H.264 standard and licensing issues (and a little about Ogg Theora)

Not so long ago, an article written by a copyright law specialist appeared on the Engadget website, explaining in detail some issues regarding the H.264 standard license. It is quite voluminous, therefore I will cite here only a few moments that interested me personally, moments, in free presentation in the form of questions and answers.

What is this MPEG-LA, which is responsible for licensing this technology?
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This is not one independent organization, but an association of dozens of patent holder companies, 26 of which control the rights to the H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC standard. Among them: Apple, Microsoft, Panasonic, Sony, Dolby, Thomson, and Toshiba. They all have different “weight” in the organization - for example, if Apple has only one patent from the common pool, Microsoft has 75 of them. It is worth noting that all these companies not only receive license fees, but also pay them themselves. Moreover, according to Microsoft, the company pays MPEG-LA about two times more than it gets for a part of its rights to H.264.

What happens to the H.264 license from January 1, 2016?

As already written on Habré,

MPEG LA extended the free license for the H.264 codec until 2016. This refers to a license for “Internet video broadcasting, which is free for end users”, that is, non-commercial video and projects such as YouTube, well, and ordinary webmasters can breathe easy: no one will disturb them for the next six years.

The introduction of fees for using H.264 is possible, but it is worth remembering that this will not be the sole decision of MPEG-LA, but an agreement between all the companies represented in it. And according to the same Microsoft, the company "is fully set up to support the decision to extend the license" in the future.

Whether there will be any changes in relation to this license in 5 years, we will find out at the end of this year.

Who should pay for a H.264 license?

In fact, MPEG-LA has two licenses: one is for codec developers (who create and sell programs that encode and decode H.264 videos), and the second for content providers (who distribute this video). At the same time, the price scale for some and for others may differ by several orders: from zero to $ 5 million ( Summary of AVC / H.264 License Terms , PDF).

Currently, 817 organizations are listed on the MPEG-LA website that are licensed to use H.264.

In response to a direct question from Engadget to MPEG-LA about whether a license is required to use H.264 cameras for commercial video shooting, the answer was received: no. The same negative answer was given to the question of whether end users who watch H.264 videos ever have to pay or receive a license for this standard.

Why not switch to the ubiquitous use of the free Ogg Theora?

First, as many people claim, H.264 is superior in quality to Ogg Theora, based on the VP3.2 codec, which was released by On2 in 2000. And secondly, there is a possibility that Theora infringes the patents owned by MPEG-LA members, which in the future could turn into a major patent lawsuit for companies using this technology (topics on this topic: " Comparison of libtheora codecs and x264 ", " Steve Jobs: going to the patent pool to overtake Theora ”)

Even if Google, who bought On2 this year, decides to open the source code of its VP8, this does not eliminate the possibility of patent infringement, and it may take a very long time before this coding standard will be widely used.