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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.
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.
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.
That isn't a specifically H.264-related policy: Firefox doesn't use system codecs for anything, because they want the exact same experience on all platforms. For example, they use internal image decoders, rather than relying on OS services like OSX's CoreImage. The downside is that therefore OSX on Firefox doesn't support everything that CoreImage does, unlike with WebKit, which just passes off to the system decoder. The upside is that the list of image formats Firefox supports doesn't vary by platform.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Let the fear-mongering commence!
No, I think it's only for those who are distributing media in the format. Opera and Mozilla are still SOL if they don't want to pay to license the decoder. If that is the case, shame on the submitter for either not reading more closely or for being a tool.
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.
H.264 is the name of the standard.
x264 is a free software library for encoding video streams into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC format.
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.
Not unless they also stop charging fees for merely implementing the codec into a browser...because even if Mozilla pays the fairly large fee it won't cover anyone distributing it downstream (Linux Distros). That would mean that MPEG LA would be able to sue the creators of any Linux distribution that includes Firefox without paying MPEG LA.
After years of not using a signature, I am going to make one to say the following: Fuck Beta
Just licensing the decoder wouldn't be enough. For code under an open source license you have to be able to sub-license to everyone who gets your code.
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.
They want to allow forks and redistributors to use their code without patent issues.
Honestly, in this case, fear mongering is better than just taking it - I mean, it's nearly impossible to make a home video without creating something that MPEG LA thinks you should pay them for.
This story demonstrates the exact opposite of your assertion.
The license to create is different from the license to allow the viewing of what was created.
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No, they're saying they won't charge you for it. They haven't relented on their basic position.
This is like Microsoft saying "If you save a document in the Word format, we own a bit of it and you owe us money if you distribute it widely enough".
Then people say "Um that's stupid, I'm not paying you money for something I made incidentally using your technology"
Then (and this is where we are now) Microsoft comes back and says "Well okay, you won't have to pay us for it as only as you're not making money off of the document, but we still own a bit of the document."
The important part here isn't the royalty charge, it's the initial claim that they can charge a royalty to the end user in the first place. They haven't relinquished that position at all, they've just said "we can do it, but we're nice so we won't".
The next downside is that Firefox has to waste time reinventing the wheel, and is a big reason why it's getting bloated. Apple and Microsoft have both spent a lot of time and money figuring out ways to offload things to hardware (especially graphics) through standardized APIs. The great thing about this is that if the abstraction layer improves, or if the underlying hardware improves (h.264 hardware decoding) the improvement is a net freebie for every program running on the system.
By going it alone, Mozilla loses out on the ability to capitalize on the OS vendor's work and has to reinvent all kinds of things best left to the window manager or lower layers. Granted, they're not the only ones doing this. I hate how Safari renders text on Windows.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
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.
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
Actually GTK came first, and GNOME came later and used it. There's a reason why GTK is short for "Gimp TookKit" ...
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
You're an encoder.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
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
Given how frail, poorly documented, and cantankerous decoder/playback systems have been on OS X and Windows in the past, it's no surprise that they wouldn't want to rely on these systems in Firefox.
Besides that, this results in running 3rd party code that could be subject to vulnerabilities, crashes, and a bucket of other issues.
Having your own codecs for web-standard formats compiled in makes loads of sense, just as having web-standard formats remain unencumbered by licensing restrictions. Nobody should have to pay to play in a standards-compliant web.
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.
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?
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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 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.