Streaming Learning Center

> If you post such video on your website, you're violating mpeg4 patents and have to pay mpeg4 licensing fee (up to $5 million/year).

No. There is a (in my opinion) fairly permissive "free" tier[1]. Posting a h264 encoded video on your website does not immediately mean you need to pay royalties.

> That basically puts mpeg4 out of reach for 99.9% content creators that cannot afford even talking to mpeg4 consortium about the license.

I think that's a bit of hyperbole.

It's not cheap, but the MPEG-LA don't charge you for talking to them. If you submit a valid request for a license based on your units[2], then they will provide you with one. In fact, you don't need to pay fees if your paid-for content is less than 12 minutes long[2], and you're looking at $5000/year + $2500 per encoder for a 500k - 999k audience.

As always comes up in the discussions of AVC/h264 vs WebM/Theora/VP8-9: there's no guarantee that use of the latter solutions provides protection from patent litigation. AVC/h264 isn't immune either, but at least you have an idea and (so far) there doesn't appear to have been any major trolls chasing h264 content distributors. WebM/VP8/etc are untested here; not just because of their youth but also because there are few (if any?) big deployments outside of YouTube (and even then).

[1]: http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/mpeg-la-h264-royalty-policy-for-free-internet-video---free.html
[2]:…

Here's a comment about that comparison from an x264 dev:

"We talked about that on IRC, both with x264 and Theora people: all considered it one of the worst articles they had ever seen.

They screwed up aspect ratio, luma levels, BT.601 vs BT.709, and so many other things in their comparison that you might as well throw the entire thing out. Plus they used an incredibly bad H.264 encoder. It’s practically a checklist of how to be completely incompetent idiots."

http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=292#comment-2768

You couldn't have picked a worse test, out of the many that have been done over the last year or so.

The fundamental mistake he's made (though there's a whole catalog of them) is that the bitrate for Theora is constant, while the H.264 is variable so H.264 saves up bits from the easy parts for the hard parts while Theora is set up as if it was live streaming and so it just uses the same bandwidth for both the easy and hard bits.

The original article that the two clips are from is here, you can see responses from Xiph and others pointing out what he's doing wrong, though it reads strangely as he had to rewrite it twice due to feedback before he gave up:

http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/ogg-vs-h264---round-one.html

So, then can you enlighten us a bite more? Personally i have read pretty much every kind of "myth" about mpeg licensing.
One blog post i remember was "according to their terms you (theoretically) would have to pay when a friend sends a video with copyrighted material to you" which more or less sounds like "wherever there is mpeg video they have the right to demand fees" (because even your holiday movie may contain a copyrighted soundtrack).

According to http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/h264-royalties-what-you-need-to-know.html there are "royalties for pay-per-view or subscription video". And this is just what is happening in the internet all over the place.
Firefox can't even know if you look a "free" broadcast or just paid for an online stream, so they just have to pay to support this codec?

And in the end, it's not at last the uncertainty about the codec. MPEG-LA could just have said "Alright guys, browsers are free of charge, go ahead with HTML5, we'd like to see our codec in HTML5". Afaik, they didn't. Because there probably is quite a good amount of money to be earned from fees.

Screw that H.264 stuff, support theora or dirac and problems are solved.

The problem with these write-ups about how bad H.264 is (or will be in 2011) is that it will not reach the right people in time; the masses. The people who clicked through to an article with H.264 in the title already know about the ins and outs.

The companies that implement and support H.264 also know all about the license, and they have most likely gotten some pretty sweet deals for getting this thing as widely deployed as possible.

What needs to be done is to get the message through so that the masses realize that MPEG LA will come after _you_ with their pitchforks and torches in less than a year from now. Worse yet, we do not even know how the license will look.

But maybe scaring people is not the key here. The question remains then: How do we get that message through to the big masses? Make alternatives look "cool"? Next generation video?

I know, I know. I'm not saying anything new...

A (6 month old) interesting link: http://streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/h264-royalties-what-you-need-to-know.html

Hi,

Completely agree with you that Mom & Pop shops still rely in technology. They still arent conversant with Dropbox or Google Docs as much as we think they are. In any case they wont be the early adopters of such technologies.

On data
1. on dev stats-about 52K independant devs out there hacking on iOS and Android. Not sure if there organizations out there that have 52K dedicated devs building mobile apps.

2. on WebGL stats-51% of browswers support it currently.
http://codeflow.org/entries/2012/apr/25/webgl-statistics-and-the-state-of-webgl-html5/
HTML 5 seems to be around 58% (Slightly dated data)
http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/stat-of-the-week-html5-desktop-market-share-at-581-max.html

3. On Digital natives-
http://www.johnsoncontrols.com/content/us/en/products/building_efficiency/gws/gwi/projects_workplace_innovation/digital-natives.html
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Older-adults-and-internet-use/Main-Report/Internet-adoption.aspx