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it's likely to be relatively clean of patents and may enable a cross-everything royalty free implementation. But time will tell how MPEG LA will feel about that
by pcl 12y ago
it's likely to be relatively clean of patents and may enable a cross-everything royalty free implementation. But time will tell how MPEG LA will feel about that.
So that's the thing. I'm all for royalty-free encoders, but the only way to know if an algorithm is really royalty-free is for it to be older than the current maximum patent age. I believe that Daala is being designed to be royalty-free, but that's not measurable in advance.
There are other good reasons to support Daala, and explicitly building something to avoid royalty issues is certainly laudable (esp. compared to explicitly doing the opposite), but you can't just go and guarantee that something new is royalty-free, and it's frustrating to see the community make exactly those sorts of statements.
- phaemon 12y agoWhere exactly did the community guarantee that Daala was clean of patents?
- keeperofdakeys 12y agoI don't know if there has been any concerted effort to find possible patents, however daala is touted as patent free because its implementation uses different technologies from H264/HEVC, hence most/all of the MPEG-LA patents shouldn't apply.
- derf_ 12y agoThe U.S. patent system makes it impossible to guarantee anything with respect to patent infringement. But how many royalty-free codecs does Xiph need to develop and deploy at scale [0-4], without anyone filing lawsuits, before people believe that success here is possible? P.S., in case it's not clear, I've volunteered for the Xiph.Org Foundation for over a decade. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis#Support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis#Support [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hardware_and_software_that_supports_FLAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hardware_and_software_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speex#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speex#Applications [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora#Playback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora#Playback [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_%28audio_codec%29#Support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_%28audio_codec%29#Support