

MPEGLA will not ever charge H264 royalties for free internet video - due to VP8? - av500
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20100825006629/en

======
plq
the first sentence of the article:

"""

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.

"""

so i guess this means ad-supported for-profit services will also be able to
use MPEG-LA ip for free. great news!

------
riffraff
this seems a clever move, but as I understand it it's something for content
providers, not users. As such, it would appear issues from content consumers
such as mozilla still stand, or am I misunderstanding?

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Yes it's just a tactical retreat, like Microsoft offering XP cheap to fend off
Linux-based netbooks but only if they conformed to certain hardware
limitations, not a complete capitulation by any means.

Mozilla is still on the hook for £5 million a year (and rising) to provide
H.264 in their own binaries, but that right doesn't cascade to open source
derivatives, if they decide to stop fighting for web standards that meet the
W3C definition.

It's interesting that these victories are often viewed as defeats for the
technologies that forced their competitors hands and saved consumers large
amounts of money.

~~~
blasdel
Mozilla could just use the host platform's codecs like Safari (Quicktime) and
IE (DirectShow), or use a cross-platform abstraction like Opera (GStreamer),
or ship an easily-replaced dynamic library like Chrome (libavcodec), but of
course they probably won't.

They'll stick with their jackass NIH attitude and continue to link directly
with liboggplay and libwebm.

~~~
jrockway
_They'll stick with their NIH attitude and continue to link directly with
liboggplay and libwebm. Jackasses._

You're the jackass for not implementing this. Open Source is not a bureaucracy
where you do whatever your boss tells you to do. You do stuff because you want
to. The current set of Firefox developers doesn't want to support H.264. You
do. You both have the same source code and the same number of hours in a day.
So add it yourself.

If people want to, they will use your version instead of Firefox. Remember
Netscape? Neither do I...

~~~
blasdel
I actually did start working on this about a year ago — and realized that I
didn't actually have to write any code! A Mozilla developer had already
written a gstreamer backend for use in Fennec, because the original
implementation couldn't play Theora in real time on any of the Maemo devices.
Of course, there was a Mozilla lead in the main bugzilla thread shooting down
any suggestions that it be used in Firefox.

So it comes down purely to the maintenance burden — but the codebase was
organized so that I'd need hostile forks of Gecko, XULRunner, and Firefox. No
thanks. Shortly afterward Chrome was usable on Linux, and I no longer had an
itch to scratch.

~~~
doublec
I was the original author of the GStreamer patch. It wasn't developed for
Fennec - it was originally developed as a backend for the Firefox desktop
browser. I wrote about it here when I first developed it:

[http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2008/04/firefox-html5-video-
wit...](http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2008/04/firefox-html5-video-with-
gstreamer.html)

Once it was decided to not use GStreamer for the desktop we continued with the
work on the Ogg backend and the patch bitrotted. It was subsequently picked up
by another Mozilla developer for Fennec work. The patch is currently waiting
on review (by me) and as I understand it it will be landed but disabled at
compile time for third parties to enable if they want it. I'm not involved in
that decision or whether it would be in desktop Firefox however.

An H.264 specific backend wouldn't be too hard to do. It should only be a few
days work to get a ffmpeg backend going for H.264 support. I had a partial one
implemented that I used for testing although it has bitrot quite a bit now.

Your point about having to maintain a fork still stands however as there's no
pluggable API for backends.

------
fragmede
I hope this is a carefully considered move because it implicates the opposite
- if I sell videos on the internet, I have to pay them for every download of
my movie if I use their codec.

~~~
wmf
They've been saying that all along. Their goal is to take a little slice out
of every step in the chain: encoding, distribution, decoding, etc.

~~~
fragmede
You're (both) absolutely right. But I'd bet most people aren't away of that
fact. This deal manages to highlight the fact that MPEG-LA is _that_ greedy,
which may lose them any good will they just bought with this announcement.

~~~
wmf
Who needs goodwill when you have a monopoly on essential technology? (Hmm, I
wonder why Oracle hasn't bought MPEG LA yet.)

------
shdon
I wonder whether this means Mozilla will include a H.264 decoder for Firefox'
HTML video support. Seems a little unclear to me. The patents remain and there
are still cases in which licensing fees and restrictions would apply, but is
that also true for codec implementations?

It would be good if Mozilla could do this, as it would be a major boon to the
standards situation on the HTML5 web, imho.

~~~
jws
People distributing decoders in volume still need to license the technology.
The good news is it is cheap, something like $0.25 and most users have already
paid if you use the code in OS X or Windows. I see Ubuntu has a mechanism to
license it for OEM built machines, though I don't see a way for an individual
to buy a license.

I don't think a one time $0.25 is a significant burden to someone that paid
1000 times that for the machine and 100 times that each month for network
access. The burden is the transaction cost. The client has to decide to pay
and then go through the hassle of paying.

Someone (with a tolerance for doing business) should set up shop selling 10
licenses to a linux H.264 decoder for $5. Use what you need, gift the rest to
friends.

~~~
wmf
Unfortunately all you have right now is the fairly expensive Fluendo codec
pack: [http://www.fluendo.com/shop/product/complete-set-of-
playback...](http://www.fluendo.com/shop/product/complete-set-of-playback-
plugins/)

------
hackermom
This topic was vented here some months ago, and the reality of non-commercial
use was actually the same then as it is now after this statement from the
MPEGLA; for-free, non-profit creation, delivery and consumption of video in
the MPEG formats was _never_ subject to the license, not for the creators, not
for the distributors, not for the end consumers, _ever_.

Hopefully this statement is clarification enough for thick skulls like Thom
Holwerda to finally put an end to the vacuous yapping, the wolf calls, and the
fear-mongering.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
That was a minor side-issue, created entirely by the MPEG-LAs need for strange
licence terms that withhold seemingly basic rights from users so that it could
later charge you money for the simple act of moving a digital file over the
internet, and be able to back that with the threat of patent lawsuits.

This is about the (previously) very real threat of future royalties for a
subset of that patent-limited file moving activity, namely non-subscription,
commercial H.264 videos (e.g. Youtube or Hulu or your random commercial
website with a video on it).

~~~
sprout
I have to wonder if that ever would have held up in court. It seems pretty
clear that for all the devices that record in H.264, the vendors did not do
their due diligence to explain that the user did not have a license to
distribute that video after 2015. And the whole concept is just patently
absurd anyway, that file transfer infringes their patent when they've already
been compensated for the encoder and decoder.

