DVD isn't free either

DVD isn't free either

Posted Dec 12, 2007 20:45 UTC (Wed) by rillian (subscriber, #11344)
In reply to: Specifying codecs for the web by nim-nim
Parent article: Specifying codecs for the web

DVD is not encumberance-free. The licensing group charges a royalty fee for encoder and decoder implementations of the MPEG-2 codec and container suites. The DVD-specific parts of the format (subtitles, menus, navigation, virtual machine, disk layout, scrambling) are only available under NDA; I don't know if there are other contractual obligations that would count an encumberances. Much of that has been reverse-engineered, however.

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On the hardware-side for all practical matters it is. I agree it's not a perfect analogy.

VHS vs Beta would be pretty close