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/

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]

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.

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: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: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