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H.264 support coming to FirefoxH.264 support coming to FirefoxPosted Mar 19, 2012 17:12 UTC (Mon) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559)Parent article: H.264 support coming to Firefox
oh well they tried to fight the good fight for a while. h264 is still a patent minefield. one day, someone will be lose their foot.
despite what eich says in his post, it isn't a matter of just waiting for the patents to expire. the mpeg group is busy working on creating new codecs which may have some minor technical advantage, but will mostly serve to extend their patents further into the future. probably the only change that can alleviate this situation is a full-scale retroactive change in the patent system itself.
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H.264 support coming to Firefox Posted Mar 19, 2012 17:51 UTC (Mon) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]
That's why key part of the war against MPEG-LA is not expiration time, but wider adoption of open codecs, primarily in hardware. Hardware is moving in that direction, albeit slowly. So H.264 won't be "the standard" in hardware decoding forever.
H.264 support coming to Firefox Posted Mar 19, 2012 19:13 UTC (Mon) by gmaxwell (subscriber, #30048) [Link]
Like has happened with MPEG-2 I expect they'll raise the effective fees until H.265 is more attractive than H.264.
They already raised the annual cap from $5m to $6.5m/yr in the last licensing update. The per-unit fees are subject to a 10% increase per-cycle limit, but the annual caps are not... and the annual caps are what matter to the major parties that really drive compatibility requirements. This will be doubly effective with many of the major hardware vendors being H.265 licensors and all of them eager to keep the users on the hardware upgrade hamster wheel.
MPEG-LA will also continue to add patents to the pool in order to extend the its life. This has been seen with MPEG2— it originally had ~27 patents and now has almost a thousand (and more than 130 US patents, so the increase isn't just from catching international variants). We'll see the same with H.264/AVC, in fact, last year they added three recently granted patents to the essential patent list from just Apple alone.
We've also got room for a good two full codec generations before the current AVC pool begins to expire in earnest.
H.264 support coming to Firefox Posted Mar 19, 2012 20:13 UTC (Mon) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]
Shouldn't it push hardware vendors (like chipset makers who implement video decoding) to use open codecs even sooner? They'll avoid any fees and will produce cheaper hardware in result.
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