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There is no much additional risk for those companies. If they're already paying MPEG LA fees then even if VP8 is found to infringe MPEG LA patents, they are c
by kjksf 16y ago
There is no much additional risk for those companies.
If they're already paying MPEG LA fees then even if VP8 is found to infringe MPEG LA patents, they are covered.
Most of the companies that would entertain adding VP8 hardware codec already have H264 codec, hence pay the fees.
The companies that don't pay MPEG LA fees, can start paying them.
The important thing to know is MPEG LA sells a bunch of patents. They don't care if they're used in implementing H264 codec or VP8 codec.
MPEG LA fees are relatively low and not a problem for companies like Texas Instruments.
The people who are really affected by those patents are startups, small companies, open-source developers etc.
- jswinghammer 16y agoSo what's the point of not using H.264?
- kjksf 16y agoFrom the perspective of Texas Instruments? They get the tech for free, so why not? More importantly, it keeps MPEG LA in check wrt. to increasing the fees. Monopolies have this tendency. If VP8 pushes out H264, TI (and others) can just switch to it and save licensing fees. Even if it doesn't but gains a significant popularity, it'll be a bargaining tool when/if MPEG LA tries to raise H264 licensing fees. From my perspective? As someone who might use some sort of video encoding technology in my software, I would rather not pay the licensing fees. Not to mention that Google innovates with VP8 faster than all of the combined H264 actors (see e.g. the constraint quality encoding mode http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/03/vp8-constrained-quality-cq-encoding.html http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/03/vp8-constrained-quality-...).