H.264 standard and licensing issues (and a bit about Ogg Theora)

Not so long ago, an article appeared on the Engadget website written by a specialist in copyright law, which explained in detail some questions regarding the license for the H.264 standard. It is quite voluminous, so I will give here only a few points that interested me personally, in a free presentation in the form of questions and answers.

What is this MPEG-LA that is responsible for licensing this technology?

This is not one independent organization, but an association of several dozen patent holders, 26 of which manage the rights to the H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC standard. Among them: Apple, Microsoft, Panasonic, Sony, Dolby, Thomson, and Toshiba. They all have different “weights” in the organization - for example, if Apple has only one patent from the common pool, Microsoft has as many as 75. It is worth noting that all these companies not only receive royalties, but also pay them themselves . Moreover, according to Microsoft, the company pays MPEG-LA about two times more than it receives for part of its rights to H.264.

What will happen to the H.264 license from January 1, 2016?

As already written on the hub

MPEG LA extended the free license for the H.264 codec to 2016. This refers to the license for "Internet video broadcasting, which is free for end users," that is, non-commercial video and projects such as YouTube, well, ordinary webmasters can breathe easy: no one will bother them for the next six years.

The introduction of a fee for using H.264 is possible, but it is worth remembering that this will not be the sole MPEG-LA decision, but an agreement between all the companies represented in it. And according to Microsoft, the company "is fully tuned to support the decision to renew the license" in the future.

Will there be any changes in relation to this license in 5 years, we will know at the end of this year.

Who should pay for the H.264 license?

In reality, MPEG-LA has two licenses: one is for codec developers (who create and sell programs that encode and decode H.264 videos), and the second is for content providers (who distribute this video). At the same time, the price scale for some, and for others, can differ by several orders of magnitude: from zero to $ 5 million (Summary of AVC / H.264 License Terms , PDF).

Currently, the MPEG-LA website lists 817 organizations that are licensed to use H.264.

In response to Engadget's direct question to MPEG-LA about whether a license is required to use an H.264 camera for shooting commercial videos, the answer was no. A similar negative answer was raised to the question whether end users watching H.264 videos should ever pay or get a license for this standard.

Why not switch to the widespread use of the free Ogg Theora?

First, as many people claim, H.264 outperforms Ogg Theora, based on the VP3.2 codec, which was released by On2 in 2000. And secondly, there is a possibility that Theora infringes patents owned by MPEG-LA members, which may turn into a large patent lawsuit for companies using this technology in the future (topics on this topic: “ Comparison of libtheora and x264 codecs ,” “ Steve Jobs: going to the patent pool to run into Theora .))

Even if Google, which bought On2 this year, decides to open the source code of its VP8, this does not eliminate the possibility of patent infringement, and it may take a very long time before this coding standard will start shi eye used.