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Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

WebM exists at all because Google has tried to create FUD with H264. Fear royalties going up by some crazy amount, because you're uncertain what this well-established organization (MPEGLA) will do, and doubt that you can afford the costs of crazy royalty fees in 2016.

This despite the fact that MPEGLA has been licensing for ubiquitous technologies like MPEG-2 for over a decade.

So I guess FUD meet FUD.

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Or perhaps people just don't want to have to pay a central licensing entity to use a video codec? I'm sure Google stands to save a lot of licensing fees if they don't have to pay into MPEGLA's patent pool. It has nothing to do with FUD and everything to do with wanting an unencumbered format.

Edit: This is the same reason that most video games these days use Ogg Vorbis for their music and sounds, because they save a lot of costs by using an unencumbered audio format.

Paying $133M to avoid paying $5M/year is indeed creative business on Google's part.

It's now at least $6.5 Million a year, for another 20 year so the maths isn't that bad. Particularly if it prompts H.265 and any other future codec to be royalty free. I guess the idea is to spur on web video and make money from that though.

This is the same reason that most video games these days use Ogg Vorbis for their music and sounds, because they save a lot of costs by using an unencumbered audio format.

Are you sure about that? I'm sure a lot do, but I think a lot use WMA on Windows and XBox. I believe the encoder and decoder are free for use when developing games for those platforms. I think a different codec is then used for PS3 and Wii. I've certainly seen Vorbis used, but I think WMA is still used a fair bit more. I'd love to see evidence either way though.

You are correct on consoles, as those are generally restricted by the manufacturer to using codecs that are burned into the hardware. But almost all of the latest PC games that I have played are using Ogg Vorbis for the audio.

Can you provide a source for the video games fact you quote? I would think that most games license engines/SDKs that already support/license MP3 and its included in their upfront toolchain cost, meaning they pay for it whether or not they use it.

An out-of-date list can be found at http://wiki.xiph.org/Games_that_use_Vorbis

Edit: some big names include World of Warcraft, Quake 4, Grand Theft Auto, and Eve Online.

The MPEG 2 patent fees accounted for a "crazy amount" of the price of a DVD player as prices fell, which caused Chinese manufacturers to revolt and threaten to create their own rival standard. It costs $20 to add MPEG2 handling capability to Quicktime.

The MPEG4 part 2 and AAC fees were such a "crazy amount" that Apple (!) refused to release Quicktime 6 as a result until the fee structure was changed.

Expecting the owner of IP to extract maximum value from it is hardly a conspiracy theory.

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