Yes. I'm particularly miffed about Steve Jobs FUDding away against Ogg
Theora with strong insinuations in various communication from Jobs
that MPEG-LA is preparing a lawsuit against ogg as we speak. Maybe
true. They've been preparing a lawsuit for the past 6 years. Until
Monty and crew actually get sued and its not thrown out almost
immediately it doesn't pay to worry so much about it, and Mr. Jobs
shouldn't make such overtures.

Unfortunately, microsoft has recently reduced the odds that the non-
mobile web moves to Ogg Theora as de-facto standard by promising IE9
support of <video> but only for H.264, like Mac and Windows Safari.
Ogg Theora as only standard has never been particularly likely, as
many mobile devices include H.264 hardware decoders, and even without
them, Ogg Theora is somewhat more CPU intensive to decode. This is no
fault of the Xiph crew who have done stellar work, but in order to
steer clear of the MPEG-LA patent portfolio they have had to get
creative. This is all the MORE reason to get behind Theora, but Joe
Schmoe User doesn't care and at least half of all web developers only
care about what the users care about.

Does anyone know if at some point all patents covering H.264 will run
out of time? Is that anywhere near? Can MPEG-LA artificially lengthen
this period by somehow refreshing patents or perhaps patent a few
'submarine' algorithms (would be fantastic to turn that submarine
patent hokum around and attack MPEG-LA with it). PNG was the superior
format but if a tonne of long-term hardware back in the day had
hardware GIF decoders that patent issue surrounding GIF would have
cleared itself up after a year or two as the unisys LZW patent was
nearing its end anyway.



On May 3, 12:40 am, Hannu Leinonen <[email protected]> wrote:
> An interesting take on H.264 license terms and how they might affect
> each one of us in the future.
>
> http://www.osnews.com/story/23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_an...
>
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