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Comment by vampirical | Hacker News Reader

Let me consult my list of companies which make money from being MPEG LA licensors: Apple Cisco Daewoo Dolby Fuijitsu HP Hitachi Philips LG Microsoft Mitsubishi NTT Panasonic Samsung Sharp Siemens Sony Ericsson Toshiba Reference: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Licensors.aspx

I am SHOCKED to hear that Microsoft would like to continue receiving royalties from all those H.264 license fees and doesn't give a toss about open standards.

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"Microsoft pays into MPEG-LA about twice as much as it receives back for rights to H.264." http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/05/03/follow-up-on-h...

So Microsoft gets a 50% discount on a tax that already benefits larger, incumbent companies by protecting them from up and coming competitors and it's incompatible with many open source and freeware business models used by competitors. And this is presented as if they're some kind of selfless saint for paying into this racket?

Bingo. Microsoft and Apple support H.264 for the same reasons that Walmart supports minimum wage increases and Mattel supports extensive product testing regulations.

If you read Microsoft's blog post, Microsoft is not taking sides on this like every other player is.

All they want is not to be liable for billions in damages if WebM is found infringing on some company's patents. They're supporting it via plugins if the user installs and are ready to bundle it with the OS if Google or someone else provides indemnification. They are relatively comfortable with H.264 because most of the major players are already in the pool and the standard has been around for a while, reducing chances of patent suits.

The ball is in Google's court now. They and their supporters are all over the internet saying that WebM has been vetted for patent infringement etc. Now they need to tell us why their belief is not enough to indemnify distributors and end users.

No, they support H.264 because it is THE video standard. Not supporting H.264 for video would be like not supporting JPEG for photographs.

Let me consult my list of companies which would benefit from WebM: Google

Don't pretend for one second this is actually about "open standards".

Actually, Mozilla and Opera would also benefit from not having to license H264. Other than the lack of license fees, how would Google benefit?

They get to screw Apple. Apple has built an existing HW ecosystem and has a highly tuned sw tools for H264. With WebM Google gets to say, "Throw all that away -- now you're behind us technologically Apple."

Regarding Apple's "highly tuned sw tools for H264", you know that their H.264 encoder in Quicktime/iTunes is abysmal, right?

There's an x264 plugin for Quicktime which is much preferable to the encoders built into most proprietary products, but Apple's is particularly bad.

And Apple is telling Google GFY and taking record profits. Why is that state of affairs going to change?

Your list of companies is rather incomplete, and should include every non-H264-licensing company on the planet that ever created a training or marketing video.

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