Quote:
Originally Posted by Sonist
I sure hope that if Google opens VP8, H.264 will disappear.
H.264 is a Trojan Horse. It is proprietary and if, as expected, the MPEG-LA imposes royalties in 2015, it will kill open source browsers.
If most web video is viewable only in commercial browsers, then DRM and other restrictions will be much, much easier to impose. |
If the MPEG-LA decides that they want a per-video license fee, they are shooting themselves in the foot, and good riddance. I like the format because it is properly standardized, rather than building up something from legos (MKV + OGG/MP3/AAC/AC3 + Theora/H.264/Whatever for example), but if they want to kill their format, I don't need to stick around to support it, and I have a feeling Apple would move to something else if that happened as well (so much of their work is based around H.264, the logistics of collecting royalties would be a PiTA).
That said, MPEG-4 already requires royalty payments. The fact that they haven't been aggressive against the OSS projects that encode/decode MPEG-4 is very strange (x264, XviD, Handbrake, ffmpeg, MPlayer and others).
Right now, the /real/ difference between MPEG-4 now, and MPEG-4 after the change you are talking about affects content providers (private or corporate) that put up video using MPEG-4. It doesn't affect the end user, but it will steer away websites from H.264 in droves.