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MPEG-2 Patents Have Expired (mpegla.com)
New submitter jabuzz writes: Unless you live in the Philippines or Malaysia, then MPEG-2 has now joined the likes of MP3 and AC3 and gone patent free with the expiration of US patent 7,334,248.
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DVB-S
it is used everywhere.
dvd format still exists, and they're still sold (the expiry doesn't address dmca concerns regarding the easily-broken css encryption, however).
some games and software use it as a lighter-weight (as in negligible cpu cost) format for included video clips.
digital broadcast standards use it as well.
Not necessarily. The license key unlocks the hardware decode unit. Broadcom no longer needs to pay patent licenses for MPEG-2 (though they may have a contract that requires them to pay for devices even after the patents expire), but they are under no obligation to pass that saving on to you.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The most obvious and probably most common usage is over-the-air broadcasts. Combined with the patent expiration of AC3 last year, this probably means sets with built-in tuners can be produced without any licensing fees... estimates were as high as $50 per set for these fees.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
As another poster pointed out, DVDs are still sold. There are also a bunch of devices around that have MPEG-2 hardware acceleration, but don't enable it because doing so would require paying for a patent license to MPEG-LA. They can now enable it in a firmware update.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yes, it does. If you are talking about a specific implementation, you are confusing patents with copyrights.
Steam In-home Streaming encodes your desktop in real-time via MPEG4/h.264, and does it with so little latency that you can use it to play FPS games. It's not like you're encoding it over and over so the latency builds up. You encode it once just before you stream it.
Cost shouldn't be an issue. Broadcast equipment typically costs tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. The addition of a few dollars for a GPU with hardware h.264 encode (now commonly found on phones and tablets) would be trivial.
I suspect the issue is simply foot dragging due to backwards compatibility. If you want your HD distribution broadcast to work with the largest number of legacy client devices, MPEG2 is what you need to use. Switching to MPEG4/h.264 would require the cable company send out a newer cable box to all those customers who've been dutifully been paying $15/mo to rent a cable box which was paid off a decade ago.
Well, since no more infringment of the mpeg2 license is possible now, apparently there is already a patch to bypass the license checking and enable the GPU encoding/decoding of MPEG-2 video on the raspberry.
Patch for MPEG-2, VC-1 license
cd /boot
cp start.elf start.elf_backup && \
perl -pne 's/\x47\xE9362H\x3C\x18/\x47\xE9362H\x3C\x1F/g' < start.elf_backup > start.elf