MPEG Continues With Royalty-free MPEG Video Codec Plans

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."'"

Comments

Wrong move.

[Bleek II]

Better than Mpeg 2 they say? Well I should hope so. And AVC Baseline isn't great. They're clearly making some crap/free encoder so that they can start charging more $$$ for their good ones. The only issue for them is that Google/Xiph have good ones that will always be free. If MPEG tries to force this new standard people will move to VC8 which has been around for some time.

Re:Quality

[Tacvek]

Not necessarily. They could decide to adopt Theora as the basis of the new standard, and see if they can get royalty free patent licenses for possible improvements.

Keep in mind that MPEG has little issue with standardizing something that already exists, like how the MOV container format was standardized as the MP4 container format, how they standardized Adobe and Microsoft's OpenType as MPEG4 Part 22: Open Font Format, or how they standarized a slight modification to ASPEC as MPEG-1 Layer 3 Audio.