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MPEG LA chases its tail, says H.264 streaming will be free forever
MPEG LA, famous for nothing other than a portfolio of pretentiously pathetic patents, has finally taken a swing at the rapidly gaining popularity of its free-as-in-matted-beard competitor, WebM. Rather than running out in 2016, the license to stream H.264 will remain free forever.This is a reactionary move to battle the rallying of Mozilla, Google and Opera behind the WebM video standard. As it stands, both Firefox 4 and Opera 10.6 only support WebM for HTML5 video -- with this licensing change, MPEG LA is obviously angling for H.264 support to find a place in both Firefox and Opera before their next stable release. Chrome, incidentally, supports both H.264 and WebM, and I expect it will continue to do so. IE9 supports H.264, but will include WebM support by the time it is released.
Despite the licensing changes, I can't imagine Mozilla leaping at the chance of including closed-source and patent-riddled code in its browser. At the end of the day, it will be services like YouTube and Hulu that actually decide the fate of the HTML5 video wars: if YouTube only provides WebM-encoded video, you can be damn sure that WebM will become the video standard!
Incidentally, if you want something disgusting to look at, check out the MPEG LA website. Not only does it look kind-of-90s-and-pseudo-NASA, but it also explains the dire, creativity-crippling concept of 'Patent Pools'. "Together, with the power of pooled patents, we can stamp out start-ups and create billions of dollars in the process! Mu ha ha!"
Someone pass me a bucket.
[via NewTeeVee]
Comments
11
Subscribe to commentsPatrick #2Aug 26th 2010 10:57AM
Wow. If only they did this a year or three ago they would most likely have been the reigning champions of all these video codecs floating around, and the Flash debate may never have ignited. How, holdouts from switching to H.264 from Flash and Ogg don't have this reason. Considering H.264 pounces each when it comes to efficiency in streaming and playing, it should get a healthy winning surge of use in the near future.
r3loadedAug 26th 2010 11:07AM
Doesn't really matter to us Sebastian - as a citizen of an EU state, we have no concept of software patents in the first place! :)
Sebastian AnthonyAug 26th 2010 11:11AM
True! But we're still stuck with whatever software is produced by the Americans!
ishidaAug 26th 2010 11:54AM
Who's to say that both can't be used in the same browser? It's not like the video formats clash with each other, is it?
DamianAug 26th 2010 12:40PM
"Firefox 4 and Opera 10.6 only support WebM for HTML5 video,"
Funny, I seem to remember them both supporting OGG, in fact I'm quite sure I was reading a hardware post about recent massive performance improvements they've been making to OGG including:
http://blog.pearce.org.nz/2010/08/keyframe-indexed-ogg-files-supported-in.html
Sebastian AnthonyAug 26th 2010 12:42PM
Yep, good point, I forgot about Ogg. I was more thinking about the WebM/H.264 competition -- sorry :)
SilverWaveAug 26th 2010 12:47PM
MPEG LA can go forth and multiply.
Hmm, a move born of desperation! Lovely.
Looks like Googles in the clear then, nice!
MS will only support WebM if you have it installed already.
Unless you know different?
Sebastian AnthonyAug 26th 2010 1:03PM
I only did a quick Google search. Seemed there were a few results that indicated WebM support would be coming -- I will ask them, when I'm San Francisco next month...!
SilverWaveAug 26th 2010 3:38PM
* Free forever for free apps only
MoondoggieSep 17th 2010 3:58PM
WebM is a video format not a video codec, H.264 is a video compression standard. Bit of a difference. Ones a container for video compressed with a codec. The others the video encoded then placed in a video container.
WebM is basically a modification (or subset) of the Matroska container that uses VP8 video codec with Vorbis audio, and because of that it could also contain H.264 video. Not that that's likely to happen but it could.
H.264 can be placed into a few different container formats (avi,mkv,mp4,flv) although it tend to be most commonly used in mp4 & mkv files.
Does any of that matter though? Not to me. As long as I can watch video's online for free (youtube, hulu etc etc) and not need to install proprietary software to do so. I don't care if Firefox or any other browser developers prefer webM over mp4 formats as long as I'm able to get my video streams in high enough quality without killing my monthly bandwidth allotment.
If the WebM developers have half a brain they will enable H.264 video content in their container now that H.264 is free. Simply because users will then have a choice on which codec they prefer and I think most of us will agree that having a choice in what we use is a good thing.
Just my 2Cents
Shiv KumarAug 31st 2010 9:54AM
This does't change anything for Firefox and Opera by the way, because the only change is broadcasting H.264 content over the Internet is free (if the video is free).
http://www.matlus.com/2010/08/h-264-free-for-internet-broadcast/
@SilverWave - No Google is not in the clear. Infringing on a patent is still an infringement. If it is determined that VP8 does indeed infringe on parts of the H.264 spec then WebM is in trouble.
@Moondoggie it doesn't matter what container a codec is wrapped in. So there is no need nor advantage of WebM supporting H.264 and so the WebM project has to and should not do anything about H.264. I don't see why you see they have to get married. WebM is WebM, browser vendors can support multiple container/codec combinations.
I'm pretty sure Firefox can use the codecs installed on a computer without violating any licenses, which mean they could support H.264 if you already have the decoder installed. But they don't want to. the Mozilla organization is a still a business ($300 million from Google each year) only their source code is open source, so let's not forget that each business has it's own interests in mind first and foremost.