
Daring Fireball: GIF, H.264, and Patents - barredo
http://daringfireball.net/2010/03/gif_h264_patents
======
please
> If some patent troll decides H.264 violates a patent, they must go to court
> with MPEG LA, not individual licensees.

This is not true, check your facts! From
<http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/FAQ.aspx>

Q: Are all AVC essential patents included?

A: No assurance is or can be made that the License includes every essential
patent. The purpose of the License is to offer a convenient licensing
alternative to everyone on the same terms and to include as much essential
intellectual property as possible for their convenience. Participation in the
License is voluntary on the part of essential patent holders, however.

If someone holds additional patents on H264 and is not part of the licensing
pool they can sue individual licensees, they even get a nice list of parties
to sue at <http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Licensees.aspx>

~~~
mjhnghfh
The patent holder can also decide not to bother MS/Apple/etc, and only
prosecute open source implementations.

The patent holder could be bought by MS/Apple/etc

Unlike copyright there is no requirement to assiduously defend a patent.

~~~
natrius
You're thinking of trademarks, not copyright.

~~~
mjhnghfh
Yes sorry, however the point remains.

It's perfectly legitimate (and common) for a patent holder to sue a single
strategic competitor while leaving a larger player alone.

An impartial (commercial) industry body could decide to sue only FOSS
implementations in order to keep the field open for their members.

~~~
blasdel
You can't sue FOSS authors for infringing patents (source code) -- you can
only sue the distributors of executable implementations (binaries)

The text of an ideal software patent is (or has a direct mapping to) the
source code of an implementation, just as an ideal steam engine patent would
be blueprints and schematics. The text of patents must always be publicly
available to be enforceable -- it's the whole point, absolutely central to
"the promotion of the useful arts and sciences".

You license the production of artifacts, not the spread of ideas.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
It's called contributory infringement.

If I supply you with tailored parts necessary to perform/make a patented
invention then that's contributory infringement.

In the US Findlaw says:

"Contributory infringement occurs when a party supplies a direct infringer
with a part that has no substantial non-infringing use. Literal infringement
exists if there is a direct correspondence between the words in the patent
claims and the infringing device."

[http://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/patent/enforce-
patent/paten...](http://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/patent/enforce-
patent/patent-litigation.html)

------
kinetik
_If some patent troll decides H.264 violates a patent, they must go to court
with MPEG LA, not individual licensees._

This is incorrect in multiple ways:

\- The MPEG-LA is a licensing body, so it's extremely unlikely to be
practicing the patent in question. Therefore it would be hard to sue them
directly for infringement. It'd also be very difficult to sue them for
inducing infringement due to the following point.

\- The H.264 license explicitly disclaims warranty that the license provided
by the MPEG-LA covers all essential patents to practice H.264. This is also
mention in the public FAQ:
<http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/FAQ.aspx>

Like most people on the internet, I Am Not A Lawyer.

------
Nwallins
> _But they can’t say Firefox only supports free and open video formats while
> still supporting Flash._

Mr. Gruber should be more precise by what he means by _support_.

Firefox's support for Flash is not like the proposed support for H.264. There
is no Flash code in the Firefox codebase, to my knowledge. There is only a
generic plugin interface, and there is one dominant, proprietary Flash plugin
that Mozilla has nothing to do with (in addition to other less-featured Flash
plugins).

What Mr. Gruber seems to be saying is that he wants Firefox to distribute
H.264 code with their browser. Either that or Firefox should rely on codecs
that may or may not be installed on the underlying system.

In the former case, the analogy is fatally flawed, while if the latter is
intended, it should be explicitly addressed.

~~~
matasar
I believe Mozilla distributes Flash as a plugin in the Firefox download. If
they don't, they certainly make special allowances to make Flash easier to
download and install than other plugins.

I assume Firefox has a public API for video codecs, and they choose to
distribute codecs or not. So I don't see the difference, really.

~~~
WildUtah
<i>Firefox has a public API for video codecs</i>

They really don't and they really should. Building a plugin architecture where
users could decide based on their local laws which technology to use when some
may be patent encumbered would be a big win for open source, standards, and
freedom on the Internet.

~~~
Herring
It seems like we went through this in the 90s with wmv/quicktime/etc. I can't
recall why it failed & I'm not sure why it should be better this time around.

~~~
GHFigs
_I'm not sure why it should be better this time around._

Because today instead of WMV/QuickTime/etc. we have H.264/H.264/Flash (which
streams H.264).

~~~
kinetik
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_services#St...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_services#Streaming_Video_Technical_Information)

I see a lot of VP6 and Sorenson listed there. What we really have today is
Flash/Flash/Flash. I'm curious about how much VC-1 use there is in the wild in
the large Microsoft/Silverlight streaming video installations.

------
koblas
Just one point of interest is that Unisys only attempted to charge for the
compression of data not the playback. So, browsers were never subject to the
licensing fees that Unisys was asking for, only products like Photoshop which
created/compressed data.

Also, they were nice enough to grandfather many programs so things like the
PBM tools were not subject to licensing fees.

~~~
btilly
That was not out of any sense of generosity. That was because their patent
clearly only applied to a (good) method for compressing gifs. Therefore their
patent did not apply to creating or reading gifs.

------
FlorinAndrei
Marginally related:

MP4 as a container, H.264 (AVC) for the video track, AAC for the audio track -
this video file format is playable everywhere. Windows, Linux, Mac, PS3, PSP,
iPhone... if the kitchen sink had a display, it would probably play it.

When I get a new file, if it's playable on the devices where it's supposed to
be viewed, I don't do anything. Otherwise, I convert it to the format
indicated above. No deliberation, I just convert it by default to MP4 AVC/AAC.
Often I'll use MeGUI if I need some kind of GUI to simplify the process.

Very often, .flv files from Youtube are just AVC/AAC (I think they use x264 to
encode the video track) encapsulated as Flash - a simple re-encapsulation
(ffmpeg on Linux, Yamb on Windows) solves the problem and - voila - the result
is an MP4 that is playable pretty much anywhere.

Blu-Ray and AVCHD disks use AVCHD (H.264 at high rez) almost always. HD
camcorders use AVCHD. And so on.

So, I guess my point is - H.264 is already used by many people. It's more or
less everywhere. Very likely, it's here to stay.

------
zppx
If Gruber was not a well known defender of whatever Apple wants to happen in
the world I would say that his viewpoint was meaningful, but it's not, he
simply want to advance the Apple wishes... if we will need to migrate to other
formats after some time, because of patent enforcement, then why adopt a
format as a standard? Why not just adopt multiple formats or no format at all?
What about the legacy devices that will not support the new format?

See, he also does not have any practical concerns, he just lives in a world
where Apple idealism is the norm.

That said, my demands from a codec is simple: it must be free to encode/decode
using the codec, free to be included in the nightly builds/repository of
WebKit and Gecko (H.264 is not) or every other project, free for a guy in a
university dorm develop a new product using the codec without paying for any
royalties, it must be patent free as it is the desirable for every other W3C
standard, I think it will be better to not have a standard at all if we do not
have these guarantees.

EDIT: lanaer and GHFigs comments were eye-openers for me, I recommend you
people to read them.

~~~
GHFigs
_Why not just adopt multiple formats or no format at all?_

HTML5's video tag supports multiple formats (it always has) and the spec does
not mandate any specific codec. Nobody is proposing to adopt h.264 as part of
the standard.

~~~
lanaer
I think a while back that _was_ under consideration, but the spec-writers gave
up since they knew that no matter what codec they picked, they knew they
couldn’t get all browser vendors to implement it.

~~~
GHFigs
You're probably confusing it with Theora, which was actually part of the spec
for a while but was removed around last June for the reasons you mention.
That's when the public shitstorms started. I was an avid reader of what WHAT-
WG list around the time leading up to that and I never recall anybody
seriously proposing H.264 be put into the spec.

~~~
lanaer
Ah ok. I didn't learn of the issue until after Theora was removed, so all I
saw were the reasons why neither H.264 nor Theora were in the spec (and the
impression that at least one of those had been considered for it).

------
loup-vaillant
_But I think history shows that practical concerns, not idealism, is what
drives web publishers to adopt new formats._

A bit off topic, but if you replace "practical" and "idealism" by their true
meaning ("short term", and "long term" respectively), you quickly realize that
this attitude is nearly universal: "Short term concerns, not long term ones,
is what drives most people".

------
ZeroGravitas
Could anyone explain the _if it was really about idealism, Firefox would
remove the plugin API that Flash (and e.g. Silverlight) uses_ argument?

I'm genuinely curious as I've seen this from both Gruber and Mark Pilgrim so
clearly some people who aren't known for being loonies think there's logic
there, but I'm just not seeing it.

Basically I read it as if they are saying you're not allowed to choose your
battles, or be pragmatic in pursuit of an idealistic goal, you have only two
options; to be more extreme than Richard Stallman or you have to shut up and
follow the crowd.

And even that ignores all the plugins that don't push patent encumbered
formats that would be collateral damage (or is he suggesting a plugin
blacklist? For patented code, all proprietary code, any code that Gruber
thinks makes them hypocrites?). Or is there more here I'm not seeing?

------
nod
"web site publishers are clearly betting on H.264 remaining free to use for
freely distributed web video"...

Yes, and MPEG LA might be perfectly content with a $5 million check from every
browser maker every year.

------
uriel
A bit sad that he made the usual silly argument that somehow Theora is more
susceptible to submarine patents than H.264.

Sure there can be submarine patents in Theora, but they can exists for H.264
too, and then you have to deal with the patent trolls _and_ the MPEG-LA.

Also, leaving your business at the mercy of someone else's future patent
licensing whims is not a very good business decision.

And of course, he didn't touch at all on the whole open source issue, which
was a big part of the problem with .gif, and which in my opinion are the main
reason H.264 is not acceptable: it is not acceptable to basically bar open
source from a huge part of the web. (And expecting all open source projects
and users to just ignore the insane patent laws is not acceptable either.)

Yes, Flash is even worse, but that is besides the point, flash is not part of
the standard web ecosystem and never will be.

~~~
GHFigs
_Also, leaving your business at the mercy of someone else's future patent
licensing whims is not a very good business decision._

This is an hard pill to swallow for companies who have profited greatly from
the interoperability that such licensing affords them.

 _it is not acceptable to basically bar open source from a huge part of the
web_

Who exactly is doing that? H.264 is not proposed to be part of the HTML5 spec.
It's just what people _use_.

 _flash is not part of the standard web ecosystem_

In the sense of de jure standards, neither is H.264. In the sense of de facto
standards, it is even more of a standard than H.264.

~~~
aw3c2
On the web, people use H.264 involuntarily because Flash supports it and most
video sites use Flash.

Theora is a good equivalent to the commonly used Baseline profile.

~~~
m_eiman
It appears that it's not equivalent in the quality/bit sense:
<http://keyj.s2000.ws/?p=356>

~~~
ZeroGravitas
From eyeballing that chart, x264 Baseline (a very, very good implementation,
that can beat some other H.264 encoders in High Profile) never beats Theora
1.1 by more than 20%.

Actually he has figures in the table, but the figures are all given against
the winning x264 profile, I've adapted them to compare x264 baseline and
Theora 1.1:

    
    
      SSIM          0.95     0.96     0.97     0.98
    
      x264_baseline	438 kbps 576 kbps 799 kbps 1322 kbps
    
      theora 	576 kbps 713 kbps 943 kbps 1648 kbps
    
      increase      31%      24%      18%      25%
    

Which is a very good showing for Theora, despite his misleading textual
comment ( _"Ogg Theora, is a big disappointment: I never expected it to play
in the same league as x264, but even I didn’t think that it would be worse
than even Baseline Profile"_ \-- remember x264 Baseline can beat Apple H.264
High Profile amongst others). Particularly with them claiming good
improvements between 1.1 and the in-development 1.2 that already exceed the
jump demonstrated in 1.1 over the initial 1.0 release. He tried to use the
latest Theora code for this test but got the wrong branch unfortunately.

He also, bizarrely, commiserated that Theora is in the same class as the "old"
Xvid, which beats the (again very, very good) x264 Baseline at the higher
bitrates. One of the better thought out codec tests I've seen, but his
commentary is weirdly lacking in context. On that note I've just noticed that
he, incorrectly, described Theora as an "MPEG-4 derivate" (like Xvid and DivX)
in the intro when you could say that not deriving from patented MPEG
technology is perhaps a fundamental feature of VP3 and perhaps the whole point
of Theora.

~~~
m_eiman
Why compare with Baseline, though, and not Main or High? In e.g. the "desktop
computer playing the video through Flash" scenario there's no client-side
reason not to use the more advanced modes. The iPhone is limited to Baseline
to be able to use accelerated decoding, but is that also the case for other
embedded systems such as set-top boxes?

In the case of YouTube et al there's the server-side performance/encoding time
consideration, but they should be able to encode everything in a quicker
format, e.g. Baseline, and re-encode popular content in High profile as
needed.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Well it was _aw3c2_ who originally made the comparison that you responded to,
so you'd have to ask them to find their reasons.

For myself, I'd suggest that Baseline might be the XP of H.264, good enough
for most folk and with a big installed base out there. (Main profile would be
Vista in this analogy as many people seem to suggest just skipping straight
onto High Profile if Baseline isn't appropriate). Would you like to provide
one set of images on your blog for most users and another set to iPhone users?
I'd guess the same applies to video. Though of course this isn't an issue for
centralised hosts like Youtube that host multiple bitrates, profiles and
codecs.

It will be interesting, for example, to see if the next-gen iPhone allows you
to play High Profile, I think the current 3GS has got enough oomph but is
software limited by Apple to baseline, presumably to keep the iPhone line a
homogenous target platform to some extent (or to avoid the hit on battery life
making them look bad?).

Speaking of XP I'd also love to know what levels of H.264 video many existing
computers, especially netbooks, can handle. I'd guess Google is the kind of
company to gather this kind of info, and they have an obvious interest with
Youtube, but I don't know if they've released any of it publicly. They _are_
famous for conservatism in their encoding settings, though I believe they use
High Profile for their 720p encodes now.

------
hackermom
Gruber nails it again. Mozilla's hypocrisy is as always overly evident. Their
stance is fuelled by sheer greed, obviously - it's about money, about them not
wanting to cut down on their yearly economical influx, not about being "open
and free", as their actions of trying to sweep the bleeding case of Flash
under the carpet is so obviously telling.

I wonder, did any of the non-Mozilla developers, whose work spans the majority
of the project today, ever see a single dime of the _tens of millions_ of USD
(yes, that's their revenue) going into the Mozilla Foundation from their
search engine sponsor choice? No, I didn't think so either.

~~~
jerf
Mozilla's money comes from Google.

Google owns YouTube, the world's largest video site.

YouTube is using h264.

If your theory was correct that Mozilla is solely concerned with money, your
theory would predict that they would _support_ h264, rabidly.

~~~
hackermom
How? Whatever does Google Search have to do with YouTube? Google Search is not
affected in any way what so ever by neither Google's nor Mozilla's love or
hate for h.264. Also, YouTube is fully enjoyable with Flash. No matter how I
twist and turn your response, I just can't see the red line you're trying to
draw here.

~~~
jerf
Yes, weak critical thinking does seem to be a problem here. Let me collapse
the three simple implications for you down to "All of Mozilla's money comes
from a known h264 supporter." If you're going to make some sort of bizarre
conspiracy theory about money making Mozilla hypocrites, then following that
up with "And therefore Mozilla is not going to support h264" just doesn't make
any sense whatsoever. If they were slaves of their money, they would be
supporting h264 loudly; this is sticking a finger in the eye of their money
source, not kowtowing to them.

