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MPEG Continues With Royalty-free MPEG Video Codec Plans

Posted by timothy on from the until-my-couch-can-play-movies-unassisted dept.

yuhong writes "From the press release: 'In recognition of the growing importance that the Internet plays in the generation and consumption of video content, MPEG intends to develop a new video compression standard in line with the expected usage models of the Internet. The new standard is intended to achieve substantially better compression performance than that offered by MPEG-2 and possibly comparable to that offered by the AVC Baseline Profile. MPEG will issue a call for proposals on video compression technology at the end of its upcoming meeting in March 2011 that is expected to lead to a standard falling under ISO/IEC "Type-1 licensing", i.e. intended to be "royalty free."'"

10 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. No worries by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I think I can save MPEG a lot of time. I've found a royalty-free container, a video codec and an audio codec we can all use:

    http://www.webmproject.org/

    1. Re:No worries by Svartalf · · Score: 2, Informative

      They're claiming this...and they claimed it with Theora. Google's got much of that alleged pool to themselves right now since VP8 was patented itself, even though Google's granted an effective license to those implementing WebM or a FOSS project.

      Any of those patents showing up will need to...

      1) Pass muster against the ones already held by Google (i.e. not invalidated by their prior art)
      2) Survive prior art scrutiny (i.e. They've taken on someone with deep pockets capable of making a go at that sort of thing)
      3) Be actually relevant to VP8.

      This is saber rattling from the MPEG-LA managers and the primary players in the pool (Apple, for example...).

      Until you see it all play out, it IS royalty free and will always be so- just like any other tech. You've no assurances that MPEG-LA's license pool fully covers h.264- it could just as easily be that Google's got a critical patent NOT in the pool and you're all in violation with h.264. You just don't know with the current sad state of affairs with Patents, especially software ones.

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    2. Re:No worries by icebike · · Score: 3, Informative

      A standard need not be free of control by a single entity. You are conflating two different concepts of standards and public ownership.

      We all pretty much agree that 802.11 is a group of standards. But its patented and owned by CSIRO.

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  2. H.264 redux by mbone · · Score: 4, Informative

    I happen to know that H.264 was _also_ supposed to be royalty free, with certain patents being reverse-engineered around in the standards development. MPEG-LA had different ideas, and they may have different ideas about this new work as well.

  3. Re:Wrong move. by lordholm · · Score: 2, Informative

    MPEG is not the same as MPEG-LA. These are two completely separate organizations that have nothing to do with each other.

    --
    "Civis Europaeus sum!"
  4. Re:Wrong move. by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Informative

    Completely separate? MPEG-LA handles licensing MPEG patents. That's what they do. To say they are completely separate is like saying the ocean and an ocean basin are completely separate.

    --
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  5. Re:Wrong move. by Tacvek · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is not an attack on VP8. It might moot the WebM project, but neither Google nor Mozilla should have much of an issue with implementing such a standard, since automatic royalty free patent licenses don't cause any issues with Free or Open Source software. Indeed, they are even compatible with the GPLv3.

    Please don't confuse MPEG with the MPEG LA. The latter is a a corporation with no formal relationship to MPEG. If anything MPEG doing this is intentionally snubbing the MPEG LA.

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  6. Re:Best possible outcome if it's better than VP8 by DaMattster · · Score: 4, Informative

    Really, I think everyone should care about this issue. It all boils down to device ownership. Say you buy a decent prosumer camcorder with the intent of maybe shooting your own low budget film. You purchased the camera so you own the device and therefore should not have to pay any additional royalties for using it in a way you desire. Under the MPEG-LA licensing agreement, you will have to pay royalties for each copy of the film you distribute to the MPEG-LA. This could get quite expensive and, in effect, creates a legal racketeering operation. You as the filmmaker are threatened with high punitive fines making it even more costly to try your own film out. Ignorance is what allows corporations (and government, too) to get away with such actions. This is where VP8 comes into play. Imagine if you had a prosumer camcorder with the VP8 capabilities - you would not worry about creativity and artistic innovation.

  7. Re:Smoke and Mirrors by click2005 · · Score: 4, Informative

    It is free for now ONLY for internet videos offered for no charge.
    Products and services other than Internet Broadcast AVC Video continue to be royalty-bearing.

    http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachments/231/n-10-08-26.pdf

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  8. Re:Dirac? by BZ · · Score: 3, Informative

    Dirac is meant to be a high-quality codec, period; it was largely designed for archival work. It makes no particularly strong effort to be low-bitrate in the process.

    The result is that at high bitrates it's pretty good (and even offers lossless compression, etc). At the bitrates at which people normally serve internet video today, it's worse quality than Theora, I'm told. But this is third-hand, so don't take my word for it.

    As bandwidth goes up, Dirac might find a place on the web, but we're not there yet.