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Firefox Gains Support for VP9 Video Codec
An anonymous reader writes "With the latest Firefox nightly builds the VP9 video codec is enabled by default. VP9 is a step ahead of the open-source VP8 codec but up to now has only been supported by the Chrome browser. VP9 support will officially appear in Firefox 28."
Most of the remaining MPEG LA patents that matter run out in Q1 2014.
That sounds great, but could you please provide a reference or two to support it?
The sources I have seen suggest that it will be after 2020 before all the patents that affect even MPEG-2 will be gone. For example: this kuro5hin article lists 2023 as the year the last MPEG-2 patent runs out. And this page lists 2027 as the year the last H.264 patents run out.
If I'm understanding you correctly, you are saying that the most essential patents are running out, so it should be possible to make a patent-free coder and decoder that would cover a usable subset of the MPEG standards?
Do you predict that a patent-free MPEG-2 decoder capable of playing DVDs would be possible within a year?
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely