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."'"

Wrong move.

[Bleek II]

Better than Mpeg 2 they say? Well I should hope so. And AVC Baseline isn't great. They're clearly making some crap/free encoder so that they can start charging more $$$ for their good ones. The only issue for them is that Google/Xiph have good ones that will always be free. If MPEG tries to force this new standard people will move to VC8 which has been around for some time.

Hmm, I wonder how good this will be

[Dr. Spork]

Since the members of the MPEG group are making such good money from the royalties, why would they want to undermine that project with something that's free? It's in their interest to make it only slightly less crappy than VP8 (which won't be hard). This will kill the motivation to develop the independent free codecs, and this is what MPEG wants, I guess. But they don't want to really risk killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Re:Quality

[Tacvek]

Not necessarily. They could decide to adopt Theora as the basis of the new standard, and see if they can get royalty free patent licenses for possible improvements.

Keep in mind that MPEG has little issue with standardizing something that already exists, like how the MOV container format was standardized as the MP4 container format, how they standardized Adobe and Microsoft's OpenType as MPEG4 Part 22: Open Font Format, or how they standarized a slight modification to ASPEC as MPEG-1 Layer 3 Audio.

Re:H.264 redux

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it possible that you are confusing H.264 with VC-1? VC-1 was supposed to be completely royalty free, but shortly after Microsoft puplished the standard it turned out that it violated many MPEG LA patents. They formed a patent pool for it and Microsoft joined.

AFAIK H.264 was never supposed to be royalty free except for internet distribution. Even that was supposed to be up for review until permanent royalty free status was announced last year.