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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.
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.
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.
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.