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by Hupo 4894 days ago
H.264 isn't exactly "closed" per se - the standard itself is freely available[1], which is why we have great free and open source encoders and decoders for it. What you mean by "closed" is most likely just "patent-encumbered", which it most certainly is and which affects anyone wanting to use it commercially (at the moment you can use it freely for non-commercial purposes on the internet, but this may or may not change in the future).

[1] http://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-H.264-201201-I/en
1 comments
shmerl 4894 days ago
By closed I mean not available for free use and distribution, for example in open source projects which can't pay any royalties. May be saying free format would sound more clear, since you are right, closed is a bit ambiguous, as it can also mean a format without published specification which needs to be reverse engineered to be used.

Also, I don't think that H.264 forbids only commercial use. Can you freely distribute their decoders and encoders? What about putting them in hardware for non commercial use?

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zanny 4894 days ago
The fine print of H264 says as a consumer you can implement the codec without paying a license fee for non commercial personal use. That does, however, mean all the free implementations like in FFMPEG are liable because since they are open sourced they are not restricted to consumer use.
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taligent 4894 days ago
Open source projects can't pay royalties. But people who use them can be forced to.

The idea that VP8/VP9 will gain traction and remain royalty free is laughable.

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nitrogen 4894 days ago
You keep bashing anything not h.26x in multiple threads. MPEG-LA threatened to assemble an anti-VP8 patent pool ages ago, and that has yet to materialize. Show us the goods, and give a really darn good reason why the ideals behind wanting a royalty-free codec don't matter.
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shmerl 4894 days ago
> Open source projects can't pay royalties. But people who use them can be forced to.

That's right, and that's the reason to avoid any closed codecs.

> The idea that VP8/VP9 will gain traction and remain royalty free is laughable.

What's laughable? VP8 remains royalty free. VP9 will as well. In practice you can never guarantee that some submarine patent troll won't appear tomorrow to threaten you. But the same perfectly applies to H.264/H.265 so your argument is irrelevant, since such threat applies to virtually anything, but it doesn't mean one should stop innovating because of it.

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