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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?
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.
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.
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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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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.
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.
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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.