News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Forging an Alliance for Royalty-Free Video. Parent comment

Re:Forging an Alliance for Royalty-Free Video by Animats on Tuesday September 01, 2015 @05:41PM (#10155955)
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

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Forging an Alliance for Royalty-Free Video by dogma1138 on Tuesday September 01, 2015 @05:52PM (#10156031)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]