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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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So I no longer need to buy the license for my Raspberry Pi XBMC unit?
Where do I get my free key to open that up?
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.
The news is that some countries are actually worse than the US regarding patents.
Is the patent relevant to modern computing? No. Could this prevent the trolling of retro engineering and homebrew projects? Yes. So let's all enjoy the thought of a parasite lawyer starving to death in a back alley, his last meal being the spunk of a truck driver named Leeroy and the only money in his pocket coming from Leeroy's copy of Monopoly.
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.
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MP3 is the audio layer (MPEG-2, third layer) of MPEG-2, isn't it? Maybe I'm wrong, it's been a very long time.
Pretty much every device on the planet has MP3 support. Also it would be great to have patent-free/patent unobstructed DVD player software; plus the idea that you can generate DVDs royalty free. A huge, huge chunk of the world still depends on street vendor pirate videos, although I think they've moved to MP4 and/or h.264 or whatever the latest standard is (I've lost track).
But billions of DVDs still exist today.
moox. for a new generation.
HDTV in the United States uses ATSC, which is a transport stream for MPEG-2. Most cable companies still use MPEG-2, though I believe the satellite companies have switched.
While this only means a $2 reduction in the cost to make a TV, it also means a $2 reduction in the cost of streaming devices capable of playing TV signals. That's significant when you're talking about a Roku stick, which is why they skipped the license fee and don't support it. That means you can't use a Roku as a frontend for MythTV without transcoding your recordings, and you can't use a Roku as a frontend for a HDPrime networked cable card tuner.
All that can change now. I don't know if existing hardware that Roku uses can support MPEG-2, but if it does, then they could add support with just a software update. The same with all the other similar devices that may not have supported MPEG-2 in the past.
Now I can stop paying all those licensing fees that I've been sending all these years!
-Styopa
Could be worse, he could be into GPL. That stuff is viral.
>Is the patent relevant to modern computing?
As network capacities increase, the efficiency of the coding should matter less. So presumably MPEG-2 is becoming more relevant over time.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
A lot of live HD distribution is still done in MPEG2. Why? The coding delay for MPEG2 is a lot lower than for h264/HVEC/whatever the latest fancy is. Not a big deal when dealing with canned material, but a huge factor in dealing with live material. It's the difference between an 18Mbps stream (for MPEG2 HD) vs 6Mbps (h.264), but also the difference between 0.5 seconds of encoding delay vs 2 or 3 seconds.
Also, the broadcast industry is incredibly stingy when it comes to spending money, especially capital expenditures. MPEG2 encoders are pretty cheap at this point, whereas MPEG4 are 10x the cost.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
The operation was a success, but the patent died.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Yeah, it's only used by DVDs and TVs, and who uses those these days? ;-)
More seriously I'm curious to know if AAC is also included, as that was part of the MPEG-2 specification, but isn't usually thought of as MPEG 2. AAC is one of the better audio encoders out there, so it'd be nice if it's free now.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
A lot of live HD distribution is still done in MPEG2. Why? The coding delay for MPEG2 is a lot lower than for h264/HVEC/whatever the latest fancy is. Not a big deal when dealing with canned material, but a huge factor in dealing with live material. It's the difference between an 18Mbps stream (for MPEG2 HD) vs 6Mbps (h.264), but also the difference between 0.5 seconds of encoding delay vs 2 or 3 seconds.
That's not an inherent problem of the spec, and hasn't been true for over half a decade:
http://web.archive.org/web/20150306225444/http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/249
(it's even better today)
I've set up live streams with x264 as an encoder with a guaranteed
encoding latency of under 150ms. On commodity hardware.
Also, the broadcast industry is incredibly stingy when it comes to spending money, especially capital expenditures. MPEG2 encoders are pretty cheap at this point, whereas MPEG4 are 10x the cost.
Yeah, commercial ones. I've been surprised several times by how free-software-averse
the whole broadcasting industry is: They'd rather buy a commercial encoder for $bignum
purchase + recurring $bignum2 support fee instead of using a superior setup that's based
on x264, would cost them about $bignum/10 for the initial setup, and then nothing to run for as
long as they'd like. I'd even deliver the whole documentation on how to run everything, so they
wouldn't need me again.
It's frustratingly hard to make "No need, I'll document and show you how to fix everything yourself"
an accepted answer to "But who do we call if something goes wrong?", even in cases where
they already have very capable and qualified people in-house.
Unfortunately, there's a pretty good inverse correlation between price and quality for H.264
encoders: The more expensive they are, the more they suck.
And that's were the latency problem tends to come in (and the encoding efficiency problem, and
the picture quality problem, and...).
FWIW, the "interesting" video codec patents expired many years ago. You can peruse them here...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The last patent is entitled "Conditional access filter as for a packet video signal inverse transport system" applied to cable systems and satellite broadcast, but basically doesn't apply to program streams (which is what is used in DVD and created by most MPEG2 A/V multiplexers).
There were some streaming and DVR-like systems that recorded transport streams directly and used them, but not really any "free" stuff (which might use packet formats like MKVs) . Of course now it is totally moot...
The mpeg2 key was just used to 'unlock' a software implementation in the VC4 firmware. It was trash anyways.
Basically all you need now is the open source VC4 drivers, or the open source vc4 gcc port and you can compile up mpeg2 for it at the same power usage as the real thing, completely bypassing the firmware requirement.
Not sure if they finished display output yet, but there is an open source VC4 bootstrap firmware now, as well as broadcom documentation on the VC4 opcodes so you could write/optimize your own implementation. The core has 20GFLOPS of peak processing if I remember correctly. Most of the Mali 400 cores are 2x that, but far less generally programmable.
I'm hoping the £2.40 fee for unlocking MPEG2 on Raspberry Pi goes away soon.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Because Mickey Mouse.
Have gnu, will travel.
And DVD's... even many Blu-ray discs use MPEG-2, especially at the beginning.
When you're using a medium for which bandwidth or size isn't a problem, there's nothing wrong with MPEG-2. Many of the first (high-def) Blu-ray discs used MPEG-2.
The original analog broadcast formats are still widespread, and in many cases, are still better quality than their digital replacements.
I'm pretty sure AM radio is "forever" because it's so simple to make a receiver in an emergency.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Well I have never seen a MPEG2 video stream with an AAC sound track that has been produced commercially. DVD's use an AC3 soundtrack (at least all mine do with sometimes a DTS one as well) and here in the UK the broadcast MPEG2 via DVB-T is all MP2 soundtracks.
The AAC format has been evolving for a long time so what do you exactly mean by AAC? The original specification MPEG-2 Part 7 is free of patents,
Unfortunately there are lots of other AAC profiles that are still under patent protection, and the MPEG4 main profile one which was defined in 2003, is as I understand it the main one in use. At least that file you downloaded from the iTunes store is.
So that will go out of patent protection sometime in 2023, aka 20 years after the publication of the standard as that would be prior art. I don't know the exact date. However there is a possibility that a patent with a file date of before 8th June 1995 managed to get an extension such that the with grant date was after sometime in 2006, at which point it will still be valid, because it's exparation is 17 years after grant for a US patent. That would be an impressive 7 year extension but it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. I can't find a list of patents for AAC on the web to check however.
That will be the same time that H.264 goes patent free too. However note for example that HE-AAC2 is sometime in 2026 and there are AAC profiles that where defined as recently as 2012.
I would hope it would be hard to make that argument. Who would be dumb enough to fall for it? Basically what you are saying is "bet your business on me, and once you pay me you are on your own".
"I'll document it and show you how to fix everything yourself" pretty much means "besides the documentation, I have no special knowledge or skills that could help you if/when something goes wrong, but trust me, this is the best thing ever". Do you really expect anyone to fall for that?
They're not so much paying for the software, they're paying for the support. The cost for the software often includes a support contract so when it all goes south 10 minutes before broadcast then can not only get all their own hands on deck, but they can bring in a paid expert from the company to help them through the process.
This fact is the biggest problem with most free software out there. If it's not a defacto standard, then the support options are few and far between. If something goes wrong, I don't want to have to wait for a response on a message board that I hope my guys know how to implement since the guy who setup the software left before he had the chance to fully document and train others on how it works.
You may not intend your words to mean what I said, but they do. While you want to portray paid service contracts as some sort of vendor lock in and something customers are forced into, companies don't view them that way. They view support contracts for what they are: contracts. They are a guarantee that you will be there to help them if they need it, and if you aren't, they have legal recourse against you. Absent a paid contract they have no such guarantee.