Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 16th May 2010 12:52 UTC, submitted by mrsteveman1
Mozilla, sticking to its ideals of the open web, decided long ago that support for the patent-encumbered H264 codec would not be included in any of its products. Not only is H264 wholly incompatible with the open web and Free software, it is also incredibly expensive. Mozilla could use one of the open source implementations, but those are not licensed, and the MPEG-LA has been quite clear in that it will sue those who encode or decode H264 content without a license. Software patents, however, are only valid in some parts of the world, so an enterprising developer has started a project that was sure to come eventually: Firefox builds with H264 support.
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RE[7]: Why not just use built in decoders?
by saynte on Tue 18th May 2010 16:13
in reply to "RE[6]: Why not just use built in decoders?"
Member since:2007-12-10
For a counter example of why Acceleration != Full-Implementation see 3D accelerators. They contain neither OpenGL or DirectX, but rather functions which can accelerate their common operations.
It is difficult to say from the outside whether a particular card supports full decompression of a codec, however for ATI I believe this is the case.
XvMC doesn't support full decoding of h264 as far as I know, only selected parts of the pipeline. I can't say whether this is a fundamental incompatibility, or just not implemented yet. Some proprietary implementations , like VDPAU from NVidia (which works quite well for me), support the full pipeline, I believe.
The layers you describe exist in theory but probably aren't actually being called/used in the way you describe. Firstly XvMC likely calls the xorg driver, secondly, I think the XvMC/xorg-driver layers do not support h264. I'm not sure what that means for licensing...
RE[8]: Why not just use built in decoders?
by lemur2 on Tue 18th May 2010 23:31
in reply to "RE[7]: Why not just use built in decoders?"
Member since:2007-02-17
For a counter example of why Acceleration != Full-Implementation see 3D accelerators. They contain neither OpenGL or DirectX, but rather functions which can accelerate their common operations.
I think you might find that there are a great number of patents involved in h.264, but all of them relate only to one or other of the low-level functions. (Here, I use the classic meaning of "function", which is a mathematical operation which takes one or more parameters as inputs, and produces one or mor values as output. Which, BTW, is why software patents are silly in the first place, because mathematics should not be patentable subject matter). Anyway, there is no patent which covers h.264 "overall".
I'm not sure what that means for licensing...
The card is advertised (by ATI) as including the following functionality within the hardware.
http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/ati-radeon-hd-4000/...
This is a long list.
When I buy the card, I get an implied license to use all of those functions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_license
Implied licenses often arise where the licensee has purchased a physical embodiment of some intellectual property belonging to the licensor
There is no doubt at all that when I purchased my ATI HD4350 video card, I have purchased a physical embodiment of all of the functions listed in the specifications as linked above.
Within the list it includes specifically hardware decoding of h.264. I have a full and reasonable expectation, when I bought my ATI HD4350 card, that included within that purchase was a license to use the h.264 decoder which is described as being included within it.
Any lawyer representing MPEG LA is going to have a very, very difficult task trying to claim that I must pay again for a licenase for the same functions in my Linux OS, because of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_doctrine
Under the exhaustion doctrine, doctrine of exhaustion, or first sale doctrine, the first unrestricted sale of a patented item exhausts the patentee's control over that particular item.
Having been effectively sold one license for H.264 decoding, I don't need to buy any other. To imply anything else would be misrepresentation at least, or outright fraud even.
Now, the really, really interesting thing is this: why exactly are people like you so keen to try to imply that this is not the case?
Hmmmmm?
Edited 2010-05-18 23:35 UTC
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/25/13 0:45 UTC
"So in summary... Google has pulled the plug on support on a protocol they've helped popularize, after years of promising interoperability, for reasons that are dubious at best, and in a way that leaves people who don't jump to the new Hangouts app unable to talk to their contacts without any feedback that their IMs aren't getting through... And they've done that with no warning to anyone. I imagine there's a bunch of people out there wondering where some of their buddies have gone, or why their messages aren't getting responses, because this isn't documented anywhere." Google really messed this up. Such a dick move.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/24/13 23:59 UTC
The Tizen Greek Community has some screenshots of a very recent build of Tizen running on a Samsung GT-i8800. It looks wholly unremarkable.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/24/13 22:33 UTC
Joint statement to The Next Web from Microsoft and Google: "Microsoft and YouTube are working together to update the new YouTube for Windows Phone app to enable compliance with YouTube's API terms of service, including enabling ads, in the coming weeks. Microsoft will replace the existing YouTube app in Windows Phone Store with the previous version during this time." Good to know these children stopped acting like little pricks. Can we have full Google support in Windows 8 now, please?
Linked by Howard Fosdick on 05/24/13 21:41 UTC
Yahoo is acquiring Tumblr, the microblogging and social networking website, for $1.1 billion USD. Tumblr offers little revenue but lots of eyeballs if Yahoo can monetarize them. Now Yahoo is bidding for Hulu, the streaming video service. After years of ineffective responses while Google, Facebook, and others took large chunks of the online advertising market, Yahoo is fighting back. Can Yahoo reignite the momentum it had at the turn of the century? What do you think?
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/24/13 14:44 UTC
"Sources have described iOS 7 as 'black, white, and flat all over'. This refers to the dropping of heavy textures and the addition of several new black and white user interface elements." I couldn't be happier.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/23/13 23:22 UTC
"Ilja van Sprundel, a security researcher with IOActive, has discovered a large number of issues in the way various X client libraries handle the responses they receive from servers, and has worked with X.Org's security team to analyze, confirm, and fix these issues."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/23/13 22:04 UTC
"Google is facing a new antitrust probe by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission into whether the company is using its leadership in the online display-advertising market to illegally curb competition, people familiar with the matter said." Sucks to be Google today, apparently.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/23/13 22:01 UTC
"In the midst of the major press blitz surrounding its annual I/O Conference, Google dropped some unfortunate news about its instant messaging plans. In several places around the web, the company is replacing the existing 'Talk' platform with a new one called 'Hangouts' that sharply diminishes support for the open messaging protocol known as XMPP (or sometimes informally Jabber), and also removes the option to disable the archiving of all chat communications. These changes represent a switch from open protocols to proprietary ones, and a clear step backward for many users." That's why I always say: only suckers trust companies.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/23/13 17:52 UTC
"The wave of departures is a sign of internal struggle, but amidst all the bad news, there is a glimmer of hope. According to an anonymous HTC executive cited by WSJ, the crucial HTC One is selling 'pretty good so far'. The executive revealed that HTC sold about five million One units since launch, a performance that is deemed encouraging. However, sales have been limited by the persisting supply issues that still plague the production of the HTC One." Finally some good news for HTC. Five million units amidst supply constraints is very impressive.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/22/13 22:23 UTC
"Sony gave the PS4 50% more raw shader performance, plain and simple (768 SPs @ 800MHz vs. 1152 SPs & 800MHz). Unlike last generation, you don't need to be some sort of Jedi to extract the PS4's potential here. The Xbox One and PS4 architectures are quite similar, Sony just has more hardware under the hood. Weâll have to wait and see how this hardware delta gets exposed in games over time, but the gap is definitely there. The funny thing about game consoles is that itâs usually the lowest common denominator that determines the bulk of the experience across all platforms. On the plus side, the Xbox One should enjoy better power/thermal characteristics compared to the PlayStation 4. Even compared to the Xbox 360 we should see improvement in many use cases thanks to modern power management techniques." AnandTech does its usual in-depth thing.More News »
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2007-02-17
Here are the specs for my video card:
http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/ati-radeon-hd-4000/...
ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform
2nd generation Unified Video Decoder (UVD 2)
Enabling hardware decode acceleration of H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2
There is also quite a long list of other functions related to hardware video acceleration, although these are not specific to h.624 I would think.
Does Hardware Accelerated Decoding (or "hardware decode acceleration") === Hardware Decoding? I know that the terms are often used synonymously, but are they the same thing. Surely your graphics card still requires some software which understands h.264, to tell the GPU what to do. "
The graphics card functions are accessed via an Application Programming Interface ... aka an API.
Software which calls that API would be termed a "driver".
Video player software which could play H.264 videos would call the driver, which in turn would use the video card API to pass on the video data to the video card to be decoded by the card's decoder functions (collectively known as UVD).
The decoder functions are on the video card. They are not executed by any of the higher layers of software in this stack.
My Linux system could have a player, say Firefox, or VLC, or SMPlayer, which would call the driver, xf86-video-ati, which in turn would call the card's hardware video acceleration API, XvMC, which would then access the actual decoder embedded on the card. None of the software layers would actually have a H.264 encoder themselves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XvMC
See? The video decoding is offloaded to the GPU video-hardware.
Therefore, the higher layers of software do not violate any H.264 patent.
Therefore, since I have purchased the video card, I have an implied license to use the patented decoder functions embedded within the video card, and I do not require any further license to use the rest of the stack (the higher layers), since these are not patented. Therefore, I can use all of this on my Linux system perfectly legally, since I have paid for the video card.
Edited 2010-05-18 14:45 UTC