Re:The H264 time bomb will kill us all in 2015, run
by ZeroGravitas on Wednesday March 21, 2012 @06:10AM
(#3733732)
So, ignoring the X/H thing, there's more fundamental misconceptions here:
1. The licensing won't change in 2015. Free use was set to expire (and that was a very bad thing) but pressure from Mozilla, Google etc. made them commit to keep it free for video provided for free for as long as the patents last to prevent WebM gaining traction.
2. The yearly cap goes up every (other) year by about 5% p.a. so it's already higher than the $5 million figure commonly given. This rise is however limited to about 5% p.a. so that won't change radically in the future either.
3. Using x264 today exposes you to just as much risk of being sued as it will after 2015 if you don't acquire the appropriate patent license (which you can do, hence it is used by big corps like Youtube)
4. Legally the end-user is already liable if the full delivery chain isn't licensed correctly (and again no-change afetr 2015). It would however be quite stupid to sue you unless you had more money than the rest of the chain and you were somehow making millions from your "end-usage".
5. You can create "DRM" roughly as strong as Flash has in HTML5. It'll just be an inconvenience though, not airtight, as the Flash stuff is. The bigger issue (which you'd think a free software magazine would pick up on) is that in order to chase this pipe dream they would happily sideline open source software.
6. There's no real reason you can't show adverts in HTML5 videos either. And I believe ad-blockers already work for Youtube adverts. So adverts and HTML5 can and will work together (it is after-all heavily pushed by Google) in video or any other web tech. Flash is probably just more advanced in this right now, just as it is for most other aspects of video display.
I'd post some corrections to the article, but it appears it only accepts Facebook logins. I guess this isn't an official FSF communication channel then.
1. The licensing won't change in 2015. Free use was set to expire (and that was a very bad thing) but pressure from Mozilla, Google etc. made them commit to keep it free for video provided for free for as long as the patents last to prevent WebM gaining traction.
2. The yearly cap goes up every (other) year by about 5% p.a. so it's already higher than the $5 million figure commonly given. This rise is however limited to about 5% p.a. so that won't change radically in the future either.
3. Using x264 today exposes you to just as much risk of being sued as it will after 2015 if you don't acquire the appropriate patent license (which you can do, hence it is used by big corps like Youtube)
4. Legally the end-user is already liable if the full delivery chain isn't licensed correctly (and again no-change afetr 2015). It would however be quite stupid to sue you unless you had more money than the rest of the chain and you were somehow making millions from your "end-usage".
5. You can create "DRM" roughly as strong as Flash has in HTML5. It'll just be an inconvenience though, not airtight, as the Flash stuff is. The bigger issue (which you'd think a free software magazine would pick up on) is that in order to chase this pipe dream they would happily sideline open source software.
6. There's no real reason you can't show adverts in HTML5 videos either. And I believe ad-blockers already work for Youtube adverts. So adverts and HTML5 can and will work together (it is after-all heavily pushed by Google) in video or any other web tech. Flash is probably just more advanced in this right now, just as it is for most other aspects of video display.
I'd post some corrections to the article, but it appears it only accepts Facebook logins. I guess this isn't an official FSF communication channel then.