It’s OK for a professional to use the software to make a living. It’s not OK for big corporations without an explicit license agreement.

The article includes comments from Dan Homiller, a patent attorney with intellectual property firm Coats and Bennett. “The purpose of the provision in the MPEG LA license is to ensure that the license doesn’t cover commercial distribution of H.264-encoded video,” Homiller said. “It would be nice if there were a ‘gentler’ way to convey this, but it might be challenging to do so without opening up some loopholes that the licensers would regret.”

There are different licenses for different purposes with H.264. Also MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 are all licensed under the same terms.

If your publishing for the web vs publishing for TV vs publishing for sale in retail… these are all have their different licenses. And end users need all their own licenses.

You cannot use the patent license provided with Final Cut Pro because the developers of Final Cut Pro did not want to pay your broadcast license.

*DUH*.

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And as far as the ‘Patent FUD’ levelled at Theora:

Your just as likely to violate a patent using H.264 as you use Theora. Popularity is NOT a defence. ‘Doctrine of Laches’ is not going to give you a advantage…

Theora is OLDER then H.264 by 3-4 years and H.264 has had various revisions/new profiles developed with the latest wide-spread one released in 2007. Theora may not be the most popular codec out there, but it’s (and VP3: which it is based) has been widely distributed and used for almost a decade now.

When you pay licensing fees to MPEG-LA you only paying money to protect yourself against the patent holders that have contributed their patents to the MPEG-LA patent pool.

_THAT_IS_IT_.

Your just as 100% liable for any unknown patents if your using H.264 as if your using Theora.

In fact, if you think about it, what is the likelihood of a unkown patent affecting Theora and NOT affecting H.264?

Imagine somebody going to court and telling a judge:

“Oh I can’t sue those billion-dollar companies using H.264 for violations because it’s used in the iPhone and, gosh darn, I am just too late. All that huge amount of money they have is just something I’ll have to give up on. But all these Theora users that are not engaged in any sort of commercial exploitation of their users… Those are the guys I want to sue!!”

I am sure that going after Youtube.com, Google, MPEG-LA, and Apple would not be worth it for these folks and going after Xiph for the $10K they have saved up for website stuff and conventions is just going to be such a more jucy target.

Avoiding the MPEG-LA patents are relative easy for Theora folks because MPEG-LA has to publish everything publicly in detail about their patents. It’s the _unknown_ patents that are the threat and that threat is just as real for H.264.

Possibly more because it’s a younger, more advanced codec. And the amount of software patents out there have grown exponentionally since the original VP3 stuff was open sourced.

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The advantage of Theora will always remain:

You can use that encoding for whatever you want whenever you want and however you want. You can open source it, you can close source it. You can include it in your product. You can use it to publish your stuff.

And _REMEMBER_… The difference between H.264 and Theora is that H.264 can compress videos further and retain the same quality. You can save money on disk space and bandwidth by using H.264, but Theora is capable of same quality and you pay the price of larger file sizes and fatter streams.

So if your somebody like Facebook and the idea of paying X hundreds of thousands of dollars on a license for H.264 will easily be offset by the cost of bandwidth…. then the chances of Theora displacing H.264 is about nill.

But if you want to do something like freely distribute and use software for streaming TV from your house to your laptop at work or creating your own websites that include streaming videos then Theora is going to be the way you want to go if you want to remain legal.

Also do not forget that Theora keeps H.264 prices low. I seriously doubt that the MPEG-LA folks would have extended their temporary low-prices a few more years if Theora was not around.

It is the _stated_goal_ that the current prices are there to get people using it widely and later on they will start to rise the prices based on what they perceive as a the value of H.264 to the companies and users that will be locked into using it.

And remember… Don’t beleive anything Apple has to say on the subject. They own patents on AAC and H.264 and the more people that depend on those technologies the more money they have to make from it.

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And, of course, the MPEG-LA tolerate open source software like x264.

x264 and ffmpeg folks produce _EXCELLENT_ top-notch software. Much better then the majority of proprietary encoders/decoders out there. We are completely fortunate that they exist.

But the MPEG-LA folks will still sue you if you don’t pay for the patent license if you use them commercially. If your too small for them to give a shit then you’ll probably wont’ get targetted.

Google, for example, uses parts of ffmpeg bundled with their Chrome browser. They pay the patent fees for using it, too.

Also, Theora may have patent liabilities. Just because no one has sued in the last 6 years of Theora’s obscurity doesn’t mean that someone can’t, or won’t. And, Theora is devastatingly lacking in quality and speed compared to H.264.

http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?cat=54

The license agreement you are reading largely has to do with how APPLE has licensed H.264 from MPEG LA. That licensing is for those who implement codecs. Apple’s license does not cover the end user’s use of the product (that’s to say, just because Apple makes Final Cut does not mean that NBC can use H.264 for free because they used Final Cut).

The AVC licensing terms are spelled out here:

http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf

Not this part for any Internet video you stream:

“In the case of Internet broadcast (AVC video that is delivered via the Worldwide Internet to an end user for which the End User does not pay remuneration for the right to receive or view, i.e., neither title-by-title nor subscription), there will be no royalty during the first term of the License (ending December 31, 2010), and after the first term the royalty shall be no more than the economic equivalent of royalties payable during the same time for free television.”

You may have missed it in all “The Sky is Falling” diatribe, but this was recently extended until 2015 or thereabouts. Thus, there are no fees for encoding Internet content for the next 5 years.

Still, the desire to paint H.264 and its licensing as a bogey man in order to push the Theora agenda is something you can try. If the codec weren’t crap, and if any devices on earth outside of a computer could actually PLAY the content, it might be more interesting. As is, H.264 already has a colossal lead and the consumer is expecting H.264 as that’s all that works on mobile devices.

Listen, it’s proprietary. That’s fine, so long as they label it as such. But this Flash vs h264 being some soft of Closed vs Open is complete bunk. It’s proprietary vs proprietary. It’s Adobe vs Apple. And quite frankly, once this becomes evident, Apple’s going to get slapped with anti-competitive practices for not allowing Flash on their iPhone and iPad. Adobe says they have it all ready to install, but Apple is blocking it to force companies to use their encoder, or face being empty blue boxed on Apple devices.

So, please, everyone, save the sanctimonious “h264 is open, down with proprietary flv” crap for Mac Fanboy conventions.

Then why does Facebook use x264?