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Comment by NooneAtAll3 | Hacker News Reader

what are the open source alternatives?

In most countries, including in Europe, the H.264 patents have already expired. There you can use H.264 freely.

Some patents remain valid in USA, Brazil and a few other countries.

This is for patent licensing. Using an open source implementation doesn't get rid of your obligation to license the patents for it.

In most countries the H.264 patents have already expired, for instance in Europe they have expired, but in USA not yet (in USA most patents should expire towards the end of next year).

So that firm might try to squeeze every penny they can before the expiration of the patents.

Just because AOM/Google says that wont charge a royalty doesn't mean AV1 isn't covered by patents owned by others. Since everyone and their brother saw how they can milk the patent system for money, they got patents that cover all "next-gen" video technologies (AV1, HEVC, VCC) a long time ago and will sue anyone that uses them. Ironically, since there are so many patent holders, each of which want a larger piece of the "licensing pie", it's making the new video technologies impossible to license. You may license HEVC or AV1 from one patent pool, but the other two and hundreds of other individual patent holders could also sue you. This is why many brands like Synology, Dell and HP have just started to simply remove these codecs from their products. I wouldn't treat any video codec as "patent free" until AT LEAST 20 years after the spec was release (AV1 = March 2038). This kind of infighting will guarantee that HEVC or AV1 will never become a ubiquitous standard for at least 20 years the way AVC/h.264 did.

I, for one, am happy about this. Nothing makes me happier than to see patent trolls eat themselves alive. Also, being an open source advocate, I appreciate when propriety technologies that are "good enough" can finally be used by open source applications with broad support. Unless you are pushing a ton of video, or working with high resolution (4K, 8K)/ high bit-rate videos, AVC/h.264 is perfectly fine.

AV1, as well as the older On2 codec series it was based off of (VP9, VP8, etc).

VP9, AV1

As the article says, there are companies seeking royalties for both of these codecs.

There is no proof that their patent claims over AV1 or VP9 are valid.

For now they try to bully some smaller companies with the threat of the big legal expenses that would be needed to fight these claims.

i don't think Snap Inc. and Amazon are small companies

The funny thing about patent licensing alliances is that there's no guarantee that nobody else outside of the bloc will pop up and start suing people.

Basically, you can consider AOM to be a licensing alliances, where the fee is zero.

Seeking is not getting, not even close. Suggesting it is only supports their propaganda and adds momentum to their bogus race to a cash grab.

OpenH264, and Cisco already paid the fees for you, I guess.

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