H.264 Licensing and the X.264 codec
- 2-9-2010
- Categorized in: H.264 production
Ever since MPEG-LA announced their policy of not charging royalties for H.264 video distributed free over the Internet, I've been getting a bunch of emails, so I thought I would share them. I'm not inviting more emails on this topic, by they way, unless you want to tell me something that you know (as in, you're an intellectual property attorney, or you've dealt with MPEG-LA and this is what happened).
Question: If a company offers the users free of charge AVC movies longer than 12 minutes to be watched on the Web via a Flash player, should the company contact MPEG LA to get the license? Is it the company's obligation or Adobe's?
Answer: MPEG LA now wants all producers releasing content with H.264 to sign up for a license. So long as the movie is free, no license should apply, even if the video is longer than 12 minutes. The license is required by the "apparent provider" of the video, so unless Adobe is releasing the video, it's you.
Second question: What if we use the opensource x264 encoder. Of course, the end user sees the file as AVC/H.264. In other words, we produce x264, but release H.264 (Flash 9.0.115+ implements H.264 decoder). As I wrote before, the video is free of charge. Do we have to sign up, anyway?
Second answer: If the X.264 encoder doesn't use any H.264-related Intellectual Property of the MPEG-LA group, then MPEG-LA is irrelevant. I have no idea whether it does or doesn't, but between you, me and the nearest pop stand, I would guess that it does. If the encoder does use H.264-related intellectual property of the MPEG-LA patent group, even if there is no royalty, MPEG-LA has made it clear that you need a license.
What happens if you don't get one? Certainly MPEG-LA doesn't have a strong incentive to chase you because you can avoid any obligation by signing a license agreement, and no royalties will apply in any case. But technically, your use of the codec (assuming x264 uses H.264 IP) is infringing.
That's about all I can tell you. For more questions I suggest that you ask your attorney.
We just got our MPEGLA License Agreement in the mail, all 100 pages. When we first started video we went with FLV based on your suggestion due to the Royalty issue. Now that Apple's devices are gaining steam without Flash Support we are considering going with H.264 once we figure out how to make a custom Non-Flash video player that will do what we want we will be ready. The royalty fee isn't all that bad. Subscription based with less than 100K users is free, and paid title by title is at max $0.02 per title. So if you streamed 100,000 videos over 12 min. in length you would owe only $2000.
Our big issue is converting the video. Right now it would take over 30 days of solid encoding to re-encode for H.264.
Interesting info and analysis, thanks for sharing.
How are you transcoding? What are you thinking for a non-Flash player? Require folks to use the Safari or Chrome browser and use HTML5?
Right now we use Adobe CS4 to encode our FCP QT reference movies to FLV. We haven't changed a thing since you helped us setup the process over a year ago.
Due to the nature of our business we must force users to watch the entire video, not allow them to fast forward, and randomly pause the video with a prompt to make sure they are there. All of this monitoring and interaction is perfect for Flash and that is why we developed a custom Flash player.
We may try and develop something in Ajax with jQuery or ??? Or we may just develop an iApp to deal with iPhones and iPads. It will be interesting to see what Hulu does, as they have the same problem on their hands right now. They need a custom player that isn't Flash too.
Hmm. You're likely thinking about changing over the H.264 soon anyway, so maybe you have to bite the re-encoding bullet whatever you do.
What's irritating you about Flash other than non-support on the iPlatforms? You see this?
http://digitalcontentproducer.com/displaypres/revf...
Thanks for sharing your knowledge of the licensing structure here.
Best.
Jan
Thanks for the link. I sent it to my coder.
I think what is even more interesting is that the Google purchase of On2 was just announced. On2's new Codec is supposed to be even better than H.264, especially their claim of low bandwidth. I guess we can only hope that Google "does no evil" and makes this a royalty free codec. Don't know what Google is thinking, but if VP8 is so great and Google uses it for YouTube, and lets the rest of the world use it for free, HTML 5 will have to take note and it could become the default standard. While Apple and Google are "fighting" one would have to believe that Apple would allow it and since there would be no royalty, it would be a good thing for everyone except the Patent Holder (Apple included).
I dunno. Apple needs to continue to support H.264 for all its devices, as does Microsoft. Mobile market has to be standards based, as does TV/Satellite/Cable. I like the On2 folks, and VP6 was a great codec, but they've made a lot of quality related claims lately and haven't delivered on them.
Now that the deal is approved, we're that much closer to seeing what Google had in mind.
Jan
the limit of users confuses me a bit. is 100 000 users same as 100 000 viewers or is it related to the encoders (100 000 encoders). Because its differcult to control how many viewers there will be.
If you have a subscription model, you can use H.264 and pay no fees if you have less than 100,000 subscribers. A subscription model means that users pay some sort of flat fee to watch your videos.
If you charge people to watch videos over 12 minutes in length, than you pay on what they call a Title by Title basis. Which is 2% or $0.02, whichever is less. Which means you pay everytime someone watches a stream.
There is different pricing for subscription models when there are greater than 100,000 subscribers in a year. Just go to their website and you can see sample pricing.
There are separate fees when dealing with encoders.