You pay in other ways as well, restricted freedom, barriers to entry that prevent competition, etc.
How exactly am I "more" free if a youtube video is encoded in theora over H.264? And I don't give a shit about barrier to entry. But even if you are worried about such things, royalties don't even come into play until you're shipping a pretty high volume of H.264 encoders/decoders or if you run a website you'd have to have pretty significant traffic. If you are reaching the point where you'd have to start paying the royalties you probably have enough money to cover them.
I stated I cannot get a legal codec for fractions of a cent.
Sure you can. Download the free and legal, DivX H.264 decoder.
How so? The H.264 royalties are capped at $5 million dollars. Spread out over all their yearly customers they'd only have to charge people a fraction of a penny to cover the costs.
The reality is I cannot get a legal h264 codec for my OS for a fraction of a cent.
Except that Microsoft has been providing a legal H.264 codec in it's OS for years now. I don't remember seeing the price of the OS skyrocket.
One can play 720@24p videos on an old AMD XP series chip with ffmpeg and it's not even really the fastest H.264 decoder around.
and tends to fall over and shit itself with even the tiniest bit of corruption.
And your answer to this is something like XviD which is far worse at bitstream corruption? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
This is a moot point anyway. It's just compression, how hard could it be? Lets get a sourceforge project going to make something better.
Oh yes, it's just soooo simple. Sure, if you ignore all the complex things that go into actually building a audio/video codec with good compression efficiency. Is this ignoring the fact that it took codecs like DivX, XviD, x264 years and years to reach their current states of quality and efficiency?
Both Apple and Microsoft have patents in MPEG-LA AVC patent pool, so they don't pay royalties.
Being in the patent pool doesn't give you free access to all the other patents in the pool. They pay royalties just like anyone else though the bulk of the cost is usually covered by cross-licensing of patents.
Know what? People pay 0 dollars for a browser. Exactly what costs are they bearing due to Apple or Google or Microsoft including H.264 support in the browser?
Oh, and a more idealistic person might even say that they'll not only be paying money
Paying money where? Browsers have all been free for quite some time now.
but paying in a more metaphorical sense with lock-in, etc.
What lock-in? What exactly am I "locked-in" to when I watch H.264 HTML 5 movies on youtube? And how would those movie being encoded in theora make me less "locked-in"?
What we need is fewer "programs" (decrease public sector) and more freedom (increase private sector).
How does more private sector mean more freedom? If anything, corporations are just as much into restricting freedom as the government is (MPAA, RIAA, etc)
But why should the average user be quite in some stupid ideological fight when they are never going to be paying for the H.264 royalties that Microsoft, Apple and Google will be shelling out to include H.264 support in their browser?
And Google, Microsoft and Apple give out a collective *yawn*. Youtube has more traffic than Wikipedia so if Google is pushing H.264 through there it will have far more impact than Wikipedia. Not to mention that Facebook, who also has more traffic than wikipedia and also youtube, also uses H.264 for its video.
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Yeah, I did. It makes his girlfriend sound even sluttier with the ending.
Sure, but prosecuting them for transmitting child pornography? That's fucking ridiculous.
When I was a teen we sent back and forth nude pictures of ourself with my girlfriend,
So she really got around, eh?
Mr. Linux Nutsack, I respect your opinion on this matter, but BadAnalogyGuy is actually correct, whether he was trying to be funny or not.
I wasn't saying he was wrong. The point, though, is that BadAnalogyGuy posts things in order to bait idiots such as eldavojohn who bite.
Wow, I didn't realize there were still people on Slashdot dumb enough to fall for a BadAnalogyGuy troll post.
Gee, it was almost as if the GP was making a joke. Geez, fucking lighten up.
All of these GTVs would beg to differ.
Sure, and they amount to a couple of cents. Oh noes! A couple of pennies is gonna break mah bank!
Licensing fees for MPEG are a part of Windows and Mac OS X price tag. Full stop.
And the price of neither operating system has changed in any significant way since they've included H.264 codecs in their OSes for some time now.
You pay in other ways as well, restricted freedom, barriers to entry that prevent competition, etc.
How exactly am I "more" free if a youtube video is encoded in theora over H.264? And I don't give a shit about barrier to entry. But even if you are worried about such things, royalties don't even come into play until you're shipping a pretty high volume of H.264 encoders/decoders or if you run a website you'd have to have pretty significant traffic. If you are reaching the point where you'd have to start paying the royalties you probably have enough money to cover them.
I stated I cannot get a legal codec for fractions of a cent.
Sure you can. Download the free and legal, DivX H.264 decoder.
Yeah because you never forget anything, right?
And what are we supposed to make of your post where your supposed case for people not knowing algebra has nothing to do with algebra?
No, they pay a lot more.
How so? The H.264 royalties are capped at $5 million dollars. Spread out over all their yearly customers they'd only have to charge people a fraction of a penny to cover the costs.
The reality is I cannot get a legal h264 codec for my OS for a fraction of a cent.
Except that Microsoft has been providing a legal H.264 codec in it's OS for years now. I don't remember seeing the price of the OS skyrocket.
I would assume that the licensing fees for MPEG are a part of the Windows and Mac OS X price tag.
So at $5 million dollars a year split over the 10s of millions of licenses a year that comes out to what? A handful of change? Oh noes!
You do realize you were most likely being trolled, right?
It's slow, unwieldy, CPU intensive
One can play 720@24p videos on an old AMD XP series chip with ffmpeg and it's not even really the fastest H.264 decoder around.
and tends to fall over and shit itself with even the tiniest bit of corruption.
And your answer to this is something like XviD which is far worse at bitstream corruption? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
This is a moot point anyway. It's just compression, how hard could it be? Lets get a sourceforge project going to make something better.
Oh yes, it's just soooo simple. Sure, if you ignore all the complex things that go into actually building a audio/video codec with good compression efficiency. Is this ignoring the fact that it took codecs like DivX, XviD, x264 years and years to reach their current states of quality and efficiency?
Both Apple and Microsoft have patents in MPEG-LA AVC patent pool, so they don't pay royalties.
Being in the patent pool doesn't give you free access to all the other patents in the pool. They pay royalties just like anyone else though the bulk of the cost is usually covered by cross-licensing of patents.
The cost is still paid by the average user, it's just tacked onto the cost of the O/S or whatever you buy from Apple, MS, etc.
So they pay a fraction of a penny more? Oh noes! That's gonna break the bank!
They just won't know it.
Know what? People pay 0 dollars for a browser. Exactly what costs are they bearing due to Apple or Google or Microsoft including H.264 support in the browser?
Oh, and a more idealistic person might even say that they'll not only be paying money
Paying money where? Browsers have all been free for quite some time now.
but paying in a more metaphorical sense with lock-in, etc.
What lock-in? What exactly am I "locked-in" to when I watch H.264 HTML 5 movies on youtube? And how would those movie being encoded in theora make me less "locked-in"?
What we need is fewer "programs" (decrease public sector) and more freedom (increase private sector).
How does more private sector mean more freedom? If anything, corporations are just as much into restricting freedom as the government is (MPAA, RIAA, etc)
But why should the average user be quite in some stupid ideological fight when they are never going to be paying for the H.264 royalties that Microsoft, Apple and Google will be shelling out to include H.264 support in their browser?
Yeah, they're all running Flash (which is closer to H.264)
What do you mean "closer to"? Flash has been using H.264 in MP4 for quite some time now.
If the OS isn't handling your plugins for you then it is lame and you should drop it for something more sophisticated and less user hostile.
Yes because no one has to install plugins in Linux, right?
Although having a proper package manager certainly helps.
Why do you need a package manager when browsers have been facilitating the easy installation of plugins, such as Flash, for years now?
So you claim that people don't want or can't figure out how to install a plugin for playing HTML 5 video but are somehow able to install Flash?
And Google, Microsoft and Apple give out a collective *yawn*. Youtube has more traffic than Wikipedia so if Google is pushing H.264 through there it will have far more impact than Wikipedia. Not to mention that Facebook, who also has more traffic than wikipedia and also youtube, also uses H.264 for its video.