback for the foreseeable future.
Aside from my 2009 Android phone, none of my devices* play this format (*my computers do). My Wii doesn't play any videos that I have; my DVD players only play my XviD files; my Roku won't even play my local network content, regardless of format.
While I would welcome an advancement from XviD encoding, until I can find *many* devices that will play *my files* in this format, I certainly don't consider h264 a de facto standard at all.
I remember when MPEGLA announced they were considering forming a patent pool for WebM, so that all the patents that WebM infringes could be put in one place, and anyone who wants to use WebM could pay for these patents.
Ever since, I've been waiting for another shoe to drop. Is there even one patent announced to go in that patent pool yet?
I've been hoping that On2 and Google did their homework, and WebM will succeed in being royalty free. The more time that goes by without serious challenge to it, the happier I'm getting.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
... if there can be a 9or many) fully legal (to use and to redistribute) open source (BSD or GPL class licensing) implementation(s) to view videos in this format, so they can be used in <video> tags, and viewed in other means. Oh, and for encoding, too.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Looks like the MPEG LA bastards are caving in somewhat to the pressure. I'll bet they are afraid the behemouth Google and their new codec making MPEG irrelevant. I hope this does not stop Google. I believe that video should be both open source and royalty unencumbered.
This is just the streaming part, which is currently free due to the temporary moratorium. You still have to pay the licensing fee for the software to encode it and the software to play it, even if said software is free and open source. So, this would still cost Mozilla $5,000,000 if they licensed it this year and rising next year.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
This is exactly the dangerous sort of assertion that makes the MPEG-LA's approach so nefarious. They are making the claim that they own the byproduct of products using their technologies.
It would be like Toyota owning a piece of your vacation photos because you went on a road trip, or Roland owning a piece of your music because you used their synth. It's plainly, on the face of it, absurd.
Why should the output of a compressor be any different?
You are not entitled to the success (or legality) of the business model of your choosing. Just because you say that people have to pay you due to a collateral trickle down license doesn't mean they do.
First hit is free, the friendly drug dealer. They get a generation hooked but if you make any cash in bulk with the codec they come after you. Enjoy, share, learn, be creative understand how the codec works ect.
Start shipping for profit and they are after you in strange and long term ways.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Having a free-as-in-beer-for-the-data-consumer-user-and-hobbyist-data-creator is a good thing.
Except that it's still not free-as-in-beer for the consumer. Encoders and decoders still have to be paid for, and those costs will be passed on to the consumer. Likewise, commercial videos will still have costs that again get passed on to the consumer. The x264 code remains illegal in the US and people outside the US are still mostly going to be paying unnecessary fees for their encoders and decoders, unless their vendors make separate US and non-US versions of their products (or non-US versions only) and manufacture the non-US versions outside of the US to avoid the patent licenses.
It does mean that hobbyist-creators in the US will only have to pay the one-time fee for the encoder, rather than paying per-video as well. That's the main benefit. Except that since the licenses already weren't being enforced for free videos, nothing's really changing. This just removes a potential future threat. There's a secondary benefit to the general consumer that this will likely encourage the creation of free videos, but since the patent licenses weren't already weren't being enforced against free video creators, the practical effect of this secondary benefit will be approximately nil. In other words, the only thing that's changed is that things that were de-facto free-as-in-beer have now become officially free-as-in-beer.
Thus, the good news isn't anywhere near as good as you suggest--but the bad news is exactly as bad as you suggest.
Say a 2 hour video interrupted by a paid ad playing every 2 minutes, so the total required viewing time (with ads) becomes 4 hours, and when it's playing you get an additional ad at the bottom, and product placements in the video player.
This way the video is "free". Maybe you require the user to register, complete a captcha, respond to an e-mail confirmation message, make a password, fill out a huge form/survey with lots of annoying questions, or pay something (to bypass some of the questions/headache required to see the video for free)
If you complete a paid offer before the video starts, you get an option to auto skip all the ads, remove or make ads less frequent. Example subscription / pricing model:
Subscription Plans (12 months minimum, all plans, or 50% * (remaining months) early term fee). Unused viewings or viewing-level privilege time expire at the end of each month.
Gold Member - $100/month - 100 Ad-Break Deluxe viewing
What about internet radio which they barred from using their AAC codec? will free radio or almost all radio be free to use AAC now? and without fees?
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
They can't even get a TLA right; I hate to think what the rest of their standards look like.
Don't let these MPEG LA devils fool you. Use something completely open developed by guys who care about things being open: Theora video and Vorbis audio.
Don't forget they may say you can use h264, but the ownership of h264 still remains under their control. By continuing to use h264, you support the developers who support intellectual property and DRM protected hardware. Do you really want to do that? I don't want to support developers who stand behind "intellectual property" and "Digital Rights Management" software and hardware. It stifles innovation and widens the disparity between the rich and the poor because the poor will have less opportunity to learn how all of this hardware works in order to create and innovate similar products.
Don't let all those intellectual assholes "smoke and mirrors" confuse you and and distract you by saying there are other codecs "technically superior" to Theora. Wikipedia took the leadership stance by adopting Theora. Everyone should follow in their footsteps. There is hardware that already supports Theora and more will follow. I prefer to support the hardware manufacturers that support this kind of hardware for all the right reasons.
I've been witness to all this video intellectual property crapola since the mid 1990's. All these different audio/video formats to obfuscate, divide and conquer the open-source world: mpeg, mp4, aac, nmr-nb, nmr-wb, 3gp, 3gp2. dirac, matroska, wav, mp3, flac. Not to mention the price to purchase the hardware had been quite exclusive for the longest time for the cameras and the encoder cards.
Vote for open-source with your buying power. Buy open source hardware that supports Theora. It would be nice to see a TV-Tuner/Capture card that hardware encodes directly to Theora. The closest thing out there is www.pchdtv.com, but they encode to mpg/mp4.
The default video editor in ubuntu is pitivi which edits theora videos, but what hardware do we have to give us those theora videos. Openshot edits mpeg/mp4 videos', but it's in a grey area legally because of all this MPEG LA legalese stuff found in all the cameras/video cameras using their "intellectual property". Even the Android phones capture video in mp4 format which is MPEG LA Intellectual Property. There should be a phone on the market using all open-source technology. The phone makers and the MID makers should be supporting the open-source route because it makes their hardware less expensive to buy in the long-run. Why is it they are still selling stuff with mp4/mpeg chipsets? Why are they supporting these intellectual property guys?
Consumers have buying power. They will vote for open-source with their money if well-informed.
Estoppel can be a little more complicated than that.
I knew he was Charlie Sheen's brother and Martin Sheen's son, but I never realised just how powerful and well connected Mr Estoppel is.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Too little, too late. Long live WebM.
Fuck them and the little donkey they rode in on.
Hey guys, before assuming MPEG LA has patents and is therefore evil, have you actually checked the license terms?
The licensing is really quite cheap. At low quantities, the licensing per codec is only $0.20. You really only should need one of these per computer, and there is no particular reason why every piece of video software get for free should need to have its dedicated codec.
Pay per view is the lower of 2% and $0.02 per view.
Based on what the x264 developer diary says, VP8 is a blatant ripoff of H.264 anyway, so I'm a bit dissapointed that Google was tricked into supporting this for WebM. I would have much rather supported an entirely new format that made use of new ideas, rather than something that steals original work and gives it enough tweaks to make it questionably legal.
Seriously, guys, this is what patents are for. H.264 is an excellent format, quite efficient to implement in hardware. The guys who designed it deserve to get paid something, even if much of the complexity is in the codec - as the x264 blog says, there is only so much you can do with a bad format.
Don't let these MPEG LA devils fool you.
Oh my, we're really in for it now.
By continuing to use h264, you support the developers who support intellectual property and DRM protected hardware. Do you really want to do that? I don't want to support developers who stand behind "intellectual property" and "Digital Rights Management" software and hardware.
Excuse me, but what does H.264 have to do with DRM?
It stifles innovation and widens the disparity between the rich and the poor because the poor will have less opportunity to learn how all of this hardware works in order to create and innovate similar products.
Hmm? Patents are freely viewable online, as is the H.264 spec. "create and innovate similar products"... similar products? I thought innovation generally resulted in original products? I digress.
Don't let all those intellectual assholes "smoke and mirrors" confuse you and and distract you by saying there are other codecs "technically superior" to Theora.
So you can magically make facts not important by enclosing them with double quotes?
I've been witness to all this video intellectual property crapola since the mid 1990's. All these different audio/video formats to obfuscate, divide and conquer the open-source world: mpeg, mp4, aac, nmr-nb, nmr-wb, 3gp, 3gp2. dirac, matroska, wav, mp3, flac.
Great job listing off open formats like dirac, matroska, wav, and flac, I see you really did your homework there. Also, mp4, 3gp, and 3gp2 are containers for the MPEG-4 format, of which aac is a component. I don't see a lot of division there - just different containers for certain specific applications with specific needs.
Not to mention the price to purchase the hardware had been quite exclusive for the longest time for the cameras and the encoder cards.
Man, if that $200 MPEG-4 encoding video camera was only $0.20 cheaper...
The phone makers and the MID makers should be supporting the open-source route because it makes their hardware less expensive to buy in the long-run.
Uhh, that's the whole point of selling or licensing things. To delegate production or R&D to other parties, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel.
Why is it they are still selling stuff with mp4/mpeg chipsets? Why are they supporting these intellectual property guys?
Consumers have buying power. They will vote for open-source with their money if well-informed.
Let's see... a well-informed customer would know that the Theora product would offer two advantages over the H.264 product... $0.20 cheaper and significantly worse video quality. This is assuming, of course, that Theora encoders and decoders are manufactured in great enough volumes to make the cost equal to H.264.
I know the real point of your post is promoting ideals, and I'm a bit of a practical type... but seriously, isn't there something better for you to campaign about?
I don't see the root problem changing with MPEG-LA. At the core of what they are is a coalition of interests that are driven by financial gain. "Free internet streaming" does not equate to a free and open format.
Royalties of some type will have to be extracted at some point in some way for them to continue to exist. It will be a good day when a majority of our society decides that to patent some things is wrong. Patents aren't wrong. Incentivizing innovation is not wrong. What is wrong is granting a for-profit group exclusive control of key innovations that are critical to the future growth of our society.
SCORacle to buy MPEG LA. Spokesmen say that users have nothing to worry about.
I made a post to this effect not long ago. For the most part, large corporations do not innovate. Large corporations like to talk about innovation until they're blue in the face, because the pretext of innovation is their best defense against sharp questions from the FTC. Microsoft in particular has been selling this Kool-Aid for decades. Why does Microsoft deserve monopolistic powers? "Because we innovate." Innovation is good for the consumer, hence our monopoly power is good for the consumer. QED.
Innovation in large corporations is a simple matter of risk allocation. The investors who signed up for monumental risk when the corporation was small have long since headed for the exits. Few stakeholders in a mature enterprise want the ongoing volatility of a never-ending stream of "bet the company" innovation initiatives. Even when large companies are willing to innovate, they prefer to derisk the process by buying up a smaller company to prime the pump.
This is entirely normal, and a big part of the reason why we have a small number of huge, mature corporations, and a wide base of small companies with larger dreams than revenues.
Even when large companies do innovate, it's more often in the area of business process than underlying technology. At that scale, innovation which changes your company is far more valuable than innovation that changes your products. The innovation at Fed-Ex was distribution logistics. It wasn't a better envelope, unless you count slapping a bar code on an envelope as innovation.
It is a risk when buying up small companies that you end up with too many culture fragments who don't sign up for the big picture. Hence the reason why upper management gets paid more than most of us sots. It's true that only a fraction of highly compensated management delivers value. This is also normal wherever you have extremely soft deliverables. It's really no different than the success rate of first round draft picks in any major league. You draft three players. One becomes the face of the franchise, the other two blow goats. It's very difficult to tell initially when they all show up wearing the same suits, speaking the same language, taught at the same schools.
In a small company, a genius researcher is your most valuable asset. In a large company, a genius manager is your most lucrative asset. This is a simple calculus of scale.
We have to stop thinking that innovation is a hallmark of vigour in large companies. There are more useful metrics of vitality, such as how a large company embraces its competitors. Do they raise the bar, or choke off the air supply? Intel is one of the strangest companies out there, because they suck at choking off the air supply (on technical grounds), yet they kick ass when they decide to compete on merit. Yet which do they frequently choose to do?
I think it comes down to having all those highly paid managers trying to come up with a pretext to prove that they're the straw that stirs the drink and not just goat wankers in expensive threads. Hmmm, we could design the Core2 Duo. That would make the engineers look good and us look irrelevant. Or we could crawl in bed with RAMBUS. That would make us look good (long enough to promote and piss off) and make the engineers irrelevant.
What I don't understand about all this, is that after Intel paid AMD a billion bucks for illegal tampering, why they didn't apply for a federal bail-out. Few companies that size wear their mistakes any more if they know how to play the game. They've missed out on *the* most important business innovation of the last thirty years. I think some of those suits need to be fired.
or, perhaps, Mozilla and other OSS groups affected by the software patents should follow the trend started by Wikileaks and such,and relocate all their developper outside of the USA, into a country with no software patents, like Sweden.
I hear that the Swedes have beautiful women.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Honestly, Theora is dead in the water. H.264 is the standard. Move on.
Free web browsers like Chrome and Firefox are still going to have to pay royalties.
From More detailed webmonkey.com article: