This came up a few weeks ago.[1] MPEG-LA's patent portfolio isn't that strong any more. MPEG-LA has a long list of patents, but most of them have expired. The key patents on video compression involved motion estimation, and those expired this year. MPEG-LA got their twenty years of patent protection, and it's over.

The remaining patents are mostly on things you don't need for Internet video. US #6,181,712, has to do with multiplexing two unrelated video streams into one. Broadcasters and cable systems do this, but Internet video does not. US #6,160,849 only applies to compression of interlaced video, which nobody uses on line. US #7,627,041 is about dealing with missing header data due to transmission noise. US #5,878,080 is about backwards-compatible multichannel (>2 channels) audio, also seldom used on-line. US #6,185,539 is for video with overcompressed extra-low-quality audio. So is US #6,009,399.

As I pointed out last time, it's time for a hard look at this patent situation. You can probably do a patent-free MPEG-4 video decoder and encoder for Internet video now. You might have to leave out some newer features nobody uses.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10042469 [2] http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/MPEG_patent_lists

It seems that MPEG-1 Layer 3 patents are mostly expired, the core patents for MPEG-2 will expire in 2016-2018, but MPEG-4 MPEGLA patents are safe till 2025-2027. Also if the patents expire the organizations loses it's ability to collect royalties for the codec it self from what i understand so if that would've been the case there's little need to create a new codec but MPEG4/AVC patent protection seem to remain quite strong for about another decade.

The MPEG4 licensing scheme is kinda confusing to me it seems that several organizations collect royalties individually even tho it states that MPEGLA collects them in the US, AT&T seems to do so too for their share of the patents.

That's the great thing about Daala, they are exploring alternate ways to build a video codec.I'm really hopeful that one day it will be as successful as Opus.

There was a great talk about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmho4gcRvQ4

Opus is tricky, it's royalty free but it's not a "free (as in free software)" standard, it's based on Patents held by the likes of Broadcom and MSFT which make them available without royalties.

This is what I've mentioned earlier there are quite a few royalty free but they are still based on held patents which are offered without royalties.

That said honestly I'm not sure how big royalties are HDMI has quite steep royalties DisplayPort doesn't and with pretty much all devices that come with a single/mono-cultured display interface will use HDMI rather than DisplayPort.

Do royalty free patents stop something from being free software? That would be surprising.

Opus' patents have patent retaliation clauses. It would be funny if those were incompatible with the GPL, because the GPL is essentially a "copyright retaliation" license.

We ran the Opus license terms by the FSF before publishing them, and they confirmed that the terms were compatible with the GPL (v3 or otherwise).

Wasn't there an issue with a couple of companies filing IPR's with royalties that cover parts of Opus?

Please see the "Other disclosures" section on https://www.opus-codec.org/license/

You may also be interested in https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/02/defending-opus/ (warning: contains discussion of specific, unexpired patents).

> I'm really hopeful that one day it will be as successful as Opus.

I assume you mean more successful.

I have never seen or even heard of an Opus file in the wild.

Have you ever used:

- Skype

- Google Hangouts

- Youtube on Chrome

- Mumble

- Teamspeak

- the Playstation 4

- most speech recognition APIs

If so, then you've used Opus.

I think it is quite popular for VoIP and it is also part of WebRTC and hence supported by Chrome and Firefox

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_(audio_format)#Software

As others have mentioned, it's heavily in use in streaming. I don't know that it offers enough of an advantage over vorbis as a file-format to overcome the inertia of devices that support vorbis; we'll see in a few years.

Perhaps here success is a measurement of producing a patent free solution that's technically competitive (performance, compression, other metrics), rather than popular and widely adopted.