10 questions for MPEG LA on H.264 | Hacker News Reader

10 questions for MPEG LA on H.264

betanews.com

19 pointsdto9 comments

After parsing this lawyer's output, I'm never using H.264 again if I can avoid it, despite the criticisms of WebM (no real spec, dog-slow encoding.) More importantly I would like to see how much of my existing video work can be done without any use of 264---in particular I will be checking my hardware devices to see if I'm entrapped at the outset.

I can tell you one thing for sure, you'd be hard-pressed to find a Theora or WebM capturing equipment, if there is any at all. Most consumer grade cameras record to h264 or h262 and pro cameras generally work with proprietary uncompressed or losslessly compressed formats.

Good Lord, is this a Q&Q session with a bot? The amount of lawyer speak is atrocious. It's like they copied and pasted those answers from a legal document somewhere. I've read about the H.264 legal issues from all sides from layspeak to lawspeak, and this has to be the worst one yet. In fact, it makes me want to avoid H.264 all together.

Can anyone answer this: what is the legal theory behind this "downstream liability" where someone who creates a video, transcodes it to something other than H.264, and then releases the video under a creative commons BY-SA license, and then someone else comes along and becomes liable for patent royalties because of a previous person in the remix chain having used H.264?

I don't think there is such a thing[1].

This idea might have come from the liability that can come downstream if an unlicensed (or inappropriately licensed) encoder was used to create the asset. I could see an argument for making the end distributor liable for the encoding royalty.

[1] If the file really is in another format and not just an obfuscated H.264. Judges aren't generally idiots and don't like it when you suggest they are.

This interview was done pre-WebM for what it’s worth.

Article date: May 10, 2010.

Not that I'm writing off the content. Just be aware that things have changed somewhat since then.

For example, the royalty-free end user bit through 2015 I believe has been extended in perpetuity [1].

[1]: http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/Featured-News/To...

Another question: Can it be empirically determined (i.e. with a real decision procedure) that a video file was at some point encoded in something H.264? Would it be possible to remove such a "watermark" from a video mechanically?

I love the repeated use of "...will benefit from coverage under the AVC License." I haven't seen careful dancing like that since the last time Riverdance was in town.

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