33 replies to this topic

[+Mephistopheles]

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.

Quote

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

[billyea]

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]

Buddha said:

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.co.../n-10-08-26.pdf

[thealexweb]

torrentthief, on 26 August 2010 - 21:21, said:

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.co.../n-10-08-26.pdf

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

[billyea]

torrentthief, on 26 August 2010 - 21:21, said:

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.co.../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]

billyea, on 26 August 2010 - 20:55, said:

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.

billyea, on 26 August 2010 - 21:31, said:

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]

torrentthief, on 26 August 2010 - 21:02, said:

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]

billyea, on 26 August 2010 - 20:55, said:

Is there anything stopping Mozilla from picking it up now?

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

[hdood]

epk, on 26 August 2010 - 22:39, said:

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.