Not their job
It used to be, but not any more. These days they just rubber stamp what the major player do.
Which means they will rubber stamp whatever MS/Google decide, sod any pretext of standards to compatibility.
H.264 video codec stays royalty-free for HTML5 testers
Freetards stand down - MPEG LA has decided to slash royalties to zero for anyone wishing to use the H.264 codec for free streaming of internet video until the end of 2016. The MPEG licensing outfit confirmed earlier this week that its AVC patent portfolio licence won’t charge royalties for internet video that is free to end …
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Friday 5th February 2010 10:23 GMT Andraž 'ruskie' Levstik
Amusing
I especially liked the idiot(i think SimonC) bitching about being a paid unemployed coder. Go get a job. Ow... you only know Visual Basic... to bad. Ow and FYI you can have cake and eat it to with Free Software. Nowhere does it say you aren't permited to charge for the app. You just need to respect the license.
Seriously... I have yet to see any benefit to h.264.... And last I heard HTML5 standard will not include any definite video format(due to Nokia and other bitching about it). If it can't be fully open then it's not in. Simple as that. As for patent fears... Apparently Nokia doesn't have them anymore... 2 long standing bugs have recently been fixed in it's maemo bugtracker... want to know what they are?
Include Ogg Vorbis support, include Flac support and I do spot theora somewhere as well so I wouldn't be suprised if that comes in as well.
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Friday 5th February 2010 10:35 GMT Martin Nicholls
What everyone's forgotten..
Is h264 can't go within a thousand miles of anything GPL due to the pattents.
Forget linux for a start, and forget anything licensed in anything that smells of the GPL's pattent clauses.
The GPL sees the edge of it's license as the process boundry not the source code, which is where the legal minefield comes into play.
Which also happens to be why it'll never be anywhere near a vanilla debian or ubuntu install for example.
And reg: stop calling everybody involved in open source freetards, even if they're just users, it's fairly annoying especially when the subject is so important like this - where these people can do basically want they want in 5 years.
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Friday 5th February 2010 13:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
GPL
This is the classic problem with GPL - it is (and I hate to agree with MS) viral in how it is applied, and it prevents GPL code from being used with other, perfectly good and freely available, code. This is "GPL's" problem; not anyone else's
Then again, it is the H264 codec that is patented, and not any souce code. There is nothing to stop you from re-implementing the codec and sticking a GPL tag on it. It just means that it might be an infringement of the patent licence to actually USE the code.
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Friday 5th February 2010 10:38 GMT Maya Posch
Software patents
It's a good thing this only affects the US and other crazy countries with software patents. Long live the EU, AKA the country of the free ;)
Mozilla should release two versions of their browser, one with AVC support and one without for the US. Somewhat like the inverse of the encryption exportation regulations the US has/had.
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Friday 5th February 2010 11:16 GMT The BigYin
Please define "free"
I make videos of something (funny kittens, I dunno)
I put them on the web at no cost to the end-user (free, in other words)
I do not syndicate or otherwise make any money directly from the videos (still free)
But....I do make money from advertising on my pages.
The video is the draw that gets people to view and click the ads I serve.
So whilst my video is still "free", is it making me money?
Would I fall foul of the "no fee" MPEG-LA offer?
I think I would, to be honest.
Ogg Theora, A.N.Other, I don't care. Just make sure it is patent and cost unencumbered.
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Friday 5th February 2010 13:32 GMT Andrew Hodgkinson
I've said it before...
...and I'll say it again; HTML does not dictate which image format you use; de facto standards emerged. HTML does not dictate which script language you might use; MS tried VBScript for a while, for example, but JavaScript won out in the long term. HTML should not dictate which video format I use either. By all means make strong recommendations, but ultimately you must let authors make the choice.
Every major OS ships with a video playing framework, I's barking mad for a web browser to implement its own framework and CODEC internally. Just call the OS! That's what it's there for.
If you really want to ensure Theora is present, then fine, support that in your browser if you must. And if you encounter H264 video with no internal decoder? Just call the OS.
There seems to be no rational technical argument here whatsoever IMHO.
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Friday 5th February 2010 22:42 GMT heyrick
Insufficient
This is like a lurking Y2K bug. We'll all get comfy with H.264, then WHAM.
Somebody said the world and their dog wants to standardise with H.264. Perhaps that's because at the time there wasn't really anything better? Not to mention you can't really claim it's an internet standard because blu-ray discs use it. Did we all pass around low-def video in MPEG2 format "because DVDs did"? No.
Trust me, if YouTube decided to change to Theora, the eventual effect would be pretty obvious - H.what? Perhaps the only two things stopping them are - does IE support it? and also the issue of transcoding existing material to a different format. It should be less of a problem if you have an HD original (or retained the original upload), otherwise...
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Monday 8th February 2010 10:04 GMT Anonymous Coward
Excuse me for using the comments section as a Q&A forum but ...
People have mentioned built-in support for H.264 in hardware.
I don't know much about codecs or the specialised hardware that implements them in small devices. I imagine though that a lot of very similar tasks pop up within the implementation of all video codecs. How generic can video decompression hardware be while still being a lot more efficient than a CPU? If the answer is "very" then can't all our fancy 'phones and whatnot be ready for any codecs of the future without having to implement them now?
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