The H264 time bomb will kill us all in 2015, run | Hacker News Reader

The H264 time bomb will kill us all in 2015, run

freesoftwaremagazine.com

19 pointsav50010 comments

So, ignoring the X/H thing, there's more fundamental misconceptions here:

1. The licensing won't change in 2015. Free use was set to expire (and that was a very bad thing) but pressure from Mozilla, Google etc. made them commit to keep it free for video provided for free for as long as the patents last to prevent WebM gaining traction.

2. The yearly cap goes up every (other) year by about 5% p.a. so it's already higher than the $5 million figure commonly given. This rise is however limited to about 5% p.a. so that won't change radically in the future either.

3. Using x264 today exposes you to just as much risk of being sued as it will after 2015 if you don't acquire the appropriate patent license (which you can do, hence it is used by big corps like Youtube)

4. Legally the end-user is already liable if the full delivery chain isn't licensed correctly (and again no-change afetr 2015). It would however be quite stupid to sue you unless you had more money than the rest of the chain and you were somehow making millions from your "end-usage".

5. You can create "DRM" roughly as strong as Flash has in HTML5. It'll just be an inconvenience though, not airtight, as the Flash stuff is. The bigger issue (which you'd think a free software magazine would pick up on) is that in order to chase this pipe dream they would happily sideline open source software.

6. There's no real reason you can't show adverts in HTML5 videos either. And I believe ad-blockers already work for Youtube adverts. So adverts and HTML5 can and will work together (it is after-all heavily pushed by Google) in video or any other web tech. Flash is probably just more advanced in this right now, just as it is for most other aspects of video display.

I'd post some corrections to the article, but it appears it only accepts Facebook logins. I guess this isn't an official FSF communication channel then.

What is this "X.264" this article refers to?

it's an open source implementation of a h264 codec

(The parent post is referring to the name confusion between H.264, a video format, and x264, an encoder for that video format. There's no such thing as X.264.)

An Open Source h264 Encoder.

New version of X.25? ;)

Ridiculous article, down to the "X.264" misnomer. Nobody made a squeal over the MPEG-1 Layer III "bomb", the MPEG-2 Part 2 "bomb" or the MPEG-4 ASP "bomb", all covered by the same license, but now, all of the sudden, the dangers of the H.264 "bomb" are looming over society!

Well, to be fair, there was quite a lot of squealing over the unisys GIF patent.

But in general you are right. It's a pretty poor article, littered with misconceptions and spelling mistakes.

Actually, the licensing wasn't always the same and people did "squeal".

I believe part of the reason Adobe went from H.263 (Sorenson Spark) to VP6 and then to H.264, jumping over MPEG-4 ASP was because of uncertainty around the licence regime including a "usage fee" for that video codec.

Similarly, Apple refused to release Quicktime 6 until the use fees for AAC were dropped.

Also, regarding MPEG-2/MP3 the Chinese government forced them to lower their fees because as DVD players plummeted in price from hundreds to tens of dollars they were beginning to account for the majority of the money paid by the end-user (dwarfing manufacturing, shipping, retailer margin) and threats of moving to VP7 codec based alternatives were made.

So yes, the article is almost entirely wrong but there's an actual issue here that big serious companies worry about too, not just crazy software hippies.

yes, I tried to pick my title accordingly

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