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Comment by DiabloD3 | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, we need to start changing the laws to prevent patent abuse. If your patents become part of a must-implement standard (with your permission, of course, mpeg-la members have obviously given theirs), then your patents become null for anyone implementing that standards, ie, you are forced to license them for free.

Using patents like this is pretty much the patent equivalent of entrapment.

Also, why isn't Vysor just using the HMTL5 facilities to use hardware h264 enc/decs?

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> Also, why isn't Vysor just using the HMTL5 facilities to use hardware h264 enc/decs?

Or the built-in Chrome API for that, PPB_VideoEncoder: https://developer.chrome.com/native-client/pepper_dev/c/stru...

Developing a pepper plugin for video decoding is a pain in the butt.

Well actually, it might be okay on desktop.

there is actually no way to get a h264 stream(!) decoded with onboard html5. using pepper plugins would limit your users to chrome. another alternative might be flash but i dont blame anyone for not taking this alternative serious.

Vysor was written in early 2015. VideoEncoder was not available until around December 2015.

But yes, I've switched.

Standards-setting bodies typically address this today through the use of standard-essential-patent policies. IEEE, for example, requires assurance from such patent holders that they will either not enforce the patent against those implementing the standard, will grant a license free of charge, or will grant a license "under reasonable rates."

https://standards.ieee.org/develop/policies/bylaws/approved-...

Not sure why improving this state of affairs would require a change in underlying patent laws. We just need standards bodies to adopt more general patent policies--which could be accomplished by preferring to use standards from orgs with better patent policies.

> Not sure why improving this state of affairs would require a change in underlying patent laws.

The problem with this is that there will always be someone who will happily say "Sure, I'll call your patent a 'standard' if you give me a little bit of money to 'certify' it."

Actually the problem these days is that standard-essential patents are considered less valuable because they tend to require FRAND licensing. This is the problem companies like Motorola and Samsung ran into during the smartphone patent wars. They could not ask for injunctions or high royalties for many of their patents as they were standards-essential, and they lost a lot of leverage.

Secondly, standards setting bodies are usually a conglomerate of members from competing companies and hence a huge political bureaucratic mess, so it's not as easy to get something into the standard just for some money.

Maybe. But then there's the little matter of adoption. The fact that some body or other called a patent technology a "standard" is meaningless, and not especially problematic. The problem comes when this standard actually comes into widespread use.

Based on his comments, it seems that the MediaSource APIs are not sufficient for low latency, and most Android devices don't have HW VP[89] encoder support.

While VP9 encoding hardware is still rare, hardware VP8 encoding on Android is pretty common due to Hangouts and the Chromecast using it.

For reference: Systems with dedicated VP8/VP9 support

http://wiki.webmproject.org/hardware/socs

Someone could link the sea of posts anticipating this exact scenario when the standard was discussed, but it's a waste of time. After all, browser makers surely have the users' best interest in mind, right? Apple, Google and Microsoft cannot all be wrong (and evil) at the same time, right? Right?

AV codecs are a patent minefield, and sitting on your hands waiting for a guaranteed free standard is a pretty shitty option for users. Even Firefox realized that.

Firefox currently ships VP8 and VP9. It includes H.264 support not for concerns about it being "guaranteed free", but for web compatibility.

That was exactly my point.

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