
A Competing HEVC Licensing Pool - KwanEsq
http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/66047.html
======
zaroth
Just want to say, thank you Monty and Co for the work you all do at Xiph. Ogg,
Vorbis, Theora, Speex, FLAC, Opus, Icecast, and Daala... it's a seriously
impressive portfolio. It probably would not be a stretch to say that billions
of people use these daily, often without even realizing it (which is often the
best kind of tech).

And thank you to Red Hat, Mozilla and all the others who sponsor this work
too. It really is incredibly important to have these open codecs, not only for
their own sake, but for the significant pressure it puts on the MPEG cartel.
As bad as they are, without stuff like Xiph I think they would be much, much
worse.

~~~
jsprogrammer
> It probably would not be a stretch to say that billions of people use these
> daily.

I think it is a stretch. There are _maybe_ 4 billion people that access the
Internet currently and most of those have limited access. Only a fraction of
those know about, much less use one of those technologies. To be in the
billions, 50% of people accessing the Internet would have to use one of those
technologies every day. I just don't believe that is the case.

BTW, this has nothing to say of the technologies themselves. It's great that
they exist. The faster we can get rid of royalty the better IMO.

~~~
derf_
Wikipedia (6th largest website in the world) serves only unencumbered formats.
Apple's Siri uses Speex. As does Flash. This stuff shows up in more places
than you think, precisely because it allows innovation without asking
permission.

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ChuckMcM
My new favorite metaphor : _Schroedinger 's Cash Box_

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TD-Linux
As another point of reference, you can compare the licensors in the MPEG-LA
H.264 patent pool:

[http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Licensors.aspx](http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Licensors.aspx)

with those in the MPEG-LA HEVC patent pool:

[http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/HEVC/Pages/Licensors.asp...](http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/HEVC/Pages/Licensors.aspx)

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dietrichepp
I'm really excited about Daala, in ways that VP8 and VP9 never excited me—VP8
seemed like a damaged version of MPEG4. Although it looks like MPEG4 will be
"good enough" for the web for a long time to come, it seems like HEVC
development is weighed down by some perverse incentives.

See this post from "Diary Of An x264 Developer" in 2010:
[http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/360](http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/360)

Meanwhile, Opus came along and outperformed HE-AAC, which makes me think that
more good things are going to come from open standards.

~~~
TD-Linux
If you haven't looked at in a while, you should try VP9 again. It is much
faster, especially if you try the new 1.4.0 release candidate.

Also keep in mind that MPEG 4 includes two separate video codecs, ASP and AVC,
with wildly different performance.

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papercruncher
> _Apparently all we have to do is stand back and let the dominant players
> commit suicide while they dance around Schroedinger 's Cash Box_

Don't know how true this is with regards to MPEG, but I really enjoyed this
quote

~~~
pgeorgi
One thing that's easily mixed up: MPEG sets standards. MPEG-LA is a wholly
different entity to organize cashing in on them.

~~~
makomk
MPEG's policies on creating standards are basically set up to enable the MPEG-
LA and new patent pools like this one to make money, though. They have a
policy of not caring about whether the technology is patented or not - there
could be a small tweak that'd turn it from patent-infringing to patent-free
and they'd ignore it - which means that all the members can and do cram as
many of their patents into MPEG standards as they can find excuses for.

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MichaelGG
Can someone explain why this is terrible for the licensors? If they have
patents that apply, can't they pretty much setup whatever ridiculous
roadblocks and tolls they desire?

Or are the open source codecs truly patent-free, as in they don't accidentally
step on something that could be "infringing" legally?

~~~
JoshTriplett
The whole point of paying the MPEG-LA protection racket is that you don't get
sued over patents. If there's another patent pool that claims to have their
own patents embodied by one or more of the major proprietary codecs, that
protection racket starts to look more like the sham it is. Someone can
_always_ come out of the woodwork and claim you're infringing one of their
patents.

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cjensen
All of the new codecs the author proposed as alternatives have the same issue:
companies who took no part in creating the codec may someday decide that the
codec infringes their patents and make everyone using the codec pay for a
license.

~~~
azakai
Abstractly, sure - all software is vulnerable that way. However, specifically,
if you create a new codec that is heavily based on previous ones, you are
clearly more at risk, than if you create a more original codec using novel
methods. The latter is safer.

~~~
fryguy
Doesn't it make sense that a codec that's heavily patented would be more
likely to have all of the patents known, rather than one that hasn't been
looked at, and is likely to accidentally infringe one of the patents in the
minefield that exists?

~~~
azakai
I don't think so. The more novel something is, the higher the chance that no
one thought of it, and so could not patent it.

If something is patented, that means people know of it, and will try to patent
similar things or parts of it that haven't been patented yet, making it
riskier.

