4 ms·

Well, so how much does the licensing actually cost? On their website MPEG LA mentions there are certain thresholds to "minimize the impact on lower volume user

by eelco 17y ago

Well, so how much does the licensing actually cost? On their website MPEG LA mentions there are certain thresholds to "minimize the impact on lower volume users" (http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Intro.aspx http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Intro.aspx). If you're running an consulting business using this format is it so weird to pay a little (or maybe nothing?) to use it? I'm pretty sure you can find outrageous (and oftentimes unlawful) things in most licenses (that's more or less the point), but come on, do you really think MPEG LA will ever sue your friend that watched your x264 encoded clip of your cat on his iPhone? (Which they found out about... how?)

motters 17y ago
In the sort of world that we've occupied until now there is nobody who is going to sue you for making a cat video using a particular codec. But I notice that over time enforcement of licenses is becoming more strict, and perhaps eventually license enforcement will be automatic. Using the H.264 standard for video on the internet seems like a dumb decision to me. It's not rocket science to choose some format which doesn't have potentially debilitating licensing issues associated with it.
- DrJokepu 17y ago
  Unfortunately, Theora is just simply inferior in every technical aspect to h264. The decision comes down to quality vs price. Choosing quality for a higher price is definitely not a "dumb" decision, surely you too often buy a bit more expensive product that promises a better quality. On the other hand, choosing a cheaper, lower quality product is understandable as well if quality is not that important. Vorbis, however is really in the league of mp3/aac/wmv, so in the case of audio, picking Vorbis is really a no-brainer.
  - vog 17y ago
    In the web, with a lot of youtube-like sized videos, the quality of Theora is more than sufficient. Also, for vacation videos and the like, Theora provides a reasonably good quality. In other words: Theora is already good enough for the "masses". It's not the technological inferiority of Theora that hinders its wide adoption. I think it's that people use H.264 for everything and don't care about the licence and the alternatives. The only way to change that is to either (a) raise awareness of the legal issues with H.264 or (b) support Theora in every browser to make it the next video standard in the web. Then, sooner or later the "masses" will follow. The article works on the former, although it's important to work on the latter, too.
    - GHFigs 17y ago
      Theora is already good enough for the "masses". So it's acceptable to deliver a product you know to be inferior to someone because their content isn't important enough to you? Would you not be insulted if someone said they didn't think your home movies were worth encoding with the best available technology?
      - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
        That'll be why your vacation photos are in the lossless but patent encumbered JPEG-2000 format, rather than the less efficient, but patent royalty free JPEG?
  - middayc 17y ago
    but you make a decision of quality vs price when you buy something. Here we are deciding.. will there be the the "free" video the masses of people can post/cut/encode/decode/do-what-ever-they-want with it on the web or not. Would it make sense for a whole web to pay for the better CSS format?
  - sailormoon 17y ago
    Sigh. I've recently been doing a lot of Theora encoding as I experiment with HTML5. I agree that Theora is immediately noticeable as worse quality than h264, and it's not a subtle difference. Even when the situation should have tricked me into thinking it was not Theora - for example, I was testing on Mac Safari and it should have been playing h264 but accepted the Theora because Perian was installed - I instantly noticed the unexpected codec because the quality was so inferior. Those people claiming the two are of comparable quality should get their eyes checked. I hear a lot of talk about how it's "good enough" but quite frankly it's not. If my videos look bad, I look bad. It matters, to me at least. Frankly at this point I wish the governments of the world would just hand the licensees $100m and annul all the patents for the public good. The cost of worrying about the damn licenses seems likely to eclipse the economic contribution of the IP itself.
    - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
      Are you sure you're using Theora 1.1 (aka Thusnelda)? Version 1.1 might be consider "inefficient" but 1.0 was simply "broken" for many uses. You mention Macs and I'm not sure if there's been an official 1.1 release of the XiphQT Quicktime plugin yet, which would affect you if you're using Mac tools to generate the video. Also, does Perian play Theora now? I'm guessing you meant the XiphQT plugin which enables Safari support.
      - sailormoon 17y ago
        Ah, you are probably right about the playback. I have both installed - if you say it's XiphQT that enables Safari to use Theora, you're probably right. As for the encoding, I was using ffmpeg2theora 0.25, which according to the release notes bundles libtheora 1.1. Whether or not I'm using it optimally, though, I can't say. I was loosely following the instructions for batch encoding here: http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html .. but no matter what I do, the .ogv comes out looking like a poorly encoded DivX. Anyway I'll keep trying, thanks for the correction on the QT plugin.
        ZeroGravitas 17y ago
  - jcl 17y ago
    Vorbis, however is really in the league of mp3/aac/wmv, so in the case of audio, picking Vorbis is really a no-brainer. Maybe on desktops, but not on portables. For whatever reason (bad implementations?), Ogg Vorbis takes more processing to decode than mp3. Numerous portable players have shorter battery lives when playing Ogg. http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t52807.html http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t5...
    - DrJokepu 17y ago
      Wild guess: The libvorbis, the "official" codec is using floating point numbers, hence the decreased performance on mobile devices that don't have native floating point support. There are integer-based codecs for MP3 (such as libmad) so it's not an issue with MP3. I suppose the solution would be writing an integer-based codec for Vorbis as well.
      - winthrowe 17y ago
        There is an integer implimentation called tremor. I believe it is more to do with the fact that there is often a dedicated mp3 decoder in these portable devices, and it has to burn the cpu for decoding vorbis.
      - vetinari 17y ago
        There is integer-only decoder for Vorbis, called Tremor. What is missing is decoding by DSPs built in mobile devices. You need to bug TI, Broadcom and other DSP makers for that.
    - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
      I'm not sure your link supports your assertion. The negative reports seem 3-6 years old and perhaps based on 3rd party software vs the software they came with. A more recent set of figures shows that implementation can have an impact, but that if you've got control of the software you'll probably do better with Vorbis. Note the test is on matching bitrates, but Vorbis is more efficient per bit. http://tuomas.kulve.fi/blog/2009/11/07/n900-battery-duration-ogg-vs-mp3/ http://tuomas.kulve.fi/blog/2009/11/07/n900-battery-duration... It also shows that FLAC has longer battery runtimes which I'm guessing is because flash based players no longer need to spin up disks more for the larger filesizes.
  - adini 17y ago
    The current version of the official Theora encoder does allow you to achieve perceived visual quality comparable to that of the current h264 encoders at not that much higher bitrate in case of, at least, the typical "Internet Video" content. Yes, to reach certain quality targets using Theora might mean increased bandwidth cost, but it will also be the only major cost left, for a moment leaving aside the question of adoption. That seem to be a much more predictable cost model than what MPEG LA offers. It might, as well, turn out to be a more affordable model for smaller companies not reaching the MPEG license fee caps. Paying more for a better product? I'd chose the, possibly higher, price of pushing Theora adoption and Theora-encoded bits now to get a promise of a better "quality", in more aspects than just the visual appearance, down the road.
- demallien 17y ago
  Developers, and even device manufacturers, don't really have much of a say in this. The problem is that many applications these days are in processing power constrained devices - netbooks, smartphones, set top boxes. For example, at the moment I'm working on a set top box. The processor is simply unable to handle 720p decoding. We need to rely on the decoder built into the chip to make it happen. And that decoder only does license-encumbered formats. Because there are a lot of devices that fall into this category, content providers are pretty much constrained to generating content in the formats handled by hardware, which in turn reinforces the use of these formats in hardware. Really, the only way out of this loop would be for the big-league device manufacturers - Apple, Sony, Samsung, etc to decide to change format. They don't seem to want to, so the rest of us are stuck with h264...
middayc 17y ago
"I do things with video on web, so irrelevant, that they won't notice me" is not the solution to these things. At least not if you want to be a web entrepreneur? If the only widely adopted format on web becomes h264, which would already be the case if Mozilla wasn't resisting (which most of you attacked), then you have no other option than to use this format. And pay, unless your plan is to be unnoticeable. And video is "everywhere". Just two examples from my real life: - Screen-cast of usage on my subscription based projects - My sister teaches elder people how to use computers. She is now preparing a set of video tutorials. Do you like paying anything for thin air?
- dagw 17y ago
  This could greatly strengthen the business case for sites like YouTube. Since they have a h264 license you don't have to worry about it. Let them compress your video for you and problem solved. The only downside is that all your videos now has to be hosted on YouTube. Perhaps in the near future we'll see a new service which lets you host password protected private videos. I wonder if Google had this scenario in mind when they bought Youtube?
  - middayc 17y ago
    Yes, this would greatly strengthen all big players that want to own the web (Goog, Apl..). Now if you want to make the competitive browser you have to pay the licenses, same for video site and probably many things. The absurdity goes even to this. If you compile the "Open Sourced" Chrome by yourself and distribute it you would have to pay the license to MPEG guys.
    - cjbos 17y ago
      On VP6 is still the most widely used codec on the web... almost all live streaming is vp6. (Flash web cam chat is Spark codec). So the opportunity still exists for you or your sister to encode web videos for commercial use and have them playable by the majority of users today with no legal hassles. The issue tends to be with the HD quality video craze thats happening now. VP6 is fine, but its noticeably different in quality to h.264. Most people wont notice the difference when encoded at high bitrates unless you know what to look for. What bugs me is Apple is part of that whole h.264 consortium that owns the h.264 patents, yet the also serve on the web standards group defining html5... I don't think they can be impartial there, also denying flash on apple products is more to do with protecting the codecs that can be used to the ones they own. If you sell a app on the apple store that uses h.264 video then you better be sure you own the commercial license as apple know who you are.
ZeroGravitas 17y ago
We don't know how much it will cost to stream video on the web. That fact alone should ring alarm bells. The last time they introduced these streaming fees, everyone (including Apple and Real) went mental and predicted that MPEG-4 would die because the licensing was so insane. They had to make some concessions, though it seems unlikely that they got bartered down very far since they started so extreme. So this time, they let the web broadcasters get away with it for nothing for years while they solidified the markets where they've already got a monopoly. You've got to admit it's a smooth move, almost Bond-villainesque.
pbhjpbhj 17y ago
From wikipedia (but it actually happened!): In August 1999, Unisys changed the details of their licensing practice, announcing the option for owners of Billboard and Intra net Web sites to obtain licenses on payment of a one-time license fee of $5000 or $7500. Such licenses were not required for website owners or other GIF users who had used licensed software to generate GIFs. Edit: I am completely opposed to web standards including proprietary codecs. HTML5 should have Theora (or some other open gratis and libre codec) as the standard which all browsers wishing to be HTML5 compliant must be able to handle - this does not stop anyone from using h264 if they wish to. What it does is ensure that the web remains as free and open to use as possible. If the working groups had plumped for Theora then optimisations and hardware would follow in pretty short shrift. It ain't going to happen and the reasons are commercial - this makes me sad for the future of the web, I see this is a big turning point. Kinda like if the developers of HTML4 had said "we know about the LZW patent but we're going to write in GIF as the standard requirement". (Incidentally I gather that no image formats were written into the standards before?!). So do you link to h264 videos from your intranet - want to buy a license for $10k? No? Switch to Theora as the best free alternative. OK, now none of the browsers support your video format natively. Congratulations you've been screwed again by MegaCorp.
- DougBTX 17y ago
  other GIF users who had used licensed software to generate GIFs. In light of this article, that quote is quite interesting. Looks like this time around the software is only licensed to generate h264 for non-commercial reasons right from the get go. Something planning ahead?
- jrockway 17y ago
  I am completely opposed to web standards including proprietary codecs. HTML5 should have Theora (or some other open gratis and libre codec) as the standard which all browsers wishing to be HTML5 compliant must be able to handle - this does not stop anyone from using h264 if they wish to. What it does is ensure that the web remains as free and open to use as possible. You seem not to realize that Apple and Microsoft are the ones writing the "standards". Their goal is use HTML5 to make money, not to make the web "more free" or something. Our only hope is that Google takes a stand.

by eelco 17y ago

motters 17y ago

In the sort of world that we've occupied until now there is nobody who is going to sue you for making a cat video using a particular codec. But I notice that over time enforcement of licenses is becoming more strict, and perhaps eventually license enforcement will be automatic. Using the H.264 standard for video on the internet seems like a dumb decision to me. It's not rocket science to choose some format which doesn't have potentially debilitating licensing issues associated with it.

DrJokepu 17y ago
Unfortunately, Theora is just simply inferior in every technical aspect to h264. The decision comes down to quality vs price. Choosing quality for a higher price is definitely not a "dumb" decision, surely you too often buy a bit more expensive product that promises a better quality. On the other hand, choosing a cheaper, lower quality product is understandable as well if quality is not that important. Vorbis, however is really in the league of mp3/aac/wmv, so in the case of audio, picking Vorbis is really a no-brainer.
- vog 17y ago
  In the web, with a lot of youtube-like sized videos, the quality of Theora is more than sufficient. Also, for vacation videos and the like, Theora provides a reasonably good quality. In other words: Theora is already good enough for the "masses". It's not the technological inferiority of Theora that hinders its wide adoption. I think it's that people use H.264 for everything and don't care about the licence and the alternatives. The only way to change that is to either (a) raise awareness of the legal issues with H.264 or (b) support Theora in every browser to make it the next video standard in the web. Then, sooner or later the "masses" will follow. The article works on the former, although it's important to work on the latter, too.
  - GHFigs 17y ago
    Theora is already good enough for the "masses". So it's acceptable to deliver a product you know to be inferior to someone because their content isn't important enough to you? Would you not be insulted if someone said they didn't think your home movies were worth encoding with the best available technology?
    - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
      That'll be why your vacation photos are in the lossless but patent encumbered JPEG-2000 format, rather than the less efficient, but patent royalty free JPEG?
- middayc 17y ago
  but you make a decision of quality vs price when you buy something. Here we are deciding.. will there be the the "free" video the masses of people can post/cut/encode/decode/do-what-ever-they-want with it on the web or not. Would it make sense for a whole web to pay for the better CSS format?
- sailormoon 17y ago
  Sigh. I've recently been doing a lot of Theora encoding as I experiment with HTML5. I agree that Theora is immediately noticeable as worse quality than h264, and it's not a subtle difference. Even when the situation should have tricked me into thinking it was not Theora - for example, I was testing on Mac Safari and it should have been playing h264 but accepted the Theora because Perian was installed - I instantly noticed the unexpected codec because the quality was so inferior. Those people claiming the two are of comparable quality should get their eyes checked. I hear a lot of talk about how it's "good enough" but quite frankly it's not. If my videos look bad, I look bad. It matters, to me at least. Frankly at this point I wish the governments of the world would just hand the licensees $100m and annul all the patents for the public good. The cost of worrying about the damn licenses seems likely to eclipse the economic contribution of the IP itself.
  - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
    Are you sure you're using Theora 1.1 (aka Thusnelda)? Version 1.1 might be consider "inefficient" but 1.0 was simply "broken" for many uses. You mention Macs and I'm not sure if there's been an official 1.1 release of the XiphQT Quicktime plugin yet, which would affect you if you're using Mac tools to generate the video. Also, does Perian play Theora now? I'm guessing you meant the XiphQT plugin which enables Safari support.
    - sailormoon 17y ago
      Ah, you are probably right about the playback. I have both installed - if you say it's XiphQT that enables Safari to use Theora, you're probably right. As for the encoding, I was using ffmpeg2theora 0.25, which according to the release notes bundles libtheora 1.1. Whether or not I'm using it optimally, though, I can't say. I was loosely following the instructions for batch encoding here: http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html .. but no matter what I do, the .ogv comes out looking like a poorly encoded DivX. Anyway I'll keep trying, thanks for the correction on the QT plugin.
      - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
- jcl 17y ago
  Vorbis, however is really in the league of mp3/aac/wmv, so in the case of audio, picking Vorbis is really a no-brainer. Maybe on desktops, but not on portables. For whatever reason (bad implementations?), Ogg Vorbis takes more processing to decode than mp3. Numerous portable players have shorter battery lives when playing Ogg. http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t52807.html http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t5...
  - DrJokepu 17y ago
    Wild guess: The libvorbis, the "official" codec is using floating point numbers, hence the decreased performance on mobile devices that don't have native floating point support. There are integer-based codecs for MP3 (such as libmad) so it's not an issue with MP3. I suppose the solution would be writing an integer-based codec for Vorbis as well.
    - winthrowe 17y ago
      There is an integer implimentation called tremor. I believe it is more to do with the fact that there is often a dedicated mp3 decoder in these portable devices, and it has to burn the cpu for decoding vorbis.
    - vetinari 17y ago
      There is integer-only decoder for Vorbis, called Tremor. What is missing is decoding by DSPs built in mobile devices. You need to bug TI, Broadcom and other DSP makers for that.
  - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
    I'm not sure your link supports your assertion. The negative reports seem 3-6 years old and perhaps based on 3rd party software vs the software they came with. A more recent set of figures shows that implementation can have an impact, but that if you've got control of the software you'll probably do better with Vorbis. Note the test is on matching bitrates, but Vorbis is more efficient per bit. http://tuomas.kulve.fi/blog/2009/11/07/n900-battery-duration-ogg-vs-mp3/ http://tuomas.kulve.fi/blog/2009/11/07/n900-battery-duration... It also shows that FLAC has longer battery runtimes which I'm guessing is because flash based players no longer need to spin up disks more for the larger filesizes.
- adini 17y ago
  The current version of the official Theora encoder does allow you to achieve perceived visual quality comparable to that of the current h264 encoders at not that much higher bitrate in case of, at least, the typical "Internet Video" content. Yes, to reach certain quality targets using Theora might mean increased bandwidth cost, but it will also be the only major cost left, for a moment leaving aside the question of adoption. That seem to be a much more predictable cost model than what MPEG LA offers. It might, as well, turn out to be a more affordable model for smaller companies not reaching the MPEG license fee caps. Paying more for a better product? I'd chose the, possibly higher, price of pushing Theora adoption and Theora-encoded bits now to get a promise of a better "quality", in more aspects than just the visual appearance, down the road.
demallien 17y ago
Developers, and even device manufacturers, don't really have much of a say in this. The problem is that many applications these days are in processing power constrained devices - netbooks, smartphones, set top boxes. For example, at the moment I'm working on a set top box. The processor is simply unable to handle 720p decoding. We need to rely on the decoder built into the chip to make it happen. And that decoder only does license-encumbered formats. Because there are a lot of devices that fall into this category, content providers are pretty much constrained to generating content in the formats handled by hardware, which in turn reinforces the use of these formats in hardware. Really, the only way out of this loop would be for the big-league device manufacturers - Apple, Sony, Samsung, etc to decide to change format. They don't seem to want to, so the rest of us are stuck with h264...

middayc 17y ago

"I do things with video on web, so irrelevant, that they won't notice me" is not the solution to these things. At least not if you want to be a web entrepreneur? If the only widely adopted format on web becomes h264, which would already be the case if Mozilla wasn't resisting (which most of you attacked), then you have no other option than to use this format. And pay, unless your plan is to be unnoticeable. And video is "everywhere". Just two examples from my real life: - Screen-cast of usage on my subscription based projects - My sister teaches elder people how to use computers. She is now preparing a set of video tutorials. Do you like paying anything for thin air?

dagw 17y ago
This could greatly strengthen the business case for sites like YouTube. Since they have a h264 license you don't have to worry about it. Let them compress your video for you and problem solved. The only downside is that all your videos now has to be hosted on YouTube. Perhaps in the near future we'll see a new service which lets you host password protected private videos. I wonder if Google had this scenario in mind when they bought Youtube?
- middayc 17y ago
  Yes, this would greatly strengthen all big players that want to own the web (Goog, Apl..). Now if you want to make the competitive browser you have to pay the licenses, same for video site and probably many things. The absurdity goes even to this. If you compile the "Open Sourced" Chrome by yourself and distribute it you would have to pay the license to MPEG guys.
  - cjbos 17y ago
    On VP6 is still the most widely used codec on the web... almost all live streaming is vp6. (Flash web cam chat is Spark codec). So the opportunity still exists for you or your sister to encode web videos for commercial use and have them playable by the majority of users today with no legal hassles. The issue tends to be with the HD quality video craze thats happening now. VP6 is fine, but its noticeably different in quality to h.264. Most people wont notice the difference when encoded at high bitrates unless you know what to look for. What bugs me is Apple is part of that whole h.264 consortium that owns the h.264 patents, yet the also serve on the web standards group defining html5... I don't think they can be impartial there, also denying flash on apple products is more to do with protecting the codecs that can be used to the ones they own. If you sell a app on the apple store that uses h.264 video then you better be sure you own the commercial license as apple know who you are.

ZeroGravitas 17y ago

We don't know how much it will cost to stream video on the web. That fact alone should ring alarm bells. The last time they introduced these streaming fees, everyone (including Apple and Real) went mental and predicted that MPEG-4 would die because the licensing was so insane. They had to make some concessions, though it seems unlikely that they got bartered down very far since they started so extreme. So this time, they let the web broadcasters get away with it for nothing for years while they solidified the markets where they've already got a monopoly. You've got to admit it's a smooth move, almost Bond-villainesque.

pbhjpbhj 17y ago

From wikipedia (but it actually happened!): In August 1999, Unisys changed the details of their licensing practice, announcing the option for owners of Billboard and Intra net Web sites to obtain licenses on payment of a one-time license fee of $5000 or $7500. Such licenses were not required for website owners or other GIF users who had used licensed software to generate GIFs. Edit: I am completely opposed to web standards including proprietary codecs. HTML5 should have Theora (or some other open gratis and libre codec) as the standard which all browsers wishing to be HTML5 compliant must be able to handle - this does not stop anyone from using h264 if they wish to. What it does is ensure that the web remains as free and open to use as possible. If the working groups had plumped for Theora then optimisations and hardware would follow in pretty short shrift. It ain't going to happen and the reasons are commercial - this makes me sad for the future of the web, I see this is a big turning point. Kinda like if the developers of HTML4 had said "we know about the LZW patent but we're going to write in GIF as the standard requirement". (Incidentally I gather that no image formats were written into the standards before?!). So do you link to h264 videos from your intranet - want to buy a license for $10k? No? Switch to Theora as the best free alternative. OK, now none of the browsers support your video format natively. Congratulations you've been screwed again by MegaCorp.

DougBTX 17y ago
other GIF users who had used licensed software to generate GIFs. In light of this article, that quote is quite interesting. Looks like this time around the software is only licensed to generate h264 for non-commercial reasons right from the get go. Something planning ahead?
jrockway 17y ago
I am completely opposed to web standards including proprietary codecs. HTML5 should have Theora (or some other open gratis and libre codec) as the standard which all browsers wishing to be HTML5 compliant must be able to handle - this does not stop anyone from using h264 if they wish to. What it does is ensure that the web remains as free and open to use as possible. You seem not to realize that Apple and Microsoft are the ones writing the "standards". Their goal is use HTML5 to make money, not to make the web "more free" or something. Our only hope is that Google takes a stand.