MPEG Continues With Royalty-free MPEG Video Codec Plans

yuhong writes "From the press release: 'In recognition of the growing importance that the Internet plays in the generation and consumption of video content, MPEG intends to develop a new video compression standard in line with the expected usage models of the Internet. The new standard is intended to achieve substantially better compression performance than that offered by MPEG-2 and possibly comparable to that offered by the AVC Baseline Profile. MPEG will issue a call for proposals on video compression technology at the end of its upcoming meeting in March 2011 that is expected to lead to a standard falling under ISO/IEC "Type-1 licensing", i.e. intended to be "royalty free."'"

Reaction

[markdavis]

Probably just another knee-jerk reaction to VP8/WebM. And you can bet this "royalty free standard" will still be protected by tons of patents. It just keeps getting more interesting all the time. Just what we need, though, yet another video standard.

Re:Wrong move.

[drinkypoo]

This is part of an at least two-pronged attack. They are attempting to put together a patent pool for VP8, even if they totally fail they will still gain FUD-based victories. If they can convince most people who matter that VP8 is really theirs then they can convince them to use their upcoming low-grade codec and prevent Google from becoming a name in yet another market.

Re:Dirac?

[bWareiWare.co.uk]

Dirac was designed for the future. Whilst it can achieve the same bitrate/quality as H.264 it is much more computationally expensive. It is also too different from H.264 to reuse the existing hardware acceleration. It was designed (by the BBC) for distribution of broadcast streams, where the required hardware is irrelevant, its better performance at high bit rates on super-HD content, optional lossless-compression, and ability to down-sample without re-compressing are all more important. In a decade Moore's Law may make it the obvious choice for all content. By acting as prior-art for most wavelet encoders it may be very important indeed.