Ogg or H.264 [LWN.net]

Ogg or H.264

Posted Jul 7, 2009 9:42 UTC (Tue) by jamesh (guest, #1159)
In reply to: Ogg or H.264 by YangBaxter
Parent article: Ogg codecs dropped from HTML5

Web browsers (and HTTP in general) have had content negotiation support for ages. I'd imagine it could be used here as well.

That said, your suggestion really just pushes the patent problem on to content producers. To make sure the video would be viewable by the maximum audience, producers would need to provide both formats. Now they've got to deal with patents on the H.264 encoders.

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Ogg or H.264

Posted Jul 7, 2009 13:11 UTC (Tue) by gmaxwell (guest, #30048) [Link] (2 responses)

The encoder licensing isn't all that exciting: Sure, it excludes authors using only legal freely licensed tools

The killer is that MPEG-LA demands royalty payments from content distributors. Though 'your first try is free' for the web until 2010, future pricing will depend on exactly how viable distributing only in unencumbered formats is at that time.

If everyone feels that they must offer H.264 or be incompatible they'll be no reason for that price to be especially low.

Even if you hate Theora and never intend on using it it's strongly in your best interest to encourage its robust adoption, unless you are one of the few companies participating in the MPEG-4 patent pool.

Specifying "one or the other" is a complete non-starter as the W3C's own IPR rules take H.264 out of consideration. Moreover, it would be short sighted: Ten years from now both H.264 and Theora will be considered old and lame compared to H.266 and Theora-III or whatever, as this is still a rapidly developing area. Legacy support is a fact of life, but having to carry around twice the legacy support is just double-uncool, especially since H.264 will still require licensing even when it is no longer anywhere close to the cutting edge and for a long time to come.

Ogg or H.264

Posted Jul 7, 2009 17:19 UTC (Tue) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (1 responses)

Err... years from now the patents will expire.

ffmpeg's implementation has no issues other than patent rights, AFAIK.

Ogg or H.264

Posted Jul 26, 2009 14:44 UTC (Sun) by jrincayc (guest, #29129) [Link]

gmaxwell specified 10 years from now, or 2019, in which case many of MPEG-LA's H.264 patents will not have expired yet since the last US patents expire in 2028.

US MPEG-LA patent list:
http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-...
based on
http://www.mpegla.com/avc/avc-patentlist.cfm

I think there is some possible justification for software patents (assuming that some way of distinguishing good patents can be found) but I have never seen a good justification for why software patents should last 20 years from filing date.