Royalty-Free MPEG Video Proposals Announced

theweatherelectric writes "Rob Glidden notes on his blog that MPEG has recently 'announced it has received proposals for a royalty-free MPEG standard and has settled on a deliberation process to consider them.' There are two tracks toward royalty-free video currently under consideration by MPEG. The first track is IVC, a new standard 'based on MPEG-1 technology which is believed a safe royalty-free baseline that can be enhanced by additional unencumbered technology described in MPEG-2, JPEG, research publications and innovative technologies which are promised to be subject to royalty-free licenses.' The second proposed track is WebVC, an attempt to get the constrained baseline profile of H.264 licensed under royalty-free terms. Rob Glidden offers an analysis of both proposals. Also of interest is Rob's short history of why royalty-free H.264 failed last time."

Comments

Or you can just...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you can just tell the MPEG-LA group to screw themselves and use VP8.

This "Intellectual Property" business is a bunch of crap.

Re:Or you can just...

[dzfoo]

And what do you do with the sections of your workflow that are not specifically Web-based?

H.264 is a video industry standard, which includes myriad delivery media. VP8 is a web video technology.

            -dZ.

Re:Or you can just...

[Vanders]

And use inferior technology that is a patent minefield?

"Inferior" is subjective, and I'd love to see any proof you have that VP8/WebM is a "patent minefield".

At least with H.264 I can be certain that my business isn't going to be taken to court one day and I lose it all. With H.264 I don't need to worry about such

Where did you get such a silly idea from? An H.264 license simply provides you a license to the patented technologies in H.264 that are owned by the MPEG-LA members. There are no guarantees or indemnities against any non-MPEG-LA member from suing you and everyone else for using H.264.

The risk from submarine patents for H.264 is exactly the same as VP8.

Re:Or you can just...

[InsightIn140Bytes]

The risk from submarine patents for H.264 is exactly the same as VP8.

No it's not. There are huge amount of companies, both big and small, using H.264. If there ever comes a problem with non-MPEG-LA member, I have a much smaller change of being directed alone. And even if I am, there are so much at play with H.264 that I'm sure to get help with it. You can't say the same for VP8. Hell, even Google isn't trusting VP8 enough to put it in HTML5 video draft.

As far as "subjective" quality issues go, this article sums it up good:

VP8, as a spec, should be a bit better than H.264 Baseline Profile and VC-1. It's not even close to competitive with H.264 Main or High Profile. If Google is willing to revise the spec, this can probably be improved.

VP8, as an encoder, is somewhere between Xvid and Microsoft's VC-1 in terms of visual quality. This can definitely be improved a lot.

VP8, as a decoder, decodes even slower than ffmpeg's H.264. This probably can't be improved that much; VP8 as a whole is similar in complexity to H.264.

With regard to patents, VP8 copies too much from H.264 for comfort, no matter whose word is behind the claim of being patent-free. This doesn't mean that it's sure to be covered by patents, but until Google can give us evidence as to why it isn't, I would be cautious.

VP8 is definitely better compression-wise than Theora and Dirac, so if its claim to being patent-free does stand up, it's a big upgrade with regard to patent-free video formats.

VP8 is not ready for prime-time; the spec is a pile of copy-pasted C code and the encoder's interface is lacking in features and buggy. They aren't even ready to finalize the bitstream format, let alone switch the world over to VP8.

With the lack of a real spec, the VP8 software basically is the specâ"and with the spec being âoefinalâ, any bugs are now set in stone. Such bugs have already been found and Google has rejected fixes.

Google made the right decision to pick Matroska and Vorbis for its HTML5 video proposal.

Re:Or you can just...

[makomk]

In fact, there have been submarine patent attacks on h.264 in the past, whereas WebM hasn't encountered any yet.

Re:Or you can just...

[TheTurtlesMoves]

At least with H.264 I can be certain that my business isn't going to be taken to court one day and I lose it all.

No you can't. They do *not* protect you from 3rd party patents that and it explicit states in the license agreement that its between you and the 3rd party, not them. MPEG-LA offer *zero* immunity or guarantees. In fact guess how many 3rd parties have come forward with claims on MPEG-LA licensed codecs? Now guess with either Theora or VP8?

It does not matter what you do, you are not safe from patent trolls. Paying one of em does nothing to remove the rest.

Re:Or you can just...

[andydread]

And use inferior technology that is a patent minefield? At least with H.264 I can be certain that my business isn't going to be taken to court one day and I lose it all. With H.264 I don't need to worry about such, and I get better technology (and hardware decoders on almost every kind of device on planet that can show video).

You are being sarcastic right? You do know that when you purchase equipment such as cameras and software that include a H.264 license it's for non-commercial uses only right?. Let say you purchase a shiny new Mac and you purchase Final Cut Pro. Note the "pro" in the name. And you decide to produce professional video and re-distribute it. You must get a license from MPEG-LA to do that. Read the fine print in the Final Cut Pro license.

Additional use licenses and fees are required for use of information encoded in compliance with the MPEG-4 Visual Standard other than the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer (i) in connection with information which has been encoded in compliance with the MPEG-4 Visual Standard by a consumer engaged in a personal and non-commercial activity, and/or (ii) in connection with MPEG-4 encoded video under license from a video provider. Additional information including that relating to promotional,internal and commercial uses and licensing may be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com./

You mentioned "At least with H.264 I can be certain that my business isn't going to be taken to court one day and I lose it all." So I am assuming you are using MPEG-4 for commercial uses and you have contacted MPEG LA for MPEG-4 licenses for each MPEG-4 work that you use commercially correct?

Re:Or you can just...

[Goaway]

Again the bullshit about x264 developers being "biased".

He also helped write the fastest VP8 decoder available, you know. Why did he do that if he was so biased against it?

Enough of these ridiculous ad hominem attacks. The guy is incredibly competent in the field, and nobody who's attacked him for what he said is anywhere close.

Re:Or you can just...

[makomk]

He's not exactly biased, he just doesn't grasp how weird the patent situation around h.264 is. Apparently a lot of the patents are quite narrow and easy to avoid because narrow patents are easier to defend in court, and the various companies just rely on their control of the standardization process to make sure that the standard is written in such a way that it necessarily infringes their patents. On2 claim to have worked around all the patents.

Re:Failed?

[Trepidity]

He's saying that the attempt to define a royalty-free "baseline" subset of h.264 was unsuccessful, not that h.264 itself failed.

Just use WebM for the web

[Anonymous Coward]

WebM is already royalty-free, and it out-performs h.264. Where is the problem?

Support: here is a performance comparison of the latest iteration of the WebM encoder hardware, showing also previous versions and a h.264 encoder for comparison.

http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/11/time-of-dragonflies.html

If WebM is better anyway, already royalty-free, and WebM/HTML5 is supported by more browsers than h264/HTML5, then why on earth shouldn't people just go ahead and use WebM.

Where is the issue?

Re:Just use WebM for the web

[John Betonschaar]

[quote]Support: here is a performance comparison of the latest iteration of the WebM encoder hardware, showing also previous versions and a h.264 encoder for comparison.

http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/11/time-of-dragonflies.html%5B/quote%5D

I hope you realize that the comparison you linked to compares ENCODER quality between two decoders (H264 and WebM) made by the same company? It says nothing about the abilities of WebM as a codec.

Try this one instead:
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377

Re:Failed?

[InsightIn140Bytes]

On August 26, 2010 MPEG LA announced that H.264 encoded internet video that is free to end users will never be charged for royalties.[10] All other royalties will remain in place such as the royalties for products that decode and encode H.264 video.[11]

Re:Failed?

[Vanders]

You said

There isn't any costs involved in streaming, playing or showing H.264 content.

The Wikipedia article you quote says

All other royalties will remain in place such as the royalties for products that decode and encode H.264 video.

So there is a cost to "play" or "show" H.264 encoded content.

Yes, this is needed

[ciaran_o_riordan]

From the point of view of technological progress, proposing the use of 20-year old technology is shameful, but it really is the only solution. (until software patents get abolished)

This was also suggested by Nokia during the html5 standard discussion of the video tag:

http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Use_software_and_functionality_from_20_years_ago

And remember, this problem is caused not by trolls but by the MPEG-LA signatories: Columbia University, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute of Korea (ETRI), France Télécom, Fujitsu, LG Electronics, Matsushita (Panasonic), Mitsubishi, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, Philips, Robert Bosch GmbH, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba, and Victor Company of Japan (JVC).

Re:Good for Firefox

[hairyfeet]

I'd be more concerned about HTML V5, as both apple and MSFT are pushing like mad to lock it behind a paywall with H.264 which as we all know is patented so badly you can pretty much give up on FOSS ever having a free version, not for another 15-20 years at least.

This is why I never understood the FOSS flash hate or why they would run to embrace an obviously hostile to FOSS group like MPEG-LA over Adobe. Sure flash isn't the greatest but have you EVER seen them complain about a distro including flash? Hell they don't even complain about gnash and I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually open flash up. Compare this to MPEG-LA that basically went "Pay your $699 license fee you cock smoking teabagger!" to Firefox and made it QUITE clear you will NOT be shipping H.264 in a browser or OS without cutting a check. of course being proprietary both Apple and MSFT can and do just cut them a check and both want to "fucking kill Google" so they're just fine with H.264.

I just hope the developers here will put their money where their mouths are and refuse to touch HTML V5 until it has a free codec as the standard, be it Theora, be it WebM (which I think is quite nice actually) or be it the royalty free MPEG 1+2 in TFA. The web should be free to all, be you proprietary or FOSS, and ATM HTML V5 is anything but and that is before they add the MPAA DRM on top which i'm sure will never work in FOSS OSes as unlike Apple and MSFT they don't support kernel level DRM..

Re:MPEG or MPEG-LA?

[hedwards]

MPEG has been around for a long time, they're the ones responsible for creating the actual IP. MPEG-LA is the patent trolls that have managed to cobble together a number of questionable patents to make people pay for h.264.