MPEG Continues With Royalty-free MPEG Video Codec Plans 139
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."'"
No worries (Score:5, Informative)
I think I can save MPEG a lot of time. I've found a royalty-free container, a video codec and an audio codec we can all use:
http://www.webmproject.org/ [webmproject.org]
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Does my unhacked ps3 play webm stuff?
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http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/an-analysis-of-webm-and-its-patent-risk/ [conecta.it]
http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/on-webm-again-freedom-quality-patents/ [conecta.it]
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Pity about all the patents they use but don't actually own. Unfortunately, royalty-free seems to equal indemnity-free (FYI, not a good kind of freedom to have).
http://www.mpegla.com/main/pid/vp8/default.aspx [mpegla.com]
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Pity about all the patents they use but don't actually own. Unfortunately, royalty-free seems to equal indemnity-free (FYI, not a good kind of freedom to have).
http://www.mpegla.com/main/pid/vp8/default.aspx [mpegla.com]
The linked page is a request for people to come forward if they have any patents covering VP8, not an indication that any such patents have been found. (Of course, with the current state of patents, realistically everything infringes some patent, it's just a matter of finding it.)
This is why we can't have nice things (Score:2)
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They're claiming this...and they claimed it with Theora. Google's got much of that alleged pool to themselves right now since VP8 was patented itself, even though Google's granted an effective license to those implementing WebM or a FOSS project.
Any of those patents showing up will need to...
1) Pass muster against the ones already held by Google (i.e. not invalidated by their prior art)
2) Survive prior art scrutiny (i.e. They've taken on someone with deep pockets capable of making a go at that sort of th
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Really?
It appears to me as if MPEG-LA called and failed to assemble a patent portfolio for WebM, so in a effort to protect their monopoly upon video codecs has decided to create a new codec to compete in every way with WebM (including royalties).
It should be interesting to see if this blatant attempt at monopoly pays off for them, or if people stick to WebM.
as a side note, how long is in before mpeg4 patents terminate and leaves MPEG-LA without any real codecs to license?
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Wow, things work fast on internet time. MPEG-LA first asked for contributions to the patent pool *this week* and they've already failed?
Why don't you wait until March 18th (the date the MPEG-LA set for submissions) before you decide it's a failure?
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Why would they want to establish a royalty free codec if not to avoid losing users to someone else, i.e. to preempt another royalty free solution?
Looking for an evil interpretation, one could say that this might forestall adoption of Webm so that H.264 royalties could be collected in the interim. Then perhaps with Webm out of the way work on the free MPEG codec could be cancelled. Or perhaps network effects and install base would make it impossible to dislodge H.264 on any time frame, yielding a mountain of royalties. Looking for a non-evil interpretation, perhaps ISO/IEC wish to improve there relevancy as standard organizations. Or perhaps there is
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Why wait? It's very obviously intended to scare people away from WebM, and a consortium which has to rely on scare tactics is desperate - SCO "we own parts of Linux but we won't tell you exactly which parts" desperate. This story is another indicator that the MPEG LA is between a rock and a hard place. Why would they want to establish a royalty free codec if not to avoid losing users to someone else, i.e. to preempt another royalty free solution? The good news is that they must still think they can win this, so they're still trying to compete. When they realize that the game is over, they'll start extracting money from their imaginary property Darl McBride style.
MPEG is not MPEG-LA
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Use of the carrot does not preclude use of the stick. I expect they are moving on several fronts.
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I would say that WebM is likely patent encumbered. MPEG-LA is assembling a patent pool for WebM, so it will not be royalty-free.
And what do you base this on? Saber rattling by MPEG-LA, who are seeing their protection racket disappear?
Either put up and show us the patents or shut up.
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Citation needed
MPEG-2, DivX, Theora, VP8, AVC baseline (Score:3)
But WebM looks no better than MPEG2.
DivX/Xvid (MPEG-4 Part 2) is stronger than MPEG-2 video, and Theora is roughly tied with that. VP8 (WebM video codec) is stronger than DivX and Theora, and as I understand it, it's close to the baseline profile of AVC.
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Mod parent up. WebM is barely better than Theora and nowhere near as good as H.264/AVC.
Mod parent down as a troll. Webm is the only video codec Chromium, Firefox and Opera and Konqueror will support natively. It is far better than H.264 because it offers similar quality while being open and free. With Webm nobody can control your video by controlling the codec.
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I'm sorry but all WebM has going for it is a bunch of FOSS users
That is far from true and even if it were, we FOSS users and creators are a very important constituency. After all, we run the internet, serve the web pages, provide the brains for a majority of intelligent consumer devices and are in the habit of standing up for freedom. Unlike you.
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You seem to have issues. I suggest a mild sedative.
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I suggest a strong sedative, quick before you burst a vein.
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Well, except criticizing your general lack of idealism and assumption that everyone else has the same, I'd like to point out a few things.
Success of linux != success of open source. Sure, it's a free operating system, and success on the desktop would be a huge boon, but just because it failed to gain acceptance there does not mean we (FLOSS community) lost. On the contrary, Linux and BSD basically own the server and supercomputer market. Open source browsers are coming close to dominating 50% of the web br
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Depends what part of H.264 you compare it to.
WebM is roughly the same quality as H.264 baseline.
H.264 High profile is clearly better.
Re:No worries (Score:4, Informative)
A standard need not be free of control by a single entity. You are conflating two different concepts of standards and public ownership.
We all pretty much agree that 802.11 is a group of standards. But its patented [google.com] and owned by CSIRO [wikipedia.org].
Royalty Free (Score:5, Funny)
So we won't find any videos of Charles, Camilla, William and Kate, Harry and the rest of the family in that format then
Re:Royalty Free (Score:5, Funny)
I would pay a premium for that.
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I hear finding a format that is specifically royalty free is difficult due to the fact that the royal family easily lends itself to compression due to the high levels of redundancy involved.
Wrong move. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wrong move. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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MPEG is not the same as MPEG-LA. These are two completely separate organizations that have nothing to do with each other.
Re:Wrong move. (Score:5, Informative)
Completely separate? MPEG-LA handles licensing MPEG patents. That's what they do. To say they are completely separate is like saying the ocean and an ocean basin are completely separate.
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Completely separate? MPEG-LA handles licensing MPEG patents.
MPEG LA handles also VC-1 patents which has no relation to ISO MPEG
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My friend, your cynical views are not welcome here, clearly MPEG-LA and MPEG are two completely independent organizations that merely happen to share part of their name and in the spirit of cooperation and well intentions decided that, though some confusion between the two might occur, it wouldn't be fair for one to request the other to pick a different name and all the hassle that would involve.
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To be more correct, the "Motion Picture Expert's Group" (or whatever the current acronym means at the moment... it seems to change with video groups from time to time like the definition of DVD) was established well before the MPEG-LA group was ever put together.
The problem is that the MPEG guys were just pure researchers and didn't give a damn about patents, royalties, or if anybody was going to even be using their stuff except as fellow computer hacker/researchers. Then it became political after a fashio
Re:Wrong move. (Score:5, Informative)
This is not an attack on VP8. It might moot the WebM project, but neither Google nor Mozilla should have much of an issue with implementing such a standard, since automatic royalty free patent licenses don't cause any issues with Free or Open Source software. Indeed, they are even compatible with the GPLv3.
Please don't confuse MPEG with the MPEG LA. The latter is a a corporation with no formal relationship to MPEG. If anything MPEG doing this is intentionally snubbing the MPEG LA.
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Google could also see it as investing in getting an open format available. The fact of the matter is that if they had not put all those resources into creating WebM, MPEG may well have taken up this issue in the first place. If they see it as such, they will welcome a competing open standard that could be superior,and would offer royalty free use of their acquired patents in this new standard.
Either reaction is possible, but your suggestion does seem slightly more likely.
Right move (Was:Wrong move.) (Score:1)
This is how Google should have released WebM to start with;
Submit it to a standards body for review.
Create an official specification (not just a token specification that is secondary to their implementation).
Have an independent body verify that it is in fact Patent Free.
As opposed to;
Buy a company, tweak the format and release it without peer review.
Write a synopsis of how the format work and then say "But if this is different to how our code works, our code is canonical".
Stick it up on a website with a big
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>>>They're clearly making some crap/free encoder
Good observation. A wiser course would be for MPEG to say, "From this point forward, MPEG2 shall be free of charge." - That would essentially kill Google's attempt to shoehorn VP8, because manufacturers would not want to abandon a current standard that every device can read, and has no cost.
Free MPEG2 would also be a great benefit for the Free TV stations (US, Canada, Mexico) - they'd save a lot of money in royalty fees and instead be able to hir
Hmm, I wonder how good this will be (Score:3, Interesting)
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Since the members of the MPEG group are making such good money from the royalties [...]
MPEG != MPEG-LA
The first is an ISO standards body, the second... well... some sort of protection racket association, I guess.
And I'm sure the misleading name similarity is pure coincidence.
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The first is an ISO standards body, the second... well... some sort of protection racket association, I guess.
And I'm sure the misleading name similarity is pure coincidence.
Not really. The way it works is that the MPEG members use the MPEG standardization process to get their patents into video compression standards, then charge money to license them via the MPEG-LA.
Re:Hmm, I wonder how good this will be (Score:4)
MPEG wants to merely merely standardize things, ending the problem of searching for a royalty free codec. Mozilla and Google both simply want a royalty free standard that is Good enough. VP8 seems like one possibility, but if something even slightly better than VP8 is standardized, both should be quite willing to implement it.
MPEG LA on the other hand actively does not want any codec better than say Microsoft Video 1 (the format most classic AVI files used) available on royalty free terms. They would lose out on a substantial amount of royalties if devices like phones or low end Digital Cameras used such a format rather than one of their formats. This is why they so actively fear projects like WebM. They make a substantial portion of their royalties from Cell phones, low end cameras, and similar devices.
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MPEG LA on the other hand actively does not want any codec better than say Microsoft Video 1...available on royalty free terms. They would lose out on a substantial amount of royalties if devices like phones or low end Digital Cameras used such a format rather than one of their formats.
The twenty-nine H.264 licensors include:
Apple. Bosch. Cisco. Daewoo. Dolby. Ericsson. Fraunhofer. Fujitsu. HP. Hitachi. JVC. LG. Microsoft. Mitsubishi. NTT. Panasonic. Philips. Samsung. Sharp. Siemens. Sony. Toshiba.
The global manufacturing and distribution horsepower on that list would be difficult to match.
The 950 or so H.264 licensees rounds out a list of the global 1,000 in tech --- and the Asian Fortune 500 in tech.
These guys are all big enough to be paying the fixed-price H.264 Enterprise Ca
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I did not say a crippling amount of royalties, merely a substantial amount. It is currently the codec of choice for many applications in a whole bunch of different industries that would be uninterested in the new royalty free codec. But companies are known for spending more money to irrationally protect a source of revenue than they actually receive from it, so some of those players may object and object loudly.
If as you imply the loss of smartphones and internet usage would barely touch the revenue and as
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MPEG-1 video has been freely implementable for a long time. MPEG-2 will be out from under its relevant patents very shortly. Both are decidedly better than MV1, and there's nothing sto
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Computational power doubles at the same price point, every 12-18 months. It's only a few years away from consumer-level encoding. The fight is not today, it's in the next 3-5 years when every mid-to-high range phone/mini tablet/camera can do professional-level video encoding.
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I did not mean to imply that low end devices could encode Web M, but they can certainly play it. I did mean to imply that MPEG-LA would not be particularly thrilled about a royalty free codec of better than MPEG 2 quality that could be encoded on such a device, much like the very concept of the story.
I was merely pointing out to the eating utensil with a PHD, that MPEG is not necessarily doing the MPEG-L any favors by developing such a standard.
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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.
H.264 redux (Score:5, Informative)
I happen to know that H.264 was _also_ supposed to be royalty free, with certain patents being reverse-engineered around in the standards development. MPEG-LA had different ideas, and they may have different ideas about this new work as well.
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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.
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Best possible outcome if it's better than VP8 (Score:3)
I for one don't care all that much about patents issues, as long as Mozilla and Opera can implement it to me it means problem solved.
HTML5 can be standardized and we can move on with our lives.
Whether it's VP8 or whatever.
If it's quality is better than VP8 all the better, those unhappy with VP8's output can now be happy.
I got a feeling this codec will be highly optimized for low bitrates and streaming, so it won't compete with H.264 main profile for other uses.
Re:Best possible outcome if it's better than VP8 (Score:5, Informative)
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I am pretty sure that you will re-encode your video after you have edited it. Your camera has nothing to do with the final distribution format of the movie. If you distribute unedited video, it is most likely free of charge in youtube, in that case you do not have to worry, since free internet distribution is royalty free.
The issue is thus mostly non existing. However, if they would try to extract royalty fees for video which was re-encoded from AVC to a patent free format, then it would be an issue. Howeve
Editing means recompression (Score:2)
And since it's already compressed, any further compression is reducing quality even more--which makes for less market value of the quality of your work period.
Any editing of the raw footage will result in a recompression unless it's only cuts and only at keyframe boundaries. At that point, the quality difference between VP8 and baseline-profile AVC becomes negligible.
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I believe that nothing of what you've said is actually true, just more of the same old H264 fear mongering you see a lot on Slashdot.
The royalty scheme includes payments for commercial encoder/decoder writers, subscription services that make money from hosting H264 video, and hardware manufacturers that include H264 playback or encoding in their devices. If you shoot a movie using an H264-capable camera, the cost of the royalties will already be absorbed in the hardware, and will be somewhere in the neighbo
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Totally wrong. Read the licensing in a decent video/camera before spouting lies and FUD in future.
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Right, because I'm going to distribute my movie in the same format that the camera uses. If it's going for broadcast I put it in a format that the broadcaster wants (which won;t be the one the camera uses, necessarily, especially if it's a prosumer one), and if it's going for a film release it will be on 35mm or into a digital format for a digital projector that is still unlikely to be the same as the camera's format.
If you have "creativity and artistic innovation" you are not concerned overly with your too
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I don't know about device ownership and stuff.
I'm namely approaching this from the point of view of HTML5 standardization.
That said, I never really considered the issue from the encoder perspective.
But if this codec really is completely royalty free (now MPEG is going to manage this I don't know), patents or no patents, then using it in the HTML5 standard shouldn't be a problem.
H.264 is obvious out unless they make it royalty free too, but that is highly unlikely to happen.
I think the main issue with includ
all these codec wars make me fear (Score:1)
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If the codec in question is genuinely royalty-free and GPL-compatible, I don't think that'll be a problem. I suspect an implementation would appear very quickly, and show up in standard Linux distribution repositories in short order.
Quality (Score:3)
Re:Quality (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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While interesting why shouldnt they inveset in new codecs? MPEG2 is decent (people seem to knock it then praise their DVDs...). H.264 is much better. However it is from the early 00's. I am sure they can do much better now. The thing is the 'cool' stuff will probably end up in a patent somewhere.
However, this sort of thing is exactly what got us the GIF fiasco. People wanting a better standard than the rest. It ended up 'good enough' even though there were better ones out there. But a single submari
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Theora can't compete with MPEG-2 to begin with. MPEG-2 is designed for high-bitrate, high quality video encoding. Theora can't handle that at all. No matter how much you crank up the bitrate, Theora will continue to be fuzzy. It was designed exclusively for very low bitrate encoding. H.264 learned from On2's mistakes, and designed their codec to excel in low-bitrates, but having the ability to shut off those featur
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MPEG-2 is designed for high-bitrate, high quality video encoding. Theora can't handle that at all. No matter how much you crank up the bitrate, Theora will continue to be fuzzy.
That turned out to be due to a really stupid and trivially fixed issue with the default inverse and forward DCT.
Dirac? (Score:3)
Whatever happened to Dirac? Wasn't it meant to achieve greatness as open, free and high quality video codec?
Re:Dirac? (Score:4, Informative)
Dirac is meant to be a high-quality codec, period; it was largely designed for archival work. It makes no particularly strong effort to be low-bitrate in the process.
The result is that at high bitrates it's pretty good (and even offers lossless compression, etc). At the bitrates at which people normally serve internet video today, it's worse quality than Theora, I'm told. But this is third-hand, so don't take my word for it.
As bandwidth goes up, Dirac might find a place on the web, but we're not there yet.
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Re:Dirac? (Score:4, Insightful)
Interesting (Score:2)
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It's not really an "about face" since the Mpeg group and the MPEG-LA are not the same thing.
You can't really about-face from someone else's position.
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It is an about-face. The traditional policy of the MPEG group has been to totally ignore patents as an issue and allow members to cram as many of their own patented techniques in as possible, even when there's a non-patented alternative that's just as good.
All is want (yesterday will be soon enough) (Score:2)
All I want is ONE high-quality video format standard for websites that works on all browsers and all platforms with the stock operating system. IMHO, this is the final battle in the browser/OS wars. No, I don't want to host my content on Youtube. No, I don't want Flash. It's down to WMV and H.264 (Ogg? What's that?). WMV always looks like crap. Ain't It Cool, a connoisseur of film, always makes a point of announcing that a trailer is in "glorious Quicktime". But of course there are still a lot of Windows us
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Quicktime is not a format though.
Quicktime can play H.264 though, as can Windows Media Player. There's no reason that a person needs Quicktime to see H.264. The key is the container format, or the nature of the stream delivered to the browser, so we need a standard format and a standard container.
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Hmm, "Ain't It Cool News" are a bunch of idiots, so clearly if they love Quicktime it must suck. Similarly, WMV has "windows" in the acronym, so it sucks pretty much by definition; that's out as well.
That leaves webm as the only thing that doesn't suck. Good work, Google!
two words (Score:2)
EXPECTED and INTENDED 'nuf said
The clock is ticking on MPEG cartel (Score:1)
The only thing patents are doing is holding back innovation, increasing costs and unjustly enriching those who no longer have an incentive to offer anything but dead labor.
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I can't wait either! Once the patents run out, we'll finally be able to buy DVD players for 19.75$ instead of 20.00$.
*sigh* (Score:2)
Ok, if you were going to post a knee-jerk response about their intentions, motivation etc please note that MPEG != MPEG-LA.
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>>>make the CODEC royalty free for consumers
It already IS free. You only need to be a royalty for MPEG2 or 4 video codecs if you earn more than 1 million gross, which means consumers and small companies (like VideoLAN (VLC) and WinAmp) can use it free of charge.
Re:Smoke and Mirrors (Score:5, Informative)
It is free for now ONLY for internet videos offered for no charge.
Products and services other than Internet Broadcast AVC Video continue to be royalty-bearing.
http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachments/231/n-10-08-26.pdf [mpegla.com]
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As the other dude said it's not free. There's so many strings attached for something which I've already paid for I resent it. I'm happy with H.264 everywhere because it's a great codec and makes things simple. What I'm not happy with is some sword of Damacles tax on an ecosystem I can't escape from. It's an unhealthy precedent and who knows where it will end? It's no different to feudal warlords taking a slice of everything the serfs produced. What next? Taking the virginity of your daughters because they d
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It didn't seem to bother you when you used Blurays, DVDs, CDs, or VHS tapes, all of which include a license fee to the original developer(s). I don't see why it should bother you now.
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MS monopoly is based on closed formats. They will not allow any royalty free standards which would allow for example linux usage.
The whole set of MPEG codecs as well as Microsoft's VC-1 can perfectly played back on Linux.
Funny story: VC-2 is based on Dirac and totally royalty-free.
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MS actually tried in the past to release a codec as royalty free. Unfortunately they didn't do their homework well enough and mpeg-la managed to find patents that it violated. mpeg-la are are clearly trying to do the same to vp8, only time will tell whether they will be successful.
It doesn't seem MS are trying to fight VP8. They have said that while they won't ship it by default IE will play it through the video tag if the user installed a coded. Flash runs on linux anyway so there is a legit (though poorly