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

[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

[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

[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

[Tharsman]

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

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

[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.

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

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.