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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.
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.
I don't think so. These are the same terms they offered before, they just removed the time limit. And their pattern with the expiration of previous time limits has been to extend the time limit.
Does "free" count Ad-supported? Not everyone does, and that little problem (as there are ads everywhere) has caused such headaches.
The ______ Agenda
Let the fear-mongering commence!
Google's smart enough to buy good matches for it's aims. Why reinvent the wheel? I'm not saying Google is a saint or anything, but they're hiring/buying the best and the brightest and recognizing new markets... better than Yahoo! when it passed on opportunities to improve search by buying Google and so on.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Ouch!
I never thought to look at how much the US business news mentioning them this year. A look at your Google list of acquisitions shows that have ballooned back to 2007 levels this year (between 14 and 16 mergers) and that they're not afraid to spend a billion or three for big fish like Youtube, Doubleclick and even 5% of AOL (ugh.)
So, I present Apple, which is the other golden boy in the eyes of tech investors in this down market. Though it has decades more behind it, there's only about 37 transactions, in comparison with the 77 on the Google list. Google's long list is probably par for the course for giants like IBM, Intel and Microsoft's yearly acquisitions, but this being slashdot, please think of what "giants" and "par for the course" mean for Google's faltering "don't be evil" motto.
Once you have that many companies in your corporate bloodstream, your original identity starts to fade and your decisions are no longer yours --they're made in consultation with previously alien VP's who all had different directions prior to the merger. Scary times ahead.
Sometimes its cheaper to buy innovation than to do it yourself, depending on what you're innovating.
Or Mozilla is not reinventing the wheel and using things like libgif, libjpeg, libpng and probably ffmpeg. You're just making stuff up as you go.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Yes, but MS added a number of "innovations" such as "squirting" and the whole idea of sharing music (in a limited fashion of course) with other Zune users, which completely bombed.
The idea of a portable digital music player was nothing new for either Apple or MS. Apple took the idea and made a player with a handy "click-wheel", put it in a fancy-looking case that a lot of people apparently thought was attractive, then stuck on easy access to an online music store where people could buy individual tracks instead of whole albums, and it was wildly successful.
MS came along a little later, made a player with access to their own (incompatible) music store, threw in a WiFi radio that was only useful for sharing songs with nearby Zune users (but you could only listen to the shared song 3 times), but not for syncing with your computer which is the more obvious application for such a device, and packaged it in a shit-brown case, and everyone laughed.
they should give the user the option. i would like to use sysinternal codecs for anything. i don't care if it works the same on linux and windows. i DO care if it works the same on any app on my one platform i use.
It is your responsibility if you publish video to publish in the ISO/IEC standard.
Maybe if you live in a police state. Everywhere else, perhaps ISO standards would get a little more adoption if they were royalty and patent free. In this case the ISO is just acting as a shill for the MPEG LA.
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?