Firm quietly boosts H.264 streaming license fees from $100,000 up to staggering $4.5 million

Comments

• BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I thought h.264 patents are expired

  Edit: it was patented in 2003, so 20 year period is gone already

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  • olafurp@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Wikipedia covers it nicely:

    Since the first version of the standard was completed in May 2003 (22 years ago) and the most commonly used profile (the High profile) was completed in June 2004[citation needed] (21 years ago), some of the relevant patents are expired by now,[75] while others are still in force in jurisdictions around the world and one of the US patents in the MPEG LA H.264 pool (granted in 2016) lasts at least until November 2030.

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Video_Coding?wprov…

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  • quick_snail@feddit.nl ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    So paying is optional? I don’t get it…

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    • BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Neither do I. Most of h264 is either open domain now or it will be very soon

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• etherphon@piefed.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Really sad how companies went from making money by innovating to making money from being shitty patent trolls.

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  • baguettefish@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    dolby technologies aren’t even the most advanced, they’re just the most marketed, most expensive, most cutthroat in the industry

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    • possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip ⁨17⁩ ⁨seconds⁩ ago

      What are the alternatives

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    • etherphon@piefed.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

      mm, I never really thought about that, they were just always a name in audio ever since cassette tapes for me. It’d be a shame if they had anything to do with what happened to E-mu/Ensoniq and then Creative Labs as they had so many great technologies and ideas. Consumer audio is pretty dull now honestly.

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• pricklypearbear@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Hope this pushes the royalty-free alternatives more. That’s a crazy jump.

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  • VibeSurgeon@piefed.social ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    AV1 already wins handily as a codec, and the only thing keeping it from being adopted more broadly than is currently the case is lack of hardware decoders on older hardware. This problem naturally solves itself as old hardware gets replaced.

    Even then, dav1d is a remarkable piece of software, and software decoding is pretty viable for AV1 thanks to it. Many places have already adopted AV1, and you should expect to keep seeing it get adopted as time goes on.

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    • RedSnt@feddit.dk ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      AV1 has recently gotten involved in a lawsuit by Dolby saying that they’re breaking like 5 of their patent, so there’s some issues there as well.

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    • plz1@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Better hardware encoder support would help, too. It’s insanely inefficient to encode without that dedicated hardware, compared to h264/h265, where dedicated hardware support is there.

      I was hoping Apple would add it when they shipped the M4, and now M5, but nope.

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  • onlinepersona@programming.dev ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Which royalty free alternatives exist?

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    • Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Theora, VP8, VP9, and AV1 are the ones that come to mind.

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  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I still wonder why video is about the only thing for which a restricted format is still the “industry standard”?

    We nowadays take photos in JPEG or WebP format, draw raster images in PNG or WebP format, vector graphics in SVG format, our documents are PDF or OOXML or ODF or HTML, all of which are (at least technically) open standards. Video is the only thing that still mostly runs on formats with restrictive patents.

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• Korkki@lemmy.ml ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  4500% increase

  Absolute financial parasitism. This is why we can’t have nice things. People who own a license of something critical can just sit on their asses decades on end and collect unearned income from other companies who will in turn move to cost to the consumers.

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  • RedSnt@feddit.dk ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Remember when Martin Shkreli was thrown in jail for hiking the price of medicine by 5555%? That was 2017, but when something like this happens in 2026 nobody bats an eye.

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    • ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      No? He was arrested for securities fraud, not for increasing the price of medication.

      That’s why you’re not seeing anyone bat an eye now they didn’t then either.

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    • a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Medicine is not a codec.

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  • Evotech@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Well it’s their developed tech and they see streaming sites raise their prices and rake money.

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• LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  They see the stupid sony lawsuit and want in.

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