Video Codec Patents
Discussions center on patent encumbrances, licensing complexities, and royalty fees for video codecs like H.264, HEVC, and alternatives such as VP8, VP9, and AV1, including their impact on open source adoption and browser support.
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Because it's based on HEVC. HEVC patents have a very complex (and expensive) licensing situation right now.
He's a short version: AAPL and MSFT have a stake in MPEG-LA owner of the proprietary H.264, for now they lets us use it without paying royalties, Mozilla and other smaller players can't support because it's proprietary. One day MPEG-LA will ask for it’s money and we’ll all be royally fucked, it happen before with GIF, so please support any existing or to introduced open source alternatives.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1098336http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1070780http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patent_licensi...
I think it's because Google is trying to avoid patents, libx264 doesn't.
It isn't about the implementation's license, it's about patents. H.264 is patented while Theora is not. This makes it illegal for anybody to distribute H.264 decoding software, whether open source or not, until they've paid for the patent license.
The problem being patents/licensing. mp4 is patented up the 'wazoo' and has onerous licensing terms.
Sadly, the best compression techniques are fairly obvious and have been patented. The economics of this space have always favored better codecs over licensing concerns. Savings in bandwidth often negate the cost benefits of a free codec. High end video recording/editing tools used by most content creators are expensive, such that a codec license amounts to only a small fraction of the cost. Pirates care about high quality and fast downloads. They don't care about licensing costs for obvious reas
Why patent-encumbered codecs use to end owning the market? E.g. nobody but Google itself ever seemed enthusiastic about WebM.
They don't want you to get along with H.264 just fine when H.264 patents will expire. That's why they are pushing for renewed codec. And the only way such thing can become free, is if someone would buy all patents on it (like Google did for VP8 with On2), and release the codec as free. But unlike the story with On2, with so many parties involved in MPEG-LA it's simply impossible. It's their perpetual cash cow, and they want to keep it that way, while it goes against the interests of the open Web
Since google's adoption relies heavily on their claim that WebM isn't patent encumbered, it's a pretty safe bet that this is being done by the h.264 patent holders for competitive reasons.