[riferguson]

Presumably it would be the holders of the putatively infringed patents that would be assembling the "pool". I don't think Apple is in the Video Codec patent-holding business. As a major licensee of H.264, you'd have to presume Apple be in a position to know if someone else was rounding up the usual suspects.

[vetinari]

Apple is not only licensee, but also licensor.

Every time you license H.264 (or something other from MPEG-4 pool), a cut goes to Apple (also to Microsoft and Nokia).

[riferguson]

I stand corrected.

Apple has one patent in the H.264 pool, US 7292636, and one in the MPEG-4 Systems pool, US 6134243. I have no idea if either of these would be relevant to Theora.

For what it's worth, there are hundreds of patents in the total MPEG-LA pool.

[samps]

> For what it's worth, there are hundreds of patents in the total MPEG-LA pool.

Furthermore, it's not clear what Apple would stand to gain by enforcing its two patents that may or may not be relevant to Theora. Maybe I'm wrong, but media patent enforcement doesn't seem to be one of Apple's core businesses (HTC lawsuit notwithstanding). There are plenty of other companies, though, that likely have a vested interest in protecting their much-larger video patent portfolios.

I think it would be wrong to assume at this point that Apple is instigating patent litigation against Theora. Occam's razor would encourage the view that Apple knows the people who want to take down Theora and is rationally fearful of them.

[jcl]

Apple stands to gain more than just licensing fees by threatening any non-H.264 codec. As Steve Jobs points out in his "Thoughts on Flash", Apple has millions of devices in the wild whose hardware is optimized exclusively for H.264. If any other video format gains dominance, the devices will not work nearly as well (cutting the battery life by half just to play an older codec, in his example).

[samps]

It's a good point that Apple's mobile devices are invested in H.264, but do you really think that -- were Theora successful and safe from litigation -- Apple wouldn't put a hypothetical Theora decoder in the iPhone? It doesn't seem rational to me to oppose Theora just because current hardware doesn't support it. Consider, for example, how Apple has largely left FireWire (its own technology) behind in favor of USB. Apple is a very "out with the old" company.

[Terretta]

No, his example referenced a little known fact about H.264, comparing hardware decodable H.264 versus non-hardware-decodable H.264. The iPhone isn't playing some other codec.

H.264 can be encoded, using the same tools, in a way that can, or cannot, be hardware decoded.

[jcl]

I was pretty sure he was referring to VP6-encoded Flash video, not some version of H.264 that is harder to decode. Could you provide more information on non-hardware-decodable versions?

[kierank]

MPEG-4 Systems is not offered any more (since it's effectively dead).

[vetinari]

"Systems" is mp4 container.

Did you mean MPEG-4 Part 2 (Advanced Simple Profile)?

[kierank]

The things which are patented generally apply to parts of the spec that have never been deployed.