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

No worries

[Anonymous Coward]

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/

Re:No worries

[vadim_t]

Citation needed

Re:No worries

[Svartalf]

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.

Re:No worries

[cynyr]

Does my unhacked ps3 play webm stuff?

Re:No worries

[Anonymous Coward]

Really?

It appears to me as if MPEG-LA called and failed to assemble a patent portfolio for WebM, so in a effort to protect their monopoly upon video codecs has decided to create a new codec to compete in every way with WebM (including royalties).

It should be interesting to see if this blatant attempt at monopoly pays off for them, or if people stick to WebM.

as a side note, how long is in before mpeg4 patents terminate and leaves MPEG-LA without any real codecs to license?

Re:No worries

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, things work fast on internet time. MPEG-LA first asked for contributions to the patent pool *this week* and they've already failed?

Why don't you wait until March 18th (the date the MPEG-LA set for submissions) before you decide it's a failure?

Re:No worries

[Captain Hook]

My understanding was that they had searched for patents which might be applicable within the group before hand, the public request for patents was widen the net in the hope for someone they don't currently have business relationship would be able to help them. That suggests they have already failed to find a patent to fight Google with.

Re:No worries

[tepples]

No, which is why you can switch from PLAYSTATION 3 to a home theater PC such as a Dell Zino.

Re:No worries

[Anonymous Coward]

let me introduce you to them thar new fangled "programmable" computamatort-thingies

Re:No worries

[Daniel Phillips]

Mod parent up. WebM is barely better than Theora and nowhere near as good as H.264/AVC.

Mod parent down as a troll. Webm is the only video codec Chromium, Firefox and Opera and Konqueror will support natively. It is far better than H.264 because it offers similar quality while being open and free. With Webm nobody can control your video by controlling the codec.

Re:No worries

[Daniel Phillips]

Why would they want to establish a royalty free codec if not to avoid losing users to someone else, i.e. to preempt another royalty free solution?

Looking for an evil interpretation, one could say that this might forestall adoption of Webm so that H.264 royalties could be collected in the interim. Then perhaps with Webm out of the way work on the free MPEG codec could be cancelled. Or perhaps network effects and install base would make it impossible to dislodge H.264 on any time frame, yielding a mountain of royalties. Looking for a non-evil interpretation, perhaps ISO/IEC wish to improve there relevancy as standard organizations. Or perhaps there is a splinter group within the organization that has the best interests of humanity in mind. Or perhaps pressure was applied from outside or funding was supplied.

Though I much prefer the latter interpretations I do not think there is any reason to change any Webm plans. Maybe when the new codec is fully defined, implemented, proved to be of superior quality and with no patent trolls in the wings. I think that such a happy day is a few years off and in the mean time, the net needs Webm, badly.

Re:No worries

[t2t10]

I would say that WebM is likely patent encumbered. MPEG-LA is assembling a patent pool for WebM, so it will not be royalty-free.

And what do you base this on? Saber rattling by MPEG-LA, who are seeing their protection racket disappear?

Either put up and show us the patents or shut up.

Re:No worries

[commodore6502]

But WebM looks no better than MPEG2.
  - So I think I'll pass, just as I have no plans to switch from Bluray to HD-DVD. I prefer upgrades, not lateral shifts. I prefer MPEG4 video and audio (AACplusSBR). Same quality as MPEG2 but only needs half the bitrate.

Re:No worries

[icebike]

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.

Re:No worries

[hairyfeet]

Actually YOU should be modded down because WebM offers NOTHING but "Free as in freedom man!" which as we have seen time and time again (Vorbis and Theora) mean exactly jack and squat unless you can bring something better to the table which it is pretty damned clear WebM DOES NOT.

Does it give a better picture than the current standard H.264? No, not even close. In fact you'd probably have to add 40%+ to the filesize and an equal amount to the bandwidth to equal H.264 AVC Baseline

Does it give better performance and battery life than H.264? Again no, in this case just the opposite in fact. WebM will suck a battery dry as it uses more CPU and RAM for the same job and that isn't counting the fact that nearly every device sold in the last 4 years, from your mobile phone to GPUs in your PC have built in hardware support for H.264.

And before anyone says "They can add it in firmware!" that is not only not possible in many devices like the cell phones and DVD players due to lack of resources, but it is also a catch-22: If it is easy to drop in WebM by using a few simple transforms in the firmware then it DOES fall afoul of H.264 patents, as they have pretty much the entire process from start to finish patented up the ying yang. If it isn't then it means all that work and all those chips are gonna have to be shitcanned, which will raise costs as well as obsolete many devices before their time.

So I'm sorry but all WebM has going for it is a bunch of FOSS users (which last I checked is less than 3% of the market) screaming "Free as in freedom!" and a single ad company (Google) that wants to control web video the way MSFT did with WMV, since they control the direction of WebM.

As we have seen time after time after time you can't just jump into the game years down the road with nothing to offer but the four freedoms because the vast majority of the world isn't coders and really don't care. The users don't care because H.264 works and gives them nice videos without killing the battery or hitting their caps, the OEMs don't care because H.264 support is already a sunk cost on their chips and thanks to MPEG-LA is perceived rightly or wrongly as not having a risk of patent trolling (which with Google refusing to indemnify those that use WebM despite their huge money and army of lawyers smells funny right off the bat) so frankly you have NOTHING compelling to offer: Not file sizes/picture quality, not bandwidth nor battery life, ALL YOU HAVE is "free as in freedom man!" which if that would work Windows wouldn't still own 90%+ of the market and iDevices wouldn't be flying off the shelves.

Sorry, but if you think freedom alone will win this you might want to talk to the Vorbis guys and see how much good it did them over MP3.

Re:No worries

[Daniel Phillips]

I'm sorry but all WebM has going for it is a bunch of FOSS users

That is far from true and even if it were, we FOSS users and creators are a very important constituency. After all, we run the internet, serve the web pages, provide the brains for a majority of intelligent consumer devices and are in the habit of standing up for freedom. Unlike you.

Re:No worries

[Agripa]

Use of the carrot does not preclude use of the stick. I expect they are moving on several fronts.

Re:No worries

[hairyfeet]

Yeah too bad you don't have any power because it is the actual PHBs and owners of said sites that WILL dictate what you do or your ass will be fired and they have spoken: It is H.264. As long as iDevices don't support WebM (and I seriously doubt they ever will, as Steve don't just change horses like that) then you have the choice of A-Cutting your nose off to spite your face by killing support for the hottest devices out there (which MSFT will jump in with a "Me too!" so that kills about 94% of the smart device users right there) or B-STFU and do what your boss says and keep your job from being shipped to Bangalore. We know which answer it will be, right Daniel?

Like it or not you have NO power because if you did Windows wouldn't own the desktop, MP3 wouldn't own the music formats, and H.264 wouldn't own the web and BD players. The very fact that they do proves you have NO power so you can keep your self righteous bullshit because that and an empty sack is worth the sack. You have NO power over OEMs, you have NO power over device manufacturers, and you have NO power over the vast majority of the public. Finally you have NO power over the CxOs, who all just got new iShiny devices and will be more than happy to fire your ass when they find their iShiny don't work.

If your group had ANY power then after FIFTEEN YEARS you would have better than a lousy 1% share which sadly was trumpeted as some sort of win here, when for anyone else the doors would have been closed and the assets sold off for such a shitty performance in that length of time. So you can just get off that high horse because as Vorbis, Theora, and soon to be WebM will prove like a slap to your face Daniel you have NO power and are just a little drone like everyone else.

Go ahead, tell your boss you're gonna make sure no iDevice works on anything you touch. I'm sure there are plenty of guys that will be more than happy for your job.

Re:No worries

[Daniel Phillips]

You seem to have issues. I suggest a mild sedative.

Re:No worries

[soundguy]

Why wait? It's very obviously intended to scare people away from WebM, and a consortium which has to rely on scare tactics is desperate - SCO "we own parts of Linux but we won't tell you exactly which parts" desperate. This story is another indicator that the MPEG LA is between a rock and a hard place. Why would they want to establish a royalty free codec if not to avoid losing users to someone else, i.e. to preempt another royalty free solution? The good news is that they must still think they can win this, so they're still trying to compete. When they realize that the game is over, they'll start extracting money from their imaginary property Darl McBride style.

MPEG is not MPEG-LA

Re:No worries

[Tharsman]

Don't be so sure, WebM may become just another patent trap soon.

Re:No worries

[hairyfeet]

And I'm afraid you are what is commonly known as a "FOSSie" which unlike FOSS users think they can force their views upon the world, but the world has spoken in a loud and clear voice Danny, they don't want to play your little reindeer games. No GPL, no "four freedoms" and the saddest part? The one that the FOSSies has been trumpeting as their savior is fucking them like a $20 whore and they are too fricking clueless to know! It is just TOO funny! Can you guess who, starts with a G and rhymes with Moogle? Notice Google won't touch GPL V3 with a 50 foot pole? Know why that is? It is because they know they can "TiVo trick" your ass and there isn't a damned thing you can do about it except bitch and whine on some forum because yet again you have NO power

So come back when you actually have a VALID argument, something that consists of more than "Free as in freedom man! Fight the power, woo!" because as we have seen time after time after time the rest of the planet by huge majorities could not care less about your "free as in freedom man, woo!" BS and would rather have things that actually...oh what is the concept? oh yeah...work well. So you can keep your CLI heavy mess of an OS, your not even as good as H.263 Theora and its soon to be stuck in court for a decade cousin WebM, because if all you have to offer the consumer is "free as in freedom man, fight the power!" then frankly you have nothing to offer.

So you can get off your "we Linux guys rule the web" bullshit, because I just provided links that show you have no power whereas you like the rest of the FOSSies only have words on a forum, that's all. No power, no large installed base, no voting stock, nada zip zero zilch. Like I said I dare you to walk into your bosses office tomorrow and tell him you won't support iDevices on anything you touch, go right ahead, put your money where your mouth is. I'm sure there are quite a few guys that will be happy to have your job, and hell will probably do it for less money to boot.

Re:No worries

[spinkham]

Depends what part of H.264 you compare it to.
WebM is roughly the same quality as H.264 baseline.
H.264 High profile is clearly better.

Re:No worries

[MidnightBrewer]

Pity about all the patents they use but don't actually own. Unfortunately, royalty-free seems to equal indemnity-free (FYI, not a good kind of freedom to have).

http://www.mpegla.com/main/pid/vp8/default.aspx

Re:No worries

[atamido]

Pity about all the patents they use but don't actually own. Unfortunately, royalty-free seems to equal indemnity-free (FYI, not a good kind of freedom to have).

http://www.mpegla.com/main/pid/vp8/default.aspx

The linked page is a request for people to come forward if they have any patents covering VP8, not an indication that any such patents have been found. (Of course, with the current state of patents, realistically everything infringes some patent, it's just a matter of finding it.)

Re:No worries

[hkmwbz]

Yawn. More FUD from the MPEG-LA cartel. They really should stop it. If they had something, they would have used it a long time ago.

Re:No worries

[Tharsman]

If you have been reading SlashDot for long enough, you should know that's not how patent trolls work. They wait until the patent usage is nigh irreversible to jump in and demand compensation.

Re:No worries

[hkmwbz]

BTW, better analysis in these links:

http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/an-analysis-of-webm-and-its-patent-risk/

http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/on-webm-again-freedom-quality-patents/

Re:No worries

[Daniel Phillips]

I suggest a strong sedative, quick before you burst a vein.

Re:No worries

[Lanteran]

Well, except criticizing your general lack of idealism and assumption that everyone else has the same, I'd like to point out a few things.

Success of linux != success of open source. Sure, it's a free operating system, and success on the desktop would be a huge boon, but just because it failed to gain acceptance there does not mean we (FLOSS community) lost. On the contrary, Linux and BSD basically own the server and supercomputer market. Open source browsers are coming close to dominating 50% of the web browser market. Android (though phone distributors try to make it otherwise) is an open, linux based phone OS that's also doing extremely well for its self. Blender, inkscape and LibreOffice are all professional grade tools. Without even mentioning the innumerable low level utilities, we're winning. Does that mean we should give up the fight just because 264's more popular? Hell no! What if firefox had never been released because IE's near total dominance had been 'unbeatable'? We wouldn't have the aforementioned open source victories on the browser field.

Using your argument, proprietary software companies have NO power because if they did, Linux wouldn't own the supercomputers, WebKit and Gecko wouldn't own the web, and Android wouldn't own the phone market.

TLDR version: You're wrong. FLOSS is doing very well and has a huge amount of power, just not in the particular fields you cherry picked (Well actually, FLAC is doing well for music..). The Good Fight (tm) isn't over yet.

Royalty Free

[Anonymous Coward]

So we won't find any videos of Charles, Camilla, William and Kate, Harry and the rest of the family in that format then

Re:Royalty Free

[mbone]

I would pay a premium for that.

Re:Royalty Free

[witherstaff]

Shame, we won't be able to yell out 'Help! Help! I'm being repressed!'

Re:Royalty Free

[EnsilZah]

I hear finding a format that is specifically royalty free is difficult due to the fact that the royal family easily lends itself to compression due to the high levels of redundancy involved.

Re:Royalty Free

[sznupi]

Upcoming end of April would be costly... (and I'm not sure if it will somehow dignify or totally destroy my birthday, which are close enough to 29IV to be possibly observed on that day, out of convenience)

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:Wrong move.

[drinkypoo]

This is part of an at least two-pronged attack. They are attempting to put together a patent pool for VP8, even if they totally fail they will still gain FUD-based victories. If they can convince most people who matter that VP8 is really theirs then they can convince them to use their upcoming low-grade codec and prevent Google from becoming a name in yet another market.

Re:Wrong move.

[commodore6502]

>>>They're clearly making some crap/free encoder

Good observation. A wiser course would be for MPEG to say, "From this point forward, MPEG2 shall be free of charge." - That would essentially kill Google's attempt to shoehorn VP8, because manufacturers would not want to abandon a current standard that every device can read, and has no cost.

Free MPEG2 would also be a great benefit for the Free TV stations (US, Canada, Mexico) - they'd save a lot of money in royalty fees and instead be able to hire more people to create new content.

Re:Wrong move.

[lordholm]

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

Re:Wrong move.

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:Wrong move.

[Tacvek]

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.

Re:Wrong move.

[JAlexoi]

To be precise, neither is a subsidiary of the other.

Re:Wrong move.

[KugelKurt]

Completely separate? MPEG-LA handles licensing MPEG patents.

MPEG LA handles also VC-1 patents which has no relation to ISO MPEG

Re:Wrong move.

[Salvo]

It may not be an attack on VP8, but Google will interpret it as an attack (which is why you won't find mention of it in Google News).
Google invested a lot of money in On2, just so they could control the format. They don't want to see a truly Open format subverting it, no matter how many times they say "Don't Be Evil".

Re:Wrong move.

[EnsilZah]

My friend, your cynical views are not welcome here, clearly MPEG-LA and MPEG are two completely independent organizations that merely happen to share part of their name and in the spirit of cooperation and well intentions decided that, though some confusion between the two might occur, it wouldn't be fair for one to request the other to pick a different name and all the hassle that would involve.

Re:Wrong move.

[Kitsune Inari]

That would essentially kill Google's need to shoehorn VP8,

Fixed

Re:Wrong move.

[Teancum]

To be more correct, the "Motion Picture Expert's Group" (or whatever the current acronym means at the moment... it seems to change with video groups from time to time like the definition of DVD) was established well before the MPEG-LA group was ever put together.

The problem is that the MPEG guys were just pure researchers and didn't give a damn about patents, royalties, or if anybody was going to even be using their stuff except as fellow computer hacker/researchers. Then it became political after a fashion when the web took off but that was when some of the leading video companies (Sony, Toshiba, etc.) got involved with the specification and started to commercialize the standards making process.

The MPEG-LA group came along when it turns out that many or indeed most of the concepts used were patented by many of the people who helped to draft the specification. This was by design so far as the techniques were incorporated into the standard both because they were good ideas, but also because these companies wanted to make a profit off of the standardization effort. There was no spirit of giving here, it was just pure business even if the standard was "available under reasonable licensing terms" to anybody who wanted to use it.

There aren't that many video file formats around (certainly far less than image file formats), and almost all of them require licensing and royalties if you want to use them. Open and "royalty free" formats are a rare and unusual thing on the whole.

Re:Wrong move.

[Tacvek]

Google could also see it as investing in getting an open format available. The fact of the matter is that if they had not put all those resources into creating WebM, MPEG may well have taken up this issue in the first place. If they see it as such, they will welcome a competing open standard that could be superior,and would offer royalty free use of their acquired patents in this new standard.

Either reaction is possible, but your suggestion does seem slightly more likely.

Re:Wrong move.

[angularbanjo]

To be more correct, the "Motion Picture Expert's Group" (or whatever the current acronym means at the moment...

Movie Patents Eat Google's-Lying Ass

Hmm, I wonder how good this will be

[Dr. Spork]

Since the members of the MPEG group are making such good money from the royalties, why would they want to undermine that project with something that's free? It's in their interest to make it only slightly less crappy than VP8 (which won't be hard). This will kill the motivation to develop the independent free codecs, and this is what MPEG wants, I guess. But they don't want to really risk killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Re:Hmm, I wonder how good this will be

[Tacvek]

MPEG wants to merely merely standardize things, ending the problem of searching for a royalty free codec. Mozilla and Google both simply want a royalty free standard that is Good enough. VP8 seems like one possibility, but if something even slightly better than VP8 is standardized, both should be quite willing to implement it.

MPEG LA on the other hand actively does not want any codec better than say Microsoft Video 1 (the format most classic AVI files used) available on royalty free terms. They would lose out on a substantial amount of royalties if devices like phones or low end Digital Cameras used such a format rather than one of their formats. This is why they so actively fear projects like WebM. They make a substantial portion of their royalties from Cell phones, low end cameras, and similar devices.

Re:Hmm, I wonder how good this will be

[TheRaven64]

He said members of the MPEG group, which (tautology aside) is a set of people with a significant overlap with the set of people who have patents licensed to MPEG-LA.

Re:Hmm, I wonder how good this will be

[Dr. Spork]

So you're telling me that a standards body is coding up a video compression codec? That sounds pretty far fetched. No, of course the coding is done by whatever corporate bodies normally write MPEG codecs, and even if they're not exactly the same as the MPEG-LA group, I'd be shocked if the overlap weren't large.

Re:Hmm, I wonder how good this will be

[westlake]

MPEG LA on the other hand actively does not want any codec better than say Microsoft Video 1...available on royalty free terms. They would lose out on a substantial amount of royalties if devices like phones or low end Digital Cameras used such a format rather than one of their formats.

The twenty-nine H.264 licensors include:

Apple. Bosch. Cisco. Daewoo. Dolby. Ericsson. Fraunhofer. Fujitsu. HP. Hitachi. JVC. LG. Microsoft. Mitsubishi. NTT. Panasonic. Philips. Samsung. Sharp. Siemens. Sony. Toshiba.

The global manufacturing and distribution horsepower on that list would be difficult to match.

The 950 or so H.264 licensees rounds out a list of the global 1,000 in tech --- and the Asian Fortune 500 in tech.

These guys are all big enough to be paying the fixed-price H.264 Enterprise Cap. They all need to license H.264 for other product lines.

Studio production. Broadcast, cable and sattelite distribution. CCTV.

Freeview in the UK.

The "Internet Enabled" HDTV in the states.

The Blu-Ray player, the video game console....

The geek sees the Internet, or part of it, anyway.

[Not the part where the content-protected Disney and PIxar "app" is baked into every HDTV on the planet.]

He sees the smartphone. But that is all he sees.

Google shopping returns about 77,000 hits for "H.264." 24,000 hits simply for H.264 surveillance cameras.

Re:Hmm, I wonder how good this will be

[evilviper]

MPEG LA on the other hand actively does not want any codec better than say Microsoft Video 1 (the format most classic AVI files used) available on royalty free terms. They would lose out on a substantial amount of royalties if devices like phones or low end Digital Cameras used such a format rather than one of their formats.

MPEG-1 video has been freely implementable for a long time. MPEG-2 will be out from under its relevant patents very shortly. Both are decidedly better than MV1, and there's nothing stopping digital camera manufactures from using them... HOWEVER, that's just not how the world works. Phone manufacturers either use MJPEG because it's computationally free (just a series of JPEGs, which any phone can already create), where using any decent video codec would require specialized hardware and added cost. Plus, how much video can fit on a flash card isn't a major selling point for basic cameras, so almost nobody cares.

At the other end of the spectrum are manufacturers who want to be buzz-word compatible. They don't care what H.264 is, and will happily sell you a camera that records videos that are nothing but static noise, as long as they can have the "H.264" buzzword on the box.

VP8/WebM won't change this, and certainly won't result in consumers getting better video quality from the cheap junk cameras out there.

Additionally, everyone here has no idea what they're talking about. The MPEG is as big and slow moving of a bureaucracy as it gets. Since they've just decided to start working on this, you can expect it will be at least 5+ years before we see even a basic spec come out of it, and longer before anyone has any implementations to show for it. VP8 is here now. Dropping the license fees on H.264 is what they've done to try to compete with VP8. This foray is irrelevant to that.

What they're trying to do here is compete with is themselves... They want to produce something that's just slightly better than MPEG-2, and where they have a way to monetize it (which they don't with MPEG-2 once the patents expire). Maybe they'll make it so that the decoder is royalty free, but the encoder needs extensive patent licenses. Maybe there will be a free encoder as well, but ONLY if you don't use several encoding options that greatly improve quality. So they'll hope to make some money up-selling their new "free" codec.

Re:Hmm, I wonder how good this will be

[Salvo]

WebM isn't designed for Low End Cameras. It is designed for playing high-quality, low res video with a low overhead. The chips they claim to be designing for portable devices will be Playback only. Encoding will have to be done on a Workstation or Server.

The only way they could have Hardware Encoders for WebM is if they give it a major overhaul. This new MPEG standard aims to perform such an overhaul, they may even use WebM or Theora as a starting codebase.

Despite what Google and Xiph may claim, WebM and Theora aren't ready for consumer use.

Re:Hmm, I wonder how good this will be

[mr_lizard13]

I'm afraid you have completely confused MPEG with the MPEG LA.

Re:Hmm, I wonder how good this will be

[pieterh]

Computational power doubles at the same price point, every 12-18 months. It's only a few years away from consumer-level encoding. The fight is not today, it's in the next 3-5 years when every mid-to-high range phone/mini tablet/camera can do professional-level video encoding.

Re:Hmm, I wonder how good this will be

[makomk]

The first is an ISO standards body, the second... well... some sort of protection racket association, I guess.
And I'm sure the misleading name similarity is pure coincidence.

Not really. The way it works is that the MPEG members use the MPEG standardization process to get their patents into video compression standards, then charge money to license them via the MPEG-LA.

Re:Hmm, I wonder how good this will be

[Tacvek]

I did not say a crippling amount of royalties, merely a substantial amount. It is currently the codec of choice for many applications in a whole bunch of different industries that would be uninterested in the new royalty free codec. But companies are known for spending more money to irrationally protect a source of revenue than they actually receive from it, so some of those players may object and object loudly.

If as you imply the loss of smartphones and internet usage would barely touch the revenue and as a result the licensors would not really care, keep in mind that that would also apply just as much to Web M. They could not even see lawsuit as a real source of income, because it would be easy to show minimal loss of revenue which is a major component of determining any award in a lawsuit.

Re:Hmm, I wonder how good this will be

[Tacvek]

I did not mean to imply that low end devices could encode Web M, but they can certainly play it. I did mean to imply that MPEG-LA would not be particularly thrilled about a royalty free codec of better than MPEG 2 quality that could be encoded on such a device, much like the very concept of the story.

I was merely pointing out to the eating utensil with a PHD, that MPEG is not necessarily doing the MPEG-L any favors by developing such a standard.

Reaction

[markdavis]

Probably just another knee-jerk reaction to VP8/WebM. And you can bet this "royalty free standard" will still be protected by tons of patents. It just keeps getting more interesting all the time. Just what we need, though, yet another video standard.

H.264 redux

[mbone]

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.

Re:H.264 redux

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it possible that you are confusing H.264 with VC-1? VC-1 was supposed to be completely royalty free, but shortly after Microsoft puplished the standard it turned out that it violated many MPEG LA patents. They formed a patent pool for it and Microsoft joined.

AFAIK H.264 was never supposed to be royalty free except for internet distribution. Even that was supposed to be up for review until permanent royalty free status was announced last year.

Re:H.264 redux

[TheRaven64]

Big 'citation needed' there. There are bits of H.264 that look like they were only added so that some of the companies involved would have something to put in the patent pool and get the discounted rate (Apple's solitary patent being an example). VP8 looks like it was designed to work around patents, but H.264 seems to have been designed with exactly the opposite requirement.

Re:H.264 redux

[mr_lizard13]

What's the MPEG-LA got to do with this announcement?

Best possible outcome if it's better than VP8

[Zelgadiss]

I for one don't care all that much about patents issues, as long as Mozilla and Opera can implement it to me it means problem solved.
HTML5 can be standardized and we can move on with our lives.

Whether it's VP8 or whatever.

If it's quality is better than VP8 all the better, those unhappy with VP8's output can now be happy.

I got a feeling this codec will be highly optimized for low bitrates and streaming, so it won't compete with H.264 main profile for other uses.

Re:Best possible outcome if it's better than VP8

[DaMattster]

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.

Re:Best possible outcome if it's better than VP8

[lordholm]

I am pretty sure that you will re-encode your video after you have edited it. Your camera has nothing to do with the final distribution format of the movie. If you distribute unedited video, it is most likely free of charge in youtube, in that case you do not have to worry, since free internet distribution is royalty free.

The issue is thus mostly non existing. However, if they would try to extract royalty fees for video which was re-encoded from AVC to a patent free format, then it would be an issue. However, I would be very surprised if they could do that from a legal point of view.

Re:Best possible outcome if it's better than VP8

[John Betonschaar]

I believe that nothing of what you've said is actually true, just more of the same old H264 fear mongering you see a lot on Slashdot.

The royalty scheme includes payments for commercial encoder/decoder writers, subscription services that make money from hosting H264 video, and hardware manufacturers that include H264 playback or encoding in their devices. If you shoot a movie using an H264-capable camera, the cost of the royalties will already be absorbed in the hardware, and will be somewhere in the neighbourhood of $0.10. If you re-encode to whatever other format you like to avoid H264 royalties, nobody is stopping you or charging you, except maybe the encoder writer (who will again factor the ~$0.10 H264 royalties in the price of his product). If you want to distribute your movie using a medium that uses H264 encoding (Blu-Ray disc for example) you will have to negotiate terms with a publisher anyway, which will cover a license to use the Blu-Ray disc format. This is no different from publishing on DVD, VHS or whatever other distribution medium. You can choose to distribute VP8 discs if you like, but you'll likely sell zero of them, because first of all nobody can play them with their home theatre sets, and second, the quality will be utter crap since VP8 was never intended for high-bitrate video in the first place.

So you can have your Kool-Aid like everyone else spreading horror stories about H264, but the fact of the matter is that it's just another piece in the long chain of technologies you use to shoot, produce and distribute video that you didn't invent and implement yourself, and therefore have to indirectly pay a small fee for. The MPEG-LA royalties are in fact very reasonable, they only apply to *profitable* use, you only have to pay them above a certain amount of *profit* you make from your movie, they have an upper-bound to the amount of money you have to pay, and in terms of 'cost per unit sold' they translate to a marginal negligible of the typical resale value of the item you are selling. There is no, I repeat *no*, levy on a not-for-profit H264 video you shot and encoded using licensed H264 tools and want to host on a website.

Re:Best possible outcome if it's better than VP8

[Anonymous Coward]

Totally wrong. Read the licensing in a decent video/camera before spouting lies and FUD in future.

Re:Best possible outcome if it's better than VP8

[jo_ham]

Right, because I'm going to distribute my movie in the same format that the camera uses. If it's going for broadcast I put it in a format that the broadcaster wants (which won;t be the one the camera uses, necessarily, especially if it's a prosumer one), and if it's going for a film release it will be on 35mm or into a digital format for a digital projector that is still unlikely to be the same as the camera's format.

If you have "creativity and artistic innovation" you are not concerned overly with your tools.

The editing software alone, if you want decent stuff, will cost you more than any licence to use the codec in your camera.

Re:Best possible outcome if it's better than VP8

[Zelgadiss]

I don't know about device ownership and stuff.

I'm namely approaching this from the point of view of HTML5 standardization.

That said, I never really considered the issue from the encoder perspective.
But if this codec really is completely royalty free (now MPEG is going to manage this I don't know), patents or no patents, then using it in the HTML5 standard shouldn't be a problem.

H.264 is obvious out unless they make it royalty free too, but that is highly unlikely to happen.

I think the main issue with including non-royalty free codecs in the HTML5 standard, is that it places the display of and the creation of HTML5 content under the control of the owners of the said non-royalty free codec. No one will be able to create nor display a HTML5 video without a license from codec owners. That IMHO is not good for the Internet.

all these codec wars make me fear

[DMiax]

Should I brace for another exciting period where a truckload of different codecs will be necessary for watching a video on internet, no one with an native Linux installer and no support whatsoever? Amazing! I cannot wait.

Re:all these codec wars make me fear

[jack2000]

Because the encoders who really know their codecs will even care. No one will bat an eyelash at this thing unless it's really good. You have nothing to fear.

Re:all these codec wars make me fear

[DMiax]

I hope so. But who is to say there will not be "incentives" to encode in this new format e.g. the coming olympic games? Microsoft already pulled that one with silverlight. MPEG-LA may try too.

Re:all these codec wars make me fear

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

"[...]no one with an native Linux installer[...]"

If the codec in question is genuinely royalty-free and GPL-compatible, I don't think that'll be a problem. I suspect an implementation would appear very quickly, and show up in standard Linux distribution repositories in short order.

This is why we can't have nice things

[poltsy]

Even if no one comes forward with a patent this seems to be turning out to be a somewhat effective fud campaign.

Re:Smoke and Mirrors

[commodore6502]

>>>make the CODEC royalty free for consumers

It already IS free. You only need to be a royalty for MPEG2 or 4 video codecs if you earn more than 1 million gross, which means consumers and small companies (like VideoLAN (VLC) and WinAmp) can use it free of charge.

Quality

[FrostedWheat]

A free codec better than MPEG2, but not as good as H.264. So they're re-inventing Theora?

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.

Re:Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

While interesting why shouldnt they inveset in new codecs? MPEG2 is decent (people seem to knock it then praise their DVDs...). H.264 is much better. However it is from the early 00's. I am sure they can do much better now. The thing is the 'cool' stuff will probably end up in a patent somewhere.

However, this sort of thing is exactly what got us the GIF fiasco. People wanting a better standard than the rest. It ended up 'good enough' even though there were better ones out there. But a single submarine patent almost nuked it from orbit. So we ended up with jpeg which was supposed to be patent free (surprise), then png which so far is but is used once and awhile.

If their stance is 'between the two' then that is a shame and it will end up not being used much. As you have the choice between a 'good enough' standard and a 'costly standard', and with few people having decoders for it.

If it doesnt blow h264 out of the water people will not even give it the time of day.

Besides what are we going to use on our next round of disc's we will be getting after bluray? :)

Re:Quality

[evilviper]

A free codec better than MPEG2, but not as good as H.264. So they're re-inventing Theora?

Theora can't compete with MPEG-2 to begin with. MPEG-2 is designed for high-bitrate, high quality video encoding. Theora can't handle that at all. No matter how much you crank up the bitrate, Theora will continue to be fuzzy. It was designed exclusively for very low bitrate encoding. H.264 learned from On2's mistakes, and designed their codec to excel in low-bitrates, but having the ability to shut off those features, and still be tolerable at high bitrates (though really not much better than MPEG-2).

Re:Quality

[makomk]

MPEG-2 is designed for high-bitrate, high quality video encoding. Theora can't handle that at all. No matter how much you crank up the bitrate, Theora will continue to be fuzzy.

That turned out to be due to a really stupid and trivially fixed issue with the default inverse and forward DCT.

Dirac?

[Midnight Thunder]

Whatever happened to Dirac? Wasn't it meant to achieve greatness as open, free and high quality video codec?

Re:Dirac?

[BZ]

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.

Re:Dirac?

[Tubal-Cain]

Yes, but not for video streaming.

Re:Dirac?

[bWareiWare.co.uk]

Dirac was designed for the future. Whilst it can achieve the same bitrate/quality as H.264 it is much more computationally expensive. It is also too different from H.264 to reuse the existing hardware acceleration. It was designed (by the BBC) for distribution of broadcast streams, where the required hardware is irrelevant, its better performance at high bit rates on super-HD content, optional lossless-compression, and ability to down-sample without re-compressing are all more important. In a decade Moore's Law may make it the obvious choice for all content. By acting as prior-art for most wavelet encoders it may be very important indeed.

Interesting

[DaMattster]

It is interesting to see this sudden almost about-face by the MPEG group. It will be interesting to see if they produce something better than VP8. However, VP8 is a very reasonable replacement for H.264. I have normal vision (i.e. without glasses) and I have a hard time discerning any differences between H.264 and VP8. All things being equal, I'd sooner go with something both open source and patent unencumbered.

Re:Interesting

[mr_lizard13]

It seems you have confused MPEG with the MPEG-LA.

Re:Interesting

[makomk]

It is an about-face. The traditional policy of the MPEG group has been to totally ignore patents as an issue and allow members to cram as many of their own patented techniques in as possible, even when there's a non-patented alternative that's just as good.

Re:Smoke and Mirrors

[click2005]

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

All is want (yesterday will be soon enough)

[RogueWarrior65]

All I want is ONE high-quality video format standard for websites that works on all browsers and all platforms with the stock operating system. IMHO, this is the final battle in the browser/OS wars. No, I don't want to host my content on Youtube. No, I don't want Flash. It's down to WMV and H.264 (Ogg? What's that?). WMV always looks like crap. Ain't It Cool, a connoisseur of film, always makes a point of announcing that a trailer is in "glorious Quicktime". But of course there are still a lot of Windows users out there who don't have or can't get Quicktime installed. Feh.

Re:All is want (yesterday will be soon enough)

[jo_ham]

Quicktime is not a format though.

Quicktime can play H.264 though, as can Windows Media Player. There's no reason that a person needs Quicktime to see H.264. The key is the container format, or the nature of the stream delivered to the browser, so we need a standard format and a standard container.

Re:All is want (yesterday will be soon enough)

[macshit]

Hmm, "Ain't It Cool News" are a bunch of idiots, so clearly if they love Quicktime it must suck. Similarly, WMV has "windows" in the acronym, so it sucks pretty much by definition; that's out as well.

That leaves webm as the only thing that doesn't suck. Good work, Google!

two words

[m509272]

EXPECTED and INTENDED 'nuf said

Re:MS will not allow that

[KugelKurt]

MS monopoly is based on closed formats. They will not allow any royalty free standards which would allow for example linux usage.

The whole set of MPEG codecs as well as Microsoft's VC-1 can perfectly played back on Linux.
Funny story: VC-2 is based on Dirac and totally royalty-free.

MPEG-2, DivX, Theora, VP8, AVC baseline

[tepples]

But WebM looks no better than MPEG2.

DivX/Xvid (MPEG-4 Part 2) is stronger than MPEG-2 video, and Theora is roughly tied with that. VP8 (WebM video codec) is stronger than DivX and Theora, and as I understand it, it's close to the baseline profile of AVC.

Re:Smoke and Mirrors

[Anonymous Coward]

As the other dude said it's not free. There's so many strings attached for something which I've already paid for I resent it. I'm happy with H.264 everywhere because it's a great codec and makes things simple. What I'm not happy with is some sword of Damacles tax on an ecosystem I can't escape from. It's an unhealthy precedent and who knows where it will end? It's no different to feudal warlords taking a slice of everything the serfs produced. What next? Taking the virginity of your daughters because they drank the water from their well?

The clock is ticking on MPEG cartel

[WaffleMonster]

I can't wait until the patents necessary to create the first DVD players run out.

The only thing patents are doing is holding back innovation, increasing costs and unjustly enriching those who no longer have an incentive to offer anything but dead labor.

Re:The clock is ticking on MPEG cartel

[Yvan256]

I can't wait either! Once the patents run out, we'll finally be able to buy DVD players for 19.75$ instead of 20.00$.

Editing means recompression

[tepples]

And since it's already compressed, any further compression is reducing quality even more--which makes for less market value of the quality of your work period.

Any editing of the raw footage will result in a recompression unless it's only cuts and only at keyframe boundaries. At that point, the quality difference between VP8 and baseline-profile AVC becomes negligible.

*sigh*

[jensend]

Ok, if you were going to post a knee-jerk response about their intentions, motivation etc please note that MPEG != MPEG-LA.

Re:Smoke and Mirrors

[commodore6502]

It didn't seem to bother you when you used Blurays, DVDs, CDs, or VHS tapes, all of which include a license fee to the original developer(s). I don't see why it should bother you now.

Right move (Was:Wrong move.)

[Salvo]

This is how Google should have released WebM to start with;
Submit it to a standards body for review.
Create an official specification (not just a token specification that is secondary to their implementation).
Have an independent body verify that it is in fact Patent Free.

As opposed to;
Buy a company, tweak the format and release it without peer review.
Write a synopsis of how the format work and then say "But if this is different to how our code works, our code is canonical".
Stick it up on a website with a big sticker that says "Patent Free".

These are the reasons why Apple's Facetime standard is being ignored by the rest of the industry, and is a contributing factor to why WebM will be ignored by the rest of the industry.

Re:Right move (Was:Wrong move.)

[RobbieThe1st]

And I disagree. WebM's already got hardware support in a few chips, and a device that could play it at 1080p, 60fps was showed off at CES? 2011(whatever that recent show was) by Rockchip.

Once Firefox 4 comes out, along with the plugin for ie9, and most people can play webm, I think YouTube will make the switch(at least as it's default on supported browsers). Once that happens, I think it'll snowball.

Re:MS will not allow that

[petermgreen]

MS actually tried in the past to release a codec as royalty free. Unfortunately they didn't do their homework well enough and mpeg-la managed to find patents that it violated. mpeg-la are are clearly trying to do the same to vp8, only time will tell whether they will be successful.

It doesn't seem MS are trying to fight VP8. They have said that while they won't ship it by default IE will play it through the video tag if the user installed a coded. Flash runs on linux anyway so there is a legit (though poorly performing) option for playing h.264 videos there.