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Comment by DjDarkman | Hacker News Reader

The MPEG LA said that it would assemble a patent pool against VP8, did they manage to do that, or they were just FUD-ing around?

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> The MPEG LA said that it would assemble a patent pool against VP8

They said the same thing about Vorbis ten years ago, don't hold your breath.

I'm not saying they will or they won't, but there is no point wasting resources assembling a patent pool against VP8 if it isn't even popular yet. When it becomes a threat, you can bet then the MPEG LA will assemble something, valid or not.

VP8 is used by skype for video and VP6 (which VP8 is based on) was used by youtube for a while on many videos. They could have made millions of dollars by suing huge companies such as Skype and Google. Why didn't they if they had patents on them? Doesn't make sense.

When did Skype switch to VP8? As far as I know they still use VP7. What does VP6 have to do with VP8?

VP8 is heavily based on VP6 and VP7. If VP8 breaches some patents, they are very high odds that so do they.

cite please.

Feel free to read the libvpx source, it's based on On2's VP7 codec and mentions it in comments in several places.

You can also compare ffvp56 and ffvp8, although there's a larger time gap between the two implementations.

What would that accomplish. The original statement was that skype uses vp8 and youtube used vp6 (which vp8 is heavily based off of). Skype doesn't use vp8, and looking at vp7 or vp8 source isn't going to tell me that vp6 infringes on any patents.

Who are they going to attack? As with Oracle's suit, you can bet Google will be chomping at the bit to invalidate anything they put in the pool, which doubtlessly would weaken their bread and butter MPEG patents.

And the thing is, hardware H.264 will almost certainly be in every phone built until the patents expire, so ragging on a free alternative is just going to jeopardize their existing revenues, for a shot at the hacker community's websites like Wikimedia running H.264 and paying royalties - which will never happen anyway. Meanwhile most likely future for WebM is that some forward thinking companies serve WebM if you're using Firefox/Opera, but most are lazy, pay their H.264 tax, and require you to use IE/Safari/Chrome.

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