A major milestone for the x264 project – and for Free software in general. “Thanks to tireless work by Kieran Kunyha, Alex Giladi, Lamont Alston, and the Doom9 crowd, x264 can now produce Blu-ray-compliant video. Extra special thanks to The Criterion Collection for sponsoring the final compliance test to confirm x264’s Blu-ray compliance. With x264’s powerful compression, as demonstrated by the incredibly popular BD-Rebuilder Blu-ray backup software, it’s quite possible to author Blu-ray disks on DVD9s (dual-layer DVDs) or even DVD5s (single-layer DVDs) with a reasonable level of quality. With a free software encoder and less need for an expensive Blu-ray burner, we are one step closer to putting HD optical media creation in the hands of the everyday user.”
Wow, that’s huge.
I’ve never seen a Blu-ray disc or watched a movie on that physical support, I still have my 1990 30cm TV and VCR, but this I welcome this as good news. Another stone in the free software pond.
Assuming they are prepared to pay for a license for the patented technology.
Without one many users (particularly US citizens) will be no better off with this than they would pirating the non-free encoders.
…except that x264 is the best h264 encoder.
And incest is the best kind of sex, but it’s still a crime.
</sarcasm>
really Kroc?
Uhmmmm…wtf?
It was a joke
Essentially highlighting how the parent’s comment was a misnomer.
My thoughts exactly. 😀
x264 development is partially funded by for-profit corporations who — depending on the use case — pay the patent license fees for themselves.
The x264 source code is even in the US not illegal. It’s protected by their constitution as freedom of speech (LAME is hosted in the US and officially distributed in source-only form).
I take it you missed the comment I was quoting which specifically refers to home users and not businesses?
“Home users” either get a pre-compiled binary from someone or they get the source code. If they get a binary, the one who’s distributing it has to pay the license fees.
Home users who obtain the source code and compile it themselves are OK, because the source code is still protected by freedom of speech and compiling it themselves is not codec distribution.
Only codec distributors and distributors of public on-disk media have to pay license fees to the MPEG-LA.
That’s not entirely true (particularly with FOSS projects like this one).
I’ll quote from VLC’s FAQ:
http://www.videolan.org/doc/faq/en/videolan-faq-en.pdf
So there you have it from the horses mouth: US home users are liable. Thus many of them will be no better off than with pirated tools (as is the madness of the US patent law)
Edited 2010-04-27 10:38 UTC
That’s totally inaccurate.
I suggest that you read the actual licensing terms right from the MPEG-LA’s website instead of quoting the FAQ from a project that has no relation to MPEG-LA.
The MPEG-LA’s AVC licensing terms are very clear: They only apply to corporations who distribute codecs or content on a large scale.
And even for those corporations the following rules apply: As long as they distribute no more than 100,000 codecs or 100,000 AVC-encoded videos per year, no royalty payment is required.
I repeat: Not even for commercial use licensing fees are required as long as you have less than 100,001 customers per year. No cost at all.
I don’t know where people get the idea that while enterprises can distribute up to 100,000 units per year, home users who may give a couple of AVCHD DVDs with holiday videos to friends have to somehow pay licensing fees…
That would be insane and the MPEG-LA isn’t doing this.
http://www.mpeg-la.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/AVC_TermsSummary…
1stly, your document is specific to H264 – the VLC document relates to more than just H264.
2ndly, VLC is not unrelated as they’re one of the guys behind x264 – the free implementation you’re talking about.
Also, what you’ve posted must be the new terms that came in a couple of months ago to discourage the growth of free codecs online. So there’s still nothing to stop MPEG-LA from changing the terms again (scanning through that document, I see many of the terms end December this year) to revert back to the original terms as described on VLCs FAQ. So surely it would make /more/ sense to avoid this whole patent mess to begin with rather than courting with an unknown future entity and then being stuck with them?
Edited 2010-04-28 10:33 UTC
But this news item doesn’t. It’s just about h.264.
“It’s like you’re involving me in crime. And I let you. _Why_ do I let you?” Amile–Ratatouille
There’s a lot of stress about how free all this is; yet it violates MPEG-LAs patents and certainly the H.264 licence. The MPEG-LA (which Apple and Microsoft are part of) have said so in no uncertain terms that an end user viewing content that was encoded using an unlicenced encoder is also in breach and liable (it’s highly questionable if that would hold up in court).
Hey everybody, download our DVD, it’s free crime!
It’s not that I’m against H.264 itself. I’ll use it occasionally whilst it’s zero-cost because it’s just a tool; but it is patented up the wazoo and me using H.264 isn’t anything like building an unlicenced encoder implementation that is both illegal in the US and essentially unsustainable (MPEG-LA can step in and shut you down as and when they please).
I’m not normally the sort to advocate such things, but in cases like this, especially when the hapless viewer has no freaking idea about this nonsense, the people bringing the litigation need to be shot, as it is one of the worst abuses that can come of this whole twisted Imaginary Property bullshit.
Yes, quite unlikely. just because a company says something doesn’t automatically make it enforcable. I’d expect the defence would argue that there’s absolutely no way a layman will have the technically knowledge to know if a certain DVD was encoded by an unlicensed encoder.
Please quote the appropriate sentence from http://www.mpeg-la.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/AVC_TermsSummary… to back your claim up.
I can’t find anything like that.
I’m sure that if these projects were hosted in the US, they would be shut down. But as they are not illegal in their native countries, cry me a river over software patent infringement.
Edited 2010-04-26 14:09 UTC
Patent Infringement: Coming to a country near you with ACTA. May contain IP, always read the EULA.
While I agree with that sentiment, it doesn’t help US citizens who watch content encoded with “illegal” (quotation marks intentional) encoders, should the patent holders decide to chase innocent consumers.
Also, I’d prefer to see people use and promote codecs which aren’t patent encumbered than see people use codecs which are bound by US IP law (particularly as the US increasingly seems to think that their national laws extend to the rest of the world)
You know what? I hope they do decide to chase consumers. I think that doing something so ridiculous might be the only way to wake everyone up on how ridiculous our patent laws have become. I hope they go all the way, make total asses of themselves, and cause a major patent reform that invalidates everything they’ve tried to use to screw everyone. Sometimes people don’t recognize stupidity until they’re confronted with it directly.
Correction:
“Sometimes people don’t recognize stupidity until they’re negatively confronted with it financially.”
Fair point, that. Either way, I hope the MPEG-LA are stupid enough to do it and everyone gets confronted negatively with it. Let’s see what happens then.
Um, in the unlikely case MPEG-LA would sue home users, the outcome wouldn’t be a patent reform.
The outcome would be this:
A judge who reads through the AVC license terms, then shrugs, and tells the MPAG-LA lawyer to go home and read his own licensing terms.
And then the next bit of the saga: MPEG-LA gets big time lawyers and appeals, finds a judge who *will* do what they want either because (s)he doesn’t have a clue about such issues or is amenable to taking a nice chunk of change, and stick it to us all… It would serve us right, haven’t we been hurt enough by the “it would never happen to *me*” mentality yet? Wake up, and actually look at how things *really* work here.
While I agree with that sentiment, it doesn’t help US citizens who watch content encoded with “illegal” (quotation marks intentional) encoders, should the patent holders decide to chase innocent consumers.
A political system is upheld by its citizens. You get what you vote for. A little patent hurt might make it clear to the citizenry that they need to get informed before placing a tick mark on the ballot.
Also, I’d prefer to see people use and promote codecs which aren’t patent encumbered than see people use codecs which are bound by US IP law (particularly as the US increasingly seems to think that their national laws extend to the rest of the world.
The codec wars have raged on and off on this site and it is clear that people prefer a few pixels more over freedom. We even had consumers defending corporations choosing H.264 for bottom line reasons, instead of thinking about their own rights.
All I could hear was: “I want! I want… to bend over and take it like a little consumer…” I say let them.
LAME is hosted in the US. It hasn’t been shut down. The source code is protected as freedom of speech by the US constitution.
Think about the US what you want, but no copyright or patent law ranks higher than the constitution there.
IMO it’s a sad day for everyone when questions of legality become divorced from questions of ethics. I think that’s all I’m going to say about this.
How do you figure I would be violating terms if I viewed video encoded in Norway? Its not an illegal encoding because it wasn’t encoded here. Thus I should have nothing to worry about as long as my decoder is legal in the US. But I suppose they would argue against that anyway.
But yes, we really should be using Theora.
By reading the licensing terms: http://www.mpeg-la.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/AVC_TermsSummary…
You should stop listening to non-credible hearsay from OSNews or similar media. Either none of the authors/”journalists” ever read the actual licensing terms or they inaccurately rephrase the terms on purpose.
Answer yourself the following questions:
Are you a codec manufacturer who sells more than 100,000 units per year? Are you a video service provider who has more than 100,000 subscribers per year? Are you an owner of a digital TV broadcasting station?
If all those answers were “No”, you’re good to go.
Still don’t have a well-integrated foss bluray *decoder* though. Playing them is still a bitch, at least if they’re commercial titles. It *can* be done, but it hasn’t been integrated into things the way DVD playback has.
Amen to that. I will not support or buy a Blu-Ray player or disks or even Netflix them until I can load it and play it on my BSD box without having to jump through all the hoops of ripping it to disk first. It’s just ridiculous. It didn’t stop the pirates, it just hurts the end user and in the end their bottom line.
Of course, given my preferences for consuming media, this is a nice feather in FOSS’s cap, but not something relevant to me.
Wake me when the MPEG-LA attacks a consumer or BD-R discs are cheap enough to begin the next phase in my optical media replacement cycle.
I second that; I’m holding off doing a computer refresh and hopefully maybe this time next year the cost of BD-R media will be something like NZ$20 for 5 discs rather than the current cost of around that amount per disc.
For me the benefits of BD-R as so far as movies is a non-issue given that my primary source for ‘entertainment’ (if you could call it that) is Fora.tv, documentary channel and so forth. The last 2-3 years the movies have been so lackluster the only DVD’s I have today are from tv shows from over 20 years ago.