Hi

just seen this article on the proposed licensing of some aspects of MPEG 4 video technology - would be interested to have Ivan's and other MPEG4 afficiando's thoughts on what it means for the commercial sector and MPEG 4 usage on the web

http://www.internetnews.com/infra/print/0,..._983771,00.html

regards

Balderaptor

I must say here that proposed MPEG-LA licensing terms are still not final, and probably will change in months to come, before the official launch of the MPEG-4 visual licensing agreement!

This level of confindentiality is very interesting - for example, couple of days after MPEG-LA announced licensing plans, my company licensed MPEG-4 video codec to one distance-learning company, and the biggest issue was this "per-view" fee, VP of sales of that company made some phone calls, with Larry Horn from MPEG-LA, and decided to go with MPEG-4 - probably because of one year grace period that will be allowed to MPEG-4 visual licensees.

For interested people, there is an ongoing hot debate on M4IF "discuss" mailing list, which is open to public - there are very important opinions of key-people, like Yuval Fischer from Envivio. I must say that most of them are against this way of licensing, and I sincerely hope MPEG-LA will withdraw it from the final agreement. The fact that Apple (one of the MPEG-4 patent holders) is against this way of licensing is very encouraging - their opinion certainly counts ;-)

I've also heard rumours that some companies inside the patent pool wish to slow-down or totally destroy MPEG-4 adoption with this ridiculous licensing plan, because they have their own technologies (guess who

Also, MPEG-4 Audio patent group (M4Audio-LC) is also working towards joint licensing for MPEG-4 audio - but from what I hear there are some problems inside the group which will postpone the final agreement.

Well, sincerly i have lost my believes around commercial market at the time of MP3 issues.
Even the DivX guys seems not so good.
Amazing stupidity around MicroSoft' "Shared Source" (aka SS:D).

As for Linux versus Windows (XP ??) the OpenSource community has demostrate that there's ONLY a way.
Apple, IBM and many others (uh, please read&sign thoose petitions http://www.petitiononline.com/OS24FREE/ - http://www.petitiononline.com/beosos/) have understood and are joining themself.

I think is the time to join forces against the monopoly.
"Bundestux Campaign" initiatives should be more "world wide"

Well, i also think that who create something has the right to be paid, so i suggest to all developers (that belives in BSD:D) to move to XviD then to Tarkin.

This is the ONLY way 'cause is THE democratic way.

Majors wanna be more conservative...


:confused:

On the Apple issue, I've heard that they're going to hold out for better license terms because they're convinced that the current license terms will effectively destroy MPEG-4, as Ivan indicated, and Apple's invested too much money in it already to allow that to happen. In particular, they're willing to allow the patent-holders to charge license fees for encoders (they said they themselves were willing to pay a $2 million proposed fee for licensing patents), but they're not willing to allow patent-holders to charge broadcasters royalties for use of MPEG-4 streaming, because they believe that if they do that, nobody will use MPEG-4 for streaming, which makes Apple's products (which will apparently be focused at the streaming market) pretty useless. So whether for good or bad reasons, at least one big company is on "our" side. =P

about beos, i dont even think it will happen. palm, inc. now owns it, and the have said they will not open source it.

Regarding Xvid and DivX -

both of them are implementations of the MPEG-4 Visual, Simple Profile - MPEG standards are open for implementation (otherwise, only the companies that invented them would be able to implement them) - but they are not free - because companies behind them claim intellectual property rights.

Claiming IPR over audio/video codecs is not a new thing, and suddenly after MP3 has gained tremendous popularity, all companies realized that they can earn $$$ by claiming IPRs that are related to transform coding.

Take a look at MPEG-2 AAC, for example - core patents were granted in 1992 (which means that they are usually sumbitted in 1990) - In that time, nobody really had taken these IPRs serously, because the market penentration was small - but when MP3 had become de-facto standard, these companies started to be very serious in their IPR protection - new business models were invented, well-known licensing companies were appointed to be in charge for patent licensing, etc...

Same goes for MPEG-4 - all companies in patent pool know that future digital streaming standard will be a huge revenue generator - and, they smelled a possibility for more $$$ by inventing a new business model, called "per view" - I sincerely hope that this model won't be successful for the digital codecs market because if it becomes successfull, they will probably invent something even more ridicululous..

As someone on M4IF mailing lists pointed out - what if Intel decides to charge "per use" fee for their CPUs, well - there is a significant amount of IPR involved in one Pentium IV, right? So - it would be OK if they charge hourly for the usage of their CPU...

Or, companies that sell TFT LCD flat panels - they also invested a lot in R&D - so it would be cool if they charge per one hour of viewing...

I said: "...move to XviD then to Tarkin."

Well, sincerly i can't understand why Apple is loosing his time around MPEG-4. I think they can join the Tarkin develop and smash out all thoose motherf***ers (DivX, Real, MS, ON2....)

Am i wrong ??

Because Apple is company, and they are working for money

There is nothing wrong in that

I agree.

And Darwin ???