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Google and MPEG LA Reach VP8 Patent Agreement
First time accepted submitter Curupira writes "The official WebM blog announced that MPEG LA has licensed all VP8 essential patents to Google Inc., allowing the company to sublicense the described techniques it to any VP8 user on a royalty-free basis." TechCrunch offers a bit more analysis.
When the Codec that is now called VP8 was being developed, it was 'closed source'. This allowed the original company to rip off the technology behind H264 and other published Codecs. VP8 was, effectively, a very poor illegal copy of parts of the H264 standard, and this is what Google discovered when it offered the source up for scrutiny.
Of course, since the illegality was stealing the patented work of other Codecs, and these patents lie almost entirely under the control of MPEG LA, Google always had the option of licensing the relevant patents after the fact, and this is what Google has now done. This doesn't change the fact that VP8 is a horrible and inefficient rip-off of PARTS of H264.
Why on Earth should anyone use this dreadful Codec today? X264, the open-source H264 encoder, does a world-class job of compressing video, whether for quality, speed of encoding, or low latency encoding for game and videophone uses. VP8 merely stinks, offering either lousy video quality or insanely bloated file sizes. Worse again is the fact that VP8 usually requires CPU decoding, massively increasing power consumption (and 'ruining the planet' for all you green idiots that believe the propaganda paid for by groups like Google- what an irony).
Why on Earth didn't Google use its massive cash pay-out to make H264 an even freer codec instead. This is further proof that Google doesn't care how poor standards are, so long as they emanate from Google itself. Nothing cripples the web more than the use of standards that are massively inefficient.
As for VP9- what a joke. Google was conned into buying pure garbage with VP8, but Google lacks the tech ability to improve the codec into a next-generation version. Sure, they can mindlessly throw money at the project (all Google seems to be capable of doing these days). But, VP9 will end up on that endless list of 'cancelled' Google projects as H265 develops into another roaring success. Google cancels software projects almost as quickly as Fox cancels TV shows.