MPEG LA Declares H.264 Standard Permanently Royalty-Free

[+Frank B. Subscriber²]

MPEG LA Declares H.264 Standard Permanently Royalty-Free

MPEG LA, the group that oversees licensing for a number of Internet media standards, today announced that Internet broadcast content using the H.264 video coding standard will remain royalty-free for the entire life of the license, quashing fears that the standard could suddenly become subject to royalty payments in 2016 after the current licensing term expires and is required to be renewed.

MPEG LA announced today that its AVC Patent Portfolio License will continue not to charge royalties for Internet Video that is free to end users (known as "Internet Broadcast AVC Video") during the entire life of this License. MPEG LA previously announced it would not charge royalties for such video through December 31, 2015, and today's announcement makes clear that royalties will continue not to be charged for such video beyond that time.

H.264 is the video content standard that has been embraced by a broad array of content providers including Apple, which owns several of the patents included in the technology's portfolio. Today's announcement also paves the way for H.264 to become the standard video format for HTML5, which had seen some contributors, such as Mozilla and Opera, supporting Ogg Theora as a royalty-free video standard.

Earlier this year, Google announced its own video standard, WebM, claiming that it would be a royalty-free alternative to H.264. Questions were raised, however, about whether WebM truly could be royalty-free, with MPEG LA even going as far as to suggest that it was looking into putting together a patent pool to assert the rights of intellectual property holders associated with the WebM/VP8 standard.

Source: Mac Rumors

[ProphetMuhammad]

Good news for web developers as using MP4 allows them to target everyone with a single file

[argonite]

Is there anything stopping Mozilla from picking it up now?

[torrentthief]

AMAZING news, i hope firefox and opera add h264 support now :) Now we can really kill off flash for web video :)

[tiagosilva29]

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.

[HawkMan]

and then WEBM died. and noone cared.

[torrentthief]

Just found out that this means its free for end-users ONLY. Mozilla will still have to pay the MPEG-LA $5m/yr to include h264 in firefox. Quite a chunk of money, i hope they do this, maybe they could ask google, microsoft and apple to donate 1/3rd each :)

Here is the confirmation that this is true and not just a rumour that h264 will be free forever: http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachments/231/n-10-08-26.pdf

[thealexweb]

Just found out that this means its free for end-users ONLY. Mozilla will still have to pay the MPEG-LA $5m/yr to include h264 in firefox. Quite a chunk of money, i hope they do this, maybe they could ask google, microsoft and apple to donate 1/3rd each :)

Here is the confirmation that this is true and not just a rumour that h264 will be free forever: http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachments/231/n-10-08-26.pdf

If the browser makers have to pay anything I think we call this a right off.

[argonite]

Just found out that this means its free for end-users ONLY. Mozilla will still have to pay the MPEG-LA $5m/yr to include h264 in firefox. Quite a chunk of money, i hope they do this, maybe they could ask google, microsoft and apple to donate 1/3rd each :)

Here is the confirmation that this is true and not just a rumour that h264 will be free forever: http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachments/231/n-10-08-26.pdf

What??? Can't the MPEG LA add some sort of "if primary use is a web browser, don't have to pay" clause. Or even reduced fee?

Don't they understand this'll mean their format will be picked up across the web?

[ObiWanToby]

Is there anything stopping Mozilla from picking it up now?

Lets hope not.

[torrentthief]

Why, i'm sure mozilla can easily get $5m extra from donations if they start a donation campaign or they could just choose to spend money on that instead of other areas.

If Opera and Mozilla can pay for these then youtube can abandon encoded all it's videos in WebM, that format could be abandoned, they could instead make a WebM2 to be of better quality than h264 and hope that becomes a standard. I would LOVE to use youtube without flash, its so jerky and uses so much cpu even on core2 cpu's.

Lets hope Google, Opera and Mozilla make official statements about this within the next 48hrs about their intentions of supporting it in firefox, opera and the intentions for youtube.

What??? Can't the MPEG LA add some sort of "if primary use is a web browser, don't have to pay" clause. Or even reduced fee?

Don't they understand this'll mean their format will be picked up across the web?

they certainly could be seeing as they they just released that press release clearly they don't intend to do that or they would have done it at the same time. The MPEG-LA is there to make money, they would like the $5m/yr from opera and mozilla and it would become a web standard and so pay sites using h264 will add support and will have to pay fees to mpeg-la which would be VERY lucrative for them. I think they are gambling on the fact that opera and mozilla will just pay up, if they don't they will probably let them have it for free in 6 months maybe.

[McCordRm]

5 million dollars a year??? I don't see that happening.

[Scorbing]

AMAZING news, i hope firefox and opera add h264 support now :) Now we can really kill off flash for web video :)

Agreed. I hate Flash.

[epk]

Is there anything stopping Mozilla from picking it up now?

I think they were against it cos it's not open source

[hdood]

I think they were against it cos it's not open source

It's a standard. It has no source code, it's just documentation. The issue is that a whole host of companies hold patents for technology used in it.

[Yusuf M. Veteran]

Just found out that this means its free for end-users ONLY. Mozilla will still have to pay the MPEG-LA $5m/yr to include h264 in firefox. Quite a chunk of money, i hope they do this, maybe they could ask google, microsoft and apple to donate 1/3rd each :)

Here is the confirmation that this is true and not just a rumour that h264 will be free forever: http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachments/231/n-10-08-26.pdf

This is an interesting read: http://obamapacman.com/2010/02/the-5-million-dollar-h-264-expensive-license-myth/

[Elliott]

This is an interesting read: http://obamapacman.com/2010/02/the-5-million-dollar-h-264-expensive-license-myth/

Great read! Myth debunked.

[ichi]

Certainly better than the previous uncertainty about what could happen in the future, although still doesn't change how things are now, which is what WebM was meant to address.

Great read! Myth debunked.

Did you read the comments to the article on that link? It's the debunking of the myth that gets debunked :p

[boogerjones]

Great read! Myth debunked.

What "myth" was debunked? There was so much Engrish in that article, I had a tough time understanding its purpose. The concern about h.264 is that the patent group, like most patent groups, is predatory.

Furthermore, the title of this article (and the one it linked to) is frankly incorrect. It only applies to web video. And though that's a big segment, it hardly makes the h.264 standard royalty-free to implement. It just means those greedy ******* won't go after Johnny Q Blogger for embedding a YouTube link on his personal page.

And let's be realistic: the ONLY reason this is happening is because of WebM. If there remained concern that the h.264 patent sharks would go for pay-day in 2016, the entire web would've switched to WebM. And why do some people keep saying the h.264 is "closed-source?" That doesn't make any sense.

[Elliott]

Did you read the comments to the article on that link? It's the debunking of the myth that gets debunked :p

I see your point, but technically, Mozilla doesn't have to pay a cent. Firefox can use the decoders built in to Windows and OS X. Linux gets screwed over, but when doesn't Linux get screwed over? I understand this is all out of principle, but seriously, unless FOSS concedes a bit, Flash is going to be the overall winner.

[Udedenkz]

Why, i'm sure mozilla can easily get $5m extra from donations if they start a donation campaign or they could just choose to spend money on that instead of other areas.

Or they could just use OS's codecs. Mac and Windows have build in h264 support. Although I would prefer like MPC:HC h264 codec though.

If Opera and Mozilla can pay for these then youtube can abandon encoded all it's videos in WebM,

YouTube can't do that, that will remove a massive amount of its users due to incompatibility issues.

that format could be abandoned, they could instead make a WebM2 to be of better quality than h264

That is a really tiny visual difference and only applies to the base profile h264.

Eventually YouTube and such sites will want to stream videos in High Quality (20Mbit +), followed by 3D.

WebM fails miserably in this area.

its so jerky and uses so much cpu even on core2 cpu's.

Flash works fairly good with modern computers.

This is because modern computers have modern graphics cards which support h264.

I suggest getting the cheapest 8-series Nvidia GPU to solve your playback issues.

Sure flash does suck -> My CPU can work up to 80% with Flash Video, compared to ~30% with MPCHC playing some 1080p file. That is why h264 HTML5 should the future.

Lets hope Google, Opera and Mozilla make official statements about this within the next 48hrs about their intentions of supporting it in firefox, opera and the intentions for youtube.

I would prepare for the great IE9 migration instead.

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

AMAZING news, i hope firefox and opera add h264 support now :) Now we can really kill off flash for web video :)

Flash video is H.264 these days, the Flash player even takes advantage of hardware H.264 decoding support.

I see your point, but technically, Mozilla doesn't have to pay a cent. Firefox can use the decoders built in to Windows and OS X. Linux gets screwed over, but when doesn't Linux get screwed over? I understand this is all out of principle, but seriously, unless FOSS concedes a bit, Flash is going to be the overall winner.

Windows 7 and OS X you mean, while MS will soon bring the H.264 decoder to Vista in an update, the fact remains that currently only one version of Windows out of the 3 supported ones actually supports H.264 out of the box.

[Growled Member]

Very good news, if true.

[Elliott]

Windows 7 and OS X you mean, while MS will soon bring the H.264 decoder to Vista in an update, the fact remains that currently only one version of Windows out of the 3 supported ones actually supports H.264 out of the box.

Fair enough, but it's trivial to do a video tag with a Flash fallback (though you still have to use that god-awful object tag markup). The re-encoding into different formats is the time-consuming and painful part. If we can agree on one video format, then displaying HTML5 video to browsers that support it and then using a Flash player for other browsers isn't too bad of a deal to me.

Now, I suppose Firefox and Opera could just be two of the browsers that get a Flash player served to them.

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

They tried to standardise on one format, but the H.264 backers didn't support it.

While the format's still locked up behind patent pools and multi-million dollar yearly licensing fees, it can't be included in any web standard or by open source browsers (Neither open source versions of Chrome or WebKit support H.264)