FFmpeg vs. MPEG-LA royalties [LWN.net]

FFmpeg vs. MPEG-LA royalties

Posted Jan 28, 2010 20:29 UTC (Thu) by roc (subscriber, #30627)
In reply to: FFmpeg vs. MPEG-LA royalties by DonDiego
Parent article: Blizzard: HTML5 video and H.264 - what history tells us and why we're standing with the web

> I think the fundamental problem is that you are the sort of person that
> wants insurance policies and buys them, while I am not.

Maybe that is because we have built up a large organization that serves hundreds of millions of users, and you have not. Or maybe it's because we're used to seeing and fighting threats to the open Web.

> Scenarios for which you require a license are listed and they do not
> apply to you, isn't that enough?

No. The document lists scenarios for which a license is offered and is silent about other scenarios. More about this in the other part of the thread.

> There are two points I think you are not assessing correctly:

How great H.264 is is not the issue here. The licensing is the problem.

> This reminds me of something: Mozilla made a study about possible
> submarine patents on Theora. What did you find? Why was the study never
> published? If you found nothing, there surely wouldn't be a reason to
> keep mum about it, don't you agree?

For reasons I honestly don't understand, our lawyers tell us not to talk about it. All I can do is point to our actions in distributing Theora.

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FFmpeg vs. MPEG-LA royalties

Posted Jan 31, 2010 11:37 UTC (Sun) by DonDiego (guest, #24141) [Link]

> > I think the fundamental problem is that you are the sort of person
> > that wants insurance policies and buys them, while I am not.

> Maybe that is because we have built up a large organization that serves
> hundreds of millions of users, and you have not.

Oh, VLC alone has over a hundred million downloads, add to that all other multimedia software based on FFmpeg. Then think of YouTube and Facebook, which are probably the largest users of FFmpeg and how many users they have.

FFmpeg is less visible than Firefox, but by no means do I believe it has less users. I'll turn your argument around:

If tomorrow all copies of Firefox deleted themselves, most people will curse and fire up the alternative browsers that are likely already installed on their machines.

If tomorrow all copies of the FFmpeg libraries delete themselves, a lot of things will stop working where no viable replacement is available or only available for a considerable amount of money.

Free software multimedia will be reduced to dealing with the <5% of fringe content for which alternative libraries exist. Large content providers will have to reengineer their backend infrastructure.

> Or maybe it's because we're used to seeing
> and fighting threats to the open Web.

Maybe we act the way we do because we have been treading the patent-filled lands of multimedia for a decade or more. You are the newbies here, not us.

> > There are two points I think you are not assessing correctly:

> How great H.264 is is not the issue here. The licensing is the problem.

I'm not particularly fond of H.264 myself. It's far too complex a standard and the quality to decoding complexity tradeoff is forcing me to upgrade my vintage hardware.

However, we finally have an open standard for lossy video encoding. This is great news in the world of multimedia.

> > This reminds me of something: Mozilla made a study about possible
> > submarine patents on Theora. What did you find? Why was the study
> > never published? If you found nothing, there surely wouldn't be a
> > reason to keep mum about it, don't you agree?

> For reasons I honestly don't understand, our lawyers tell us not to talk
> about it. All I can do is point to our actions in distributing Theora.

This confirms the rumors that there are submarines lurking in the Theora ocean. Nothing else can explain your actions and why Nokia (who supposedly holds patents that Theora infringes) is afraid of touching Theora.