MPEG LA H.264 license ‘nothing new indefinitely’
p2pnet view P2P:- “The MPEG Licensing Association—the group responsible for handling the necessary patent licensing for use of MPEG video codec standards—has announced that it will not charge royalties for AVC/H.264 encoded video that is made available to view via the Internet for free”, says Ars Technica, going on:
“The group earlier this year had extended its limited moratorium on licensing fees for free Internet video until the end of 2015.”
Now, the MPEG LA “extends the time period of the moratorium for the life of its ‘AVC Patent Portfolio License,’ effectively making free-to-view H.264 encoded video royalty-free indefinitely”, it says.
Wow!
Or maybe not.
Pointing out the MPEG-LA’s license change applies to free video broadcasts, not applications that encode and decode video, “Mozilla vice president of engineering Mike Shaver has questioned the importance of the forever free H.264 license” introduced by the MPEG-LA, “the organization that oversees the web video codec on behalf of patent holders such as Apple and Microsoft”, says The Register.
“For content folks, this announcement could be a big deal, though the content folks were already completely sold on h264″, Monty Montgomery, aka xiphmont, told p2pnet.
But, says the creator of the Ogg Free Software container format and Vorbis audio codec, to name but two, “It’s hard to see how this is ‘countering Google’s WebM’ as it doesn’t affect it in the slightest, except as a PR move”, going on:
“When MPEG-LA announced they were postponing royalties until 2015 earlier this year, the articles were all saying the same thing – ‘INTERNET VIDEO IS FREE, WHY WON’T MOZILLA USE H.264?”
“You could have recycled all the articles from earlier in the summer — most of the ‘user comments’ too.”
Montgomery says he wishes he could get “that kind of repeated press for announcing we’re doing nothing new and plan to do nothing new indefinitely!”
Stay tuned.
… and identi.ca
Ars Technica – MPEG LA counters Google WebM with permanent royalty moratorium, August 27, 2010
The Register – Mozilla shrugs off ‘forever free’ H.264 codec license, August 24, 2010
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August 30th, 2010 at 12:32 pm
Vorbis is better than H.264 anyway and I don’t understand why this is not the standard.
If H.264 codec license was attached to royalty vorbis would have became the standard.