Royalty-Free MPEG Video Proposals Announced 108
Posted
by
timothy
from the good-times-ahead-and-clear-sailing dept.
from the good-times-ahead-and-clear-sailing dept.
theweatherelectric writes "Rob Glidden notes on his blog that MPEG has recently 'announced it has received proposals for a royalty-free MPEG standard and has settled on a deliberation process to consider them.' There are two tracks toward royalty-free video currently under consideration by MPEG. The first track is IVC, a new standard 'based on MPEG-1 technology which is believed a safe royalty-free baseline that can be enhanced by additional unencumbered technology described in MPEG-2, JPEG, research publications and innovative technologies which are promised to be subject to royalty-free licenses.' The second proposed track is WebVC, an attempt to get the constrained baseline profile of H.264 licensed under royalty-free terms. Rob Glidden offers an analysis of both proposals. Also of interest is Rob's short history of why royalty-free H.264 failed last time."
Re:Good for Firefox (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd be more concerned about HTML V5, as both apple and MSFT are pushing like mad to lock it behind a paywall with H.264 which as we all know is patented so badly you can pretty much give up on FOSS ever having a free version, not for another 15-20 years at least.
This is why I never understood the FOSS flash hate or why they would run to embrace an obviously hostile to FOSS group like MPEG-LA over Adobe. Sure flash isn't the greatest but have you EVER seen them complain about a distro including flash? Hell they don't even complain about gnash and I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually open flash up. Compare this to MPEG-LA that basically went "Pay your $699 license fee you cock smoking teabagger!" to Firefox and made it QUITE clear you will NOT be shipping H.264 in a browser or OS without cutting a check. of course being proprietary both Apple and MSFT can and do just cut them a check and both want to "fucking kill Google" so they're just fine with H.264.
I just hope the developers here will put their money where their mouths are and refuse to touch HTML V5 until it has a free codec as the standard, be it Theora, be it WebM (which I think is quite nice actually) or be it the royalty free MPEG 1+2 in TFA. The web should be free to all, be you proprietary or FOSS, and ATM HTML V5 is anything but and that is before they add the MPAA DRM on top which i'm sure will never work in FOSS OSes as unlike Apple and MSFT they don't support kernel level DRM..