Google & MPEG LA Reach VP8 Agreement

MPEG LA will not be forming a patent pool to go after Google's "royalty-free" VP8 video format.

A press release was issued today between Google and the MPEG LA that they have come an agreement over VP8. "Google Inc. and MPEG LA, LLC announced today that they have entered into agreements granting Google a license to techniques that may be essential to VP8 and earlier-generation VPx video compression technologies under patents owned by 11 patent holders. The agreements also grant Google the right to sublicense those techniques to any user of VP8, whether the VP8 implementation is by Google or another entity. It further provides for sublicensing those VP8 techniques in one next-generation VPx video codec. As a result of the agreements, MPEG LA will discontinue its effort to form a VP8 patent pool."

The latest from the project can be fetched from WebMProject.org.

Other details of the agreement were not published. Sadly, nothing new was shared about VP9, the next-generation successor to VP8. Chrome 25 brings initial support for the VP9 decoder, but there hasn't been other exciting details to share recently on the upcoming video compression standard.