Category Archives: Software

MPEG-LA answers some questions about AVC/H.264 licensing

The issues surrounding the nature of content created using the AVC/H.264 video specification, which includes the video produced by most camcorders, digital cameras, and cell phones in use today, have confused many people.  In fact, people on both sides of the issue have made contradictory claims and rarely, if ever, were such claims based on actual facts, but rather, either speculation or misunderstanding of the issues that come into play.

One notable mention that came-up during the heated debate of which codec should be used in the HTML5 <video> tag was Ben Schwartz‘s posting, No, you can’t do that with H.264. Ben avoided the mistakes committed by most by explicitly referencing the legal terms found in the documentation of professional products, including Final Cut Pro as well as Windows 7 Ultimate.

In the interest of clarifying the ambiguous claims regarding the licensing terms of using the AVC/H.264 video technology, Libre Video has taken the time over the past few weeks to contact the MPEG-LA directly, the licensing authority responsible for administering the patent pool for the H.264 specification.  We have asked them various questions related to what we feel are important issues surrounding the terms under which normal people are permitted to use hardware products that they have purchased and the resulting multimedia content created with them.  This communication happened via a series of e-mails over a little more than one week that we have compiled together here.  They graciously answered our queries to the extent that we can draw some concrete conclusions related to what users can and cannot do according to the licensing terms they are generally granted.

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The challenges in using proprietary standards (linked)

Venkatesh Hariharan, author of the Open Source India blog, has made a post that quotes Jonathan Gay, co-creator of the Flash, on the challenges in using proprietary standards.  It’s a good read demonstrating the real & practical roadblocks that royalty-based licensing schemes such as those that exist for the AVC/H.264 video standard that lead to Macromedia (the ones that developed Flash before being purchased by Adobe) to choose an alternative codec from On2 (now owned by Google) due to a much smaller licensing burden.

WebM on the web

News & developments about WebM are coming too fast to cover all of them, but it’s definitely encouraging to see that the free software world (as well as some other surprising, but welcome, players) has unequivocally embraced WebM as the standard for the web.

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Theora: Ptalarbvorm project update 20100518

Monty of Xiph.org Foundation has given us a demonstration update of the latest development going into the Ptalarbvorm Theora encoder, which is lined-up to be released as libtheora 1.2.  The demo includes screenshots comparing the latest development code with the last release, libtheora 1.1.1 a.k.a., Thusnelda.