Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 20th May 2010 22:28 UTC
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RE[4]: Tried it out...
by dragos.pop on Fri 21st May 2010 14:31
in reply to "RE[3]: Tried it out..."
RE[5]: Tried it out...
by B. Janssen on Sat 22nd May 2010 12:54
in reply to "RE[4]: Tried it out..."
Currently the MPEG-LA is not asking for license fees from consumers, i. e. those who only decode h264 content. They also don't want money from consumers who encode content for personal use, whether the soft- or hardware manufacturer (of the means used) paid his license fees or not.
They, however, want money from those who implement their codec, e. g. software developers, and (some types of) distributors. By extension this means they want money from Adobe and VLC or Hulu.com but not from me, watching YouTube.
Of course the submarine clause that this might change by 2015 is still a good reason to not touch h264 with a 10 feet pole.
Edited 2010-05-22 12:55 UTC




Member since:
2007-02-17
Having said that, "outlier" projects such as this one often include very useful pieces.
Of particular interest here is "hardware accelerated rendering using OpenGL Shaders (GLSL)".
My Linux system, (and likewise millions of other Linux systems in use today), happens to include a GPU, and the open source driver I use, which is xf86-video-ati, happens to support GLSL.
Now, having paid for a video card and its GPU, I have an implied license to use whatever functions are embedded on the video card. One of the functions is H.264 decoder. So I do have a paid-for license to use H.264 decoding on my Linux system.
So this bit of code from the Lightspark project may actually be of use. It may enable millions of Linux systems to legally play h.264 video with hardware acceleration.