Forging an Alliance for Royalty-Free Video
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/hevc/Documents/hevc-att1...
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...
The remaining patents are mostly on things you don't need for Internet video. US #6,181,712, has to do with multiplexing two unrelated video streams into one. Broadcasters and cable systems do this, but Internet video does not. US #6,160,849 only applies to compression of interlaced video, which nobody uses on line. US #7,627,041 is about dealing with missing header data due to transmission noise. US #5,878,080 is about backwards-compatible multichannel (>2 channels) audio, also seldom used on-line. US #6,185,539 is for video with overcompressed extra-low-quality audio. So is US #6,009,399.
As I pointed out last time, it's time for a hard look at this patent situation. You can probably do a patent-free MPEG-4 video decoder and encoder for Internet video now. You might have to leave out some newer features nobody uses.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10042469 [2] http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/MPEG_patent_lists
The MPEG4 licensing scheme is kinda confusing to me it seems that several organizations collect royalties individually even tho it states that MPEGLA collects them in the US, AT&T seems to do so too for their share of the patents.
There was a great talk about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmho4gcRvQ4
I assume you mean more successful.
I have never seen or even heard of an Opus file in the wild.
- Skype
- Google Hangouts
- Youtube on Chrome
- Mumble
- Teamspeak
- the Playstation 4
- most speech recognition APIs
If so, then you've used Opus.
This is what I've mentioned earlier there are quite a few royalty free but they are still based on held patents which are offered without royalties.
That said honestly I'm not sure how big royalties are HDMI has quite steep royalties DisplayPort doesn't and with pretty much all devices that come with a single/mono-cultured display interface will use HDMI rather than DisplayPort.
Opus' patents have patent retaliation clauses. It would be funny if those were incompatible with the GPL, because the GPL is essentially a "copyright retaliation" license.
You may also be interested in https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/02/defending-opus/ (warning: contains discussion of specific, unexpired patents).
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.
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".
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?
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.
If successful this will be good for all of us, not just good for them and bad for us.
WRT hardware support, I agree, but it won't be available in the early life of any new codec so it's important that it also works well in software (accelerated by SIMD and the like). The power difference is less than you might think, I have some preliminary measurements here: https://people.xiph.org/~tdaede/power/
Assuming the groups listed actually back up their words with action, then hardware support will happen, basically every smart TV shipped already has VP9, so if Google's Youtube and Netflix and Amazon and Microsoft agree on a codec, it'll be in hardware (both in the sense of it being available, and in the sense of it being in every video device you can buy almost instantly.)
Dealing with video is like dealing with the toothpaste aisle at the store. Just a ridiculous amount of unnecessary information.
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/
There's lots of cool tech in Daala, but I'm guessing that most people involved would be happy to see a royalty-free video codec succeed even if it wasn't entirely their baby and if the member corporations can throw enough lawyers, engineers and existing patents at the problem, then less sexy, more traditional tech will probably get the job done and make Daala's strategy less relevant.
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.
Though as long as it isn't proprietary and DRM'd to crud, you won't see any support from Hollywood.
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...
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...
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.
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.
Everybody 'hates' DRM, it seems but I don't think it's going anywhere and I don't think you can ship a codec standard without it. You usually want hardware support for the DRM encryption. I don't know the specifics of their technology, but Netflix and Hulu and Amazon all stream tons and tons of media and I'd be surprised if it wasn't DRM'd in some capacity, I know the video apple sells/streams all is.
CSS, AACS and HDCP are all broken, Flash is on its last legs and music downloads have largely abandoned it to positive consequences. Streams seem to be the last bastion, but that doesn't even make sense -- the reason people subscribe to Netflix is to watch new content every month, not to watch the same content over and over. If they wanted to do that they would just buy the Blu-ray (or, if so inclined, pirate it once). And pirates have no reason to rip a 6Mbps stream when they can rip a 40Mbps Blu-ray.
DRM is a box you have to check when a suit was bamboozled by a DRM snake oil salesman into putting it in a contract. How the DRM works is irrelevant because it won't actually work anyway. A fig leaf doesn't need codec support.
That's what EME is about, and that's why you hear the free software people griping about it but not the actual pirates. EME makes piracy easier. It separates the DRM into its own little box which makes it easier to circumvent. Which is what the pirates will do because they don't care about breaking the law, but which law-abiding free software people are proscribed from doing by DMCA 1201.
But the most fundamental flaw in your argument is that you misunderstand who decides what DRM gets used. DRM is not content. What gets supported is ultimately decided by the platform companies. When Apple says there will be no DRM on iTunes, there will be no DRM on iTunes. The only thing Disney or Universal can do about it is withhold their content, but that costs them more than it costs Apple or Google. Which means it isn't something they can credibly threaten unless the dispute is of a make or break significance, and the particulars of DRM implementation are not on that level.