MPEGLA will not ever charge H264 royalties for free internet video - due to VP8? | Hacker News Reader

MPEGLA will not ever charge H264 royalties for free internet video - due to VP8?

businesswire.com

78 pointsav50027 comments

the first sentence of the article:

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MPEG LA announced today that its AVC Patent Portfolio License will continue not to charge royalties for Internet Video that is free to end users (known as “Internet Broadcast AVC Video”) during the entire life of this License.

"""

so i guess this means ad-supported for-profit services will also be able to use MPEG-LA ip for free. great news!

this seems a clever move, but as I understand it it's something for content providers, not users. As such, it would appear issues from content consumers such as mozilla still stand, or am I misunderstanding?

Yes it's just a tactical retreat, like Microsoft offering XP cheap to fend off Linux-based netbooks but only if they conformed to certain hardware limitations, not a complete capitulation by any means.

Mozilla is still on the hook for £5 million a year (and rising) to provide H.264 in their own binaries, but that right doesn't cascade to open source derivatives, if they decide to stop fighting for web standards that meet the W3C definition.

It's interesting that these victories are often viewed as defeats for the technologies that forced their competitors hands and saved consumers large amounts of money.

Mozilla could just use the host platform's codecs like Safari (Quicktime) and IE (DirectShow), or use a cross-platform abstraction like Opera (GStreamer), or ship an easily-replaced dynamic library like Chrome (libavcodec), but of course they probably won't.

They'll stick with their jackass NIH attitude and continue to link directly with liboggplay and libwebm.

They'll stick with their NIH attitude and continue to link directly with liboggplay and libwebm. Jackasses.

You're the jackass for not implementing this. Open Source is not a bureaucracy where you do whatever your boss tells you to do. You do stuff because you want to. The current set of Firefox developers doesn't want to support H.264. You do. You both have the same source code and the same number of hours in a day. So add it yourself.

If people want to, they will use your version instead of Firefox. Remember Netscape? Neither do I...

I actually did start working on this about a year ago — and realized that I didn't actually have to write any code! A Mozilla developer had already written a gstreamer backend for use in Fennec, because the original implementation couldn't play Theora in real time on any of the Maemo devices. Of course, there was a Mozilla lead in the main bugzilla thread shooting down any suggestions that it be used in Firefox.

So it comes down purely to the maintenance burden — but the codebase was organized so that I'd need hostile forks of Gecko, XULRunner, and Firefox. No thanks. Shortly afterward Chrome was usable on Linux, and I no longer had an itch to scratch.

I was the original author of the GStreamer patch. It wasn't developed for Fennec - it was originally developed as a backend for the Firefox desktop browser. I wrote about it here when I first developed it:

http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2008/04/firefox-html5-video-wit...

Once it was decided to not use GStreamer for the desktop we continued with the work on the Ogg backend and the patch bitrotted. It was subsequently picked up by another Mozilla developer for Fennec work. The patch is currently waiting on review (by me) and as I understand it it will be landed but disabled at compile time for third parties to enable if they want it. I'm not involved in that decision or whether it would be in desktop Firefox however.

An H.264 specific backend wouldn't be too hard to do. It should only be a few days work to get a ffmpeg backend going for H.264 support. I had a partial one implemented that I used for testing although it has bitrot quite a bit now.

Your point about having to maintain a fork still stands however as there's no pluggable API for backends.

This doesn't affect your point at all, but just so you know, Firefox 4 doesn't use liboggplay nor anything called libwebm.

Awesome, they must have cleaned up their act when they implemented WebM. Do you know what it uses now? (I'm on my iPhone now)

Use of liboggplay has been dropped in favour of implementing Ogg support directly using just libogg, libvorbis and libtheora.

The WebM support is implementing using libvpx (Google's VP8 reference decoder library), libnestegg (a WebM container library), and libvorbis.

They're all still builtin however so this doesn't do anything to change your NIH assertion.

You realize that Mozilla didn't invent Vorbis, Theora, Ogg, WebM or VP8 but rather adopted them because they fitted their mission of creating an open web. On the level of code they've used multiple 3rd party libraries on various platforms and at various times. Which makes accusations of NIH syndrome rather bizarre. Notably they shifted focus to WebM even after they'd implemented Theora since it fulfilled the requirements better. I see no reason why they wouldn't do the same for H.264 if it was licenced in the standard W3C manner.

Why make up fake reasons for them to not adopt it when they're very clear it's a licencing issue.

If you're running a website (YouTube, Posterous, nytimes.com) that publishes free video, this exempts you from royalties.

If you're running a transcoder (Zencoder, Quicktime Pro, ffmpeg) or a player (Flash, native HTML5 video in Firefox), you still may need to pay royalties.

I hope this is a carefully considered move because it implicates the opposite - if I sell videos on the internet, I have to pay them for every download of my movie if I use their codec.

They've been saying that all along. Their goal is to take a little slice out of every step in the chain: encoding, distribution, decoding, etc.

You're (both) absolutely right. But I'd bet most people aren't away of that fact. This deal manages to highlight the fact that MPEG-LA is that greedy, which may lose them any good will they just bought with this announcement.

Who needs goodwill when you have a monopoly on essential technology? (Hmm, I wonder why Oracle hasn't bought MPEG LA yet.)

This was the case all along. What is interesting to note, however, is that the MPEGLA hasn't really ever jumped on anyone about royalties for selling MPEG-formatted video.

Well they'd had a moratorium on collecting fees for it.

All the other links in the chain (encoders, decoders etc) are licencing it, and when a company does give their pound of flesh then they have jump on them over licencing terms (eg, the Nero free trial case: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1372536)

I wonder whether this means Mozilla will include a H.264 decoder for Firefox' HTML video support. Seems a little unclear to me. The patents remain and there are still cases in which licensing fees and restrictions would apply, but is that also true for codec implementations?

It would be good if Mozilla could do this, as it would be a major boon to the standards situation on the HTML5 web, imho.

This is very unrelated to the patent issues for en-/decoders.

A boon to the "interoperability" bit, but not the "freedom" and "open standards" bit. VP8's obviously a mixed bag, but I don't think this makes H.264 any less dangerous to hitch the HTML5 cart to.

People distributing decoders in volume still need to license the technology. The good news is it is cheap, something like $0.25 and most users have already paid if you use the code in OS X or Windows. I see Ubuntu has a mechanism to license it for OEM built machines, though I don't see a way for an individual to buy a license.

I don't think a one time $0.25 is a significant burden to someone that paid 1000 times that for the machine and 100 times that each month for network access. The burden is the transaction cost. The client has to decide to pay and then go through the hassle of paying.

Someone (with a tolerance for doing business) should set up shop selling 10 licenses to a linux H.264 decoder for $5. Use what you need, gift the rest to friends.

Unfortunately all you have right now is the fairly expensive Fluendo codec pack: http://www.fluendo.com/shop/product/complete-set-of-playback...

This topic was vented here some months ago, and the reality of non-commercial use was actually the same then as it is now after this statement from the MPEGLA; for-free, non-profit creation, delivery and consumption of video in the MPEG formats was never subject to the license, not for the creators, not for the distributors, not for the end consumers, ever.

Hopefully this statement is clarification enough for thick skulls like Thom Holwerda to finally put an end to the vacuous yapping, the wolf calls, and the fear-mongering.

I completely agree (that was one---though not the only one---things that made me stop reading OSNews).

But I also think that originally it was free (as you said) but only for a certain number of years. In other words the "novelty" is not that it's free (for those cases) but that it's free forever.

That was a minor side-issue, created entirely by the MPEG-LAs need for strange licence terms that withhold seemingly basic rights from users so that it could later charge you money for the simple act of moving a digital file over the internet, and be able to back that with the threat of patent lawsuits.

This is about the (previously) very real threat of future royalties for a subset of that patent-limited file moving activity, namely non-subscription, commercial H.264 videos (e.g. Youtube or Hulu or your random commercial website with a video on it).

I have to wonder if that ever would have held up in court. It seems pretty clear that for all the devices that record in H.264, the vendors did not do their due diligence to explain that the user did not have a license to distribute that video after 2015. And the whole concept is just patently absurd anyway, that file transfer infringes their patent when they've already been compensated for the encoder and decoder.

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