

The H264 time bomb will kill us all in 2015, run - av500
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/time_bomb_called_h264_set_explode_2015_are_you_watching

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ZeroGravitas
So, ignoring the X/H thing, there's more fundamental misconceptions here:

1\. The licensing won't change in 2015. Free use _was_ set to expire (and that
_was_ a very bad thing) but pressure from Mozilla, Google etc. made them
commit to keep it free for video provided for free for as long as the patents
last to prevent WebM gaining traction.

2\. The yearly cap goes up every (other) year by about 5% p.a. so it's already
higher than the $5 million figure commonly given. This rise is however limited
to about 5% p.a. so that won't change radically in the future either.

3\. Using x264 today exposes you to just as much risk of being sued as it will
after 2015 if you don't acquire the appropriate patent license (which you can
do, hence it is used by big corps like Youtube)

4\. Legally the end-user is already liable if the full delivery chain isn't
licensed correctly (and again no-change afetr 2015). It would however be quite
stupid to sue you unless you had more money than the rest of the chain and you
were somehow making millions from your "end-usage".

5\. You can create "DRM" roughly as strong as Flash has in HTML5. It'll just
be an inconvenience though, not airtight, as the Flash stuff is. The bigger
issue (which you'd think a free software magazine would pick up on) is that in
order to chase this pipe dream they would happily sideline open source
software.

6\. There's no real reason you can't show adverts in HTML5 videos either. And
I believe ad-blockers already work for Youtube adverts. So adverts and HTML5
can and will work together (it is after-all heavily pushed by Google) in video
or any other web tech. Flash is probably just more advanced in this right now,
just as it is for most other aspects of video display.

I'd post some corrections to the article, but it appears it only accepts
Facebook logins. I guess this isn't an official FSF communication channel
then.

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nattofriends
What is this "X.264" this article refers to?

~~~
zuppy
it's an open source implementation of a h264 codec

~~~
mappu
(The parent post is referring to the name confusion between H.264, a video
format, and x264, an encoder for that video format. There's no such thing as
X.264.)

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hackermom
Ridiculous article, down to the "X.264" misnomer. Nobody made a squeal over
the MPEG-1 Layer III "bomb", the MPEG-2 Part 2 "bomb" or the MPEG-4 ASP
"bomb", all covered by the same license, but now, all of the sudden, the
dangers of the H.264 "bomb" are looming over society!

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Actually, the licensing wasn't always the same and people did "squeal".

I believe part of the reason Adobe went from H.263 (Sorenson Spark) to VP6 and
then to H.264, jumping over MPEG-4 ASP was because of uncertainty around the
licence regime including a "usage fee" for that video codec.

Similarly, Apple refused to release Quicktime 6 until the use fees for AAC
were dropped.

Also, regarding MPEG-2/MP3 the Chinese government forced them to lower their
fees because as DVD players plummeted in price from hundreds to tens of
dollars they were beginning to account for the majority of the money paid by
the end-user (dwarfing manufacturing, shipping, retailer margin) and threats
of moving to VP7 codec based alternatives were made.

So yes, the article is almost entirely wrong but there's an actual issue here
that big serious companies worry about too, not just crazy software hippies.

