
Forging an Alliance for Royalty-Free Video - derf_
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/09/01/forging-an-alliance-for-royalty-free-video/
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dogma1138
Would be interesting to see if this can be pulled off mostly due to existing
patents. H.265 license covers over 500 patents you can find quite a few of
them dating form the 90's which will expire in 2-3 years, but also quite a few
that wont.

[http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/hevc/Documents/hevc-
att1...](http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/hevc/Documents/hevc-att1.pdf)

Considering that many companies patent everything and their mother I wonder if
it's possible to actually have a Royalty-Free codec in which the involving
parties did not volunteer their IP at no cost because I'm not sure if making
one without stepping on the toes of existing patents is possible...

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keeperofdakeys
That's the great thing about Daala, they are exploring alternate ways to build
a video codec.I'm really hopeful that one day it will be as successful as
Opus.

There was a great talk about it
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmho4gcRvQ4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmho4gcRvQ4)

~~~
threeseed
> I'm really hopeful that one day it will be as successful as Opus.

I assume you mean more successful.

I have never seen or even heard of an Opus file in the wild.

~~~
TD-Linux
Have you ever used:

\- Skype

\- Google Hangouts

\- Youtube on Chrome

\- Mumble

\- Teamspeak

\- the Playstation 4

\- most speech recognition APIs

If so, then you've used Opus.

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spankalee
Edit: Looks like I was mistaken. See:
[http://aomedia.org/](http://aomedia.org/)

It's important to note that this isn't a project to create a new codec. It's
an organization to share the legal infrastructure for things like patent
analysis and licensing agreements.

The Joint Development Foundation's website is not even video-specific, but
invites any project to join operate under their legal umbrella.

[http://www.jointdevelopment.org/](http://www.jointdevelopment.org/)

~~~
ZeroGravitas
> It's important to note that this isn't a project to create a new codec.

Are you sure?

The alliance website says "The Open and royalty-free format for next-
generation ultra high definition media" and their top news item is "Alliance
for Open Media Established to Deliver Next-Generation Open Media Formats".

~~~
spankalee
Oh, good point. I jumped right to the Joint Development Foundation part. Oops!

~~~
ZeroGravitas
To be fair, it seems you were technically correct (the best kind!) and the
website messaging is slightly confusing. According to xiphmont the main point
of this particular group is for sharing IP investigation, and the development
output of the members will be directed towards NetVC effort in the IETF. So a
codec will be produced, and by these same people, but wearing different hats.

[http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/67752.html](http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/67752.html)

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sitkack
What Mozilla should do is patent the hell of out everything they are currently
developing. One way out is a MAD style codec arms race. You _have_ to get the
other side to capitulate, to tap out. If you have no patents you have no
leverage. The problem with the licensing "authorities" is that they are borg
like in that hundreds of orgs have put patents in the pool. Nocking out a
patent or two won't effect them.

~~~
Caspy7
They _are_ patenting what they develop.

~~~
sitkack
Can you provide a link? Because this would be excellent news.

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Daiz
Sounds nice and all, but part of me can't help but feel quite "eh" to see
names like Netflix, Google and Microsoft in there, all responsible for
bringing DRM into HTML and moving the open web more toward a closed one. So
while they might champion for the open web in cases like these, it's obvious
that the only thing they really care about is their bottom line and not paying
license fees on video formats.

~~~
NeutronBoy
> So while they might champion for the open web in cases like these, it's
> obvious that the only thing they really care about is their bottom line and
> not paying license fees on video formats.

So? Netflix and Google are the two biggest online video players. Without them,
adoption is going to be pretty pathetic. You want to start excluding people
because of perceived (or actual) motivations?

~~~
Daiz
>You want to start excluding people because of perceived (or actual)
motivations?

Nah, I don't subscribe to the (unfortunately common) mentality of being
exclusionary based on ideological purity evaluations. But since they obviously
don't _really_ subscribe to the idea of Open Web (as evident by their
enthusiastic support for DRM in HTML, which is about as anti-Open Web as it
gets), I guess I just wish they could be more honest about it. After all, what
good is it that someone uses an "Open Media" format when it's put behind a
completely closed black box barrier of DRM that you aren't even allowed to
legally poke at thanks to anti-circumvention laws?

I do think this particular development is very much a good thing for the Open
Web, and I certainly don't doubt Mozilla commitment to that. But the whole
HTML DRM debacle did leave a really bitter taste in my mouth.

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atonse
This is great, but how does it compare to H.265/HEVC? And any news on hardware
decoding support? IMO, hardware support is the thing that really makes a
difference from a consumer experience point of view (more than patents). It's
what allows one to watch hours of video without the device getting hot or
losing too much battery life.

~~~
kibwen
Getting your codec supported in hardware is a tricky business, and as much as
I've been a huge fan of the Daala initiative it was always going to be an
insurmountable hurdle for Mozilla alone. IMO getting buy-in from Cisco and
Youtube actually gives us a fighting chance at an actual royalty-free
hardware-supported codec, which is why I'm so excited at this news.

~~~
cpeterso
I'm sure Intel, one of the AOM partners, is interested in hardware codecs. :)

~~~
kibwen
Yes, not sure how I managed to miss that one. :P

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datashovel
It will be interesting to see how much of the "stack" ends up being open and
royalty free. Don't get me wrong, open format is great, but only part of the
story.

That being said, I'm definitely optimistic this is a step in the right
direction given the fact that Mozilla is a part of it.

EDIT: Actually, looks like they may be proposing full-stack will be open:
[http://aomedia.org/about-us/](http://aomedia.org/about-us/)

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1ris
I wonder what that means for Daala. It's scheduled to be finished by the end
of this year. I hope it still gets finised.

~~~
Caspy7
Technologies from Daala, Thor, VP10 and contributions from other participants
in the group will all be combined to essentially make one uber codec.

Since Thor was released Daala already started incorporating parts of it that
made sense (and vice versa for Thor). So this will just expand that pattern.

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ocdtrekkie
It's definitely cool if we get to a point where Microsoft, Mozilla, and Google
aren't each pushing their own video codec in their respective browsers. If
this ends that, I'm all for it.

Though as long as it isn't proprietary and DRM'd to crud, you won't see any
support from Hollywood.

~~~
jmvalin
Well, DRM is completely independent from the codec. You can put DRM on a free
codec and you can have a non-free codec without DRM. As for Hollywood... note
that the Alliance also includes Netflix.

~~~
dogma1138
DRM has to be kinda an integral part of the Codec in order for it to work
efficiently especially with streaming any other type of DRM will not be really
viable since it will either require you to get the entire file or to chop the
video into smaller blocks.

DRM for the most part is encryption and if you want to have it with all the
vector voodoo of video compression it has to be built in.

That said today there is no way in hell to make a codec without DRM and expect
it to have wide support, lack of DRM is actually killing more projects (like
various open source streamers) than outrage of the free software community
will ever be able too.

An open codec is only viable if it's worth to be picked by the big players and
those are the big media and content providers who won't pick up a penny if it
didn't had DRM support...

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aidenn0
Name one codec with specific support for DRM built into the compression.

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dogma1138
MPEG4 trough part 13 (IPMP was also backported into MPEG2)
[http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_...](http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=39110)

[http://www.w3.org/2000/12/drm-
ws/pp/koenen.pdf](http://www.w3.org/2000/12/drm-ws/pp/koenen.pdf)

H.264 (trough IPMP), H.265 also implement in-bistream DRM interfaces directly
into the decoder...

~~~
aidenn0
My understanding is that IPMP was not precisely builtin to MPEG-2 or -4. The
fact that it could be backported to MPEG2 is partly indicative of this.

IPMP does not in any meaningful way alter the H.263 or H.264 compression
algorithims, even though it does alter the bitstream in ways that require
modifications of the encode/decode pipeline

There is nothing stopping a third-party from similarly making a pipeline-
invasive DRM for any open codec. As a matter of fact, if the open codec is
patent free, then there would be no legal way to stop them.

~~~
dogma1138
Both MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 have several revisions, while not being directly tied
to the "compression" which might be the wrong choice of words IPMP hooks into
virtually every step in the encoding and decoding pipeline. You can implement
multiple IP controls over every bit of the format from audio streams to the
scene constructing language that is used to rebuild the scene it self so you
can technically put DRM on individual elements so you can literally force
people to pay money to see Kevin Spacey instead of a banana in house of cards
without having to encode 2 completely different video streams into the file,
but I'm pretty sure people will pay extra to see a banana instead of Kevin
Spacey.

And while you can make a DRM free encoder it's still wasn't the argument that
i was talking about if there won't be a well established and well integrated
DRM mechanism within the design of the Codec it will be dead in the water
since for a codec to be widely accepted these days it needs to be adopted by
the media/movie/tv/streaming/content delivery whatcha gonna call it industry
and that industry needs DRM. Heck even sites like YouTube use DRM these days
(paid content trough), Twitch and other similar sites will eventually have to
enable DRM too if they want to offer premium content as it's much easier to
gate people with DRM than to have some weird session based authorization for
streaming which is a nightmare and doesn't really work as DRM. And using
multiple codecs (cie? x's? xes?) is probably not a viable approach either.

~~~
aidenn0
I still maintain that a good royalty-free codec will get a DRM standard (by a
third party if the creators don't define one), so having it not builtin to the
core standard is a non-issue.

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ZeroGravitas
I guess a new web image standard to replace JPEG might be a nice side-effect
of this too.

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cheersalam
Cisco is working on royalty free open source video codec called Thor.
[https://github.com/cisco/thor](https://github.com/cisco/thor)

~~~
mtgx
Read the post.

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9fb29947
Why isn't Apple in this alliance?

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jmvalin
You have to start somewhere. Expect more companies to join.

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kerkeslager
What does this mean for DRM?

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Caspy7
This is a video codec and is a separate topic from DRM. It will have nothing
DRM specific.

