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Originally posted by williamthrilliam
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Who'd want that anyways? Besides, is there an open source codec for it? -
Sure, because any user knows the MPEG LA wants you to buy a license. Your logic makes no sense whatsoever. I mean, if that was only true for x264 that could be understandable. But you also aren't asked for x265 licenses. And there is absolutely no way that you could get away with that naive thinking here. After all, Google bought VP8 and started VP9, because not only was h265 licensing much more expensive than h264, but after some companies of the patent pool were willing to scratch royalties on decoders, Microsoft - and with them their back-then lackey Nokia - along with some other overly greedy companies left the MPEG LA with their patents to prevent this from happening. So there's no way on earth or on hell that the newly formed patent pool wouldn't have gone after all Linux distros and VLC - that was pretty much the only video player used on Windows for quite a while - and make sure that every single user would pay their ransom. You just can't be that naive to believe that.Originally posted by ssokolow View PostComment
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MPEG-LA has known since XviD that patent infringement is a thing and Linux is a drop in the ocean compared to Windows. You're the loss leader for all those H.264 licenses in phones and cameras with hardware encoding (which most people use to create their H.264 video), and in Windows/macOS products like Adobe Premiere which most people use to edit their video, and in YouTube and NetFlix data centers which encode the H.264 streams that most people play back.Originally posted by Artim View Post
(Did you know that there's DRM in your Raspberry Pi's firmware that enforces that GPU-accelerated MP4 encoding only works when you connect the Pi bearing the GPU to the genuine RPi camera board bearing the license?)
It's actually a very smart strategy. The big five record labels pissed away so much money in their attempts to use the law to stop individual users from using P2P file-sharing that now it's "the big three". MPEG-LA probably learned by watching Fraunhofer's strategy for dealing with all the unlicensed users of MP3 encoders.Last edited by ssokolow; 06 April 2024, 11:37 AM.Comment
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I find it difficult to believe that you are this thick.Originally posted by Artim View Post
X264 is an encoder that creates H264 compliant streams.
The methods it uses are implementations of patented technology.
It uses AQ - patented.
It uses rate distortion optimization - patented.
It uses B frames - patented.
This is not opinion, this is well documented in the manual, in tutorials, by the developers themselves, it is indisputable, any encoder that uses any of these technologies is using patented technology:
Look at the encoder features, then look at the patents i linked to, they use patented technology.
This the reason they created x264 LLC and there is also an x265 LLC, so that you can use it in commercial projects:
From one of the main developers:
To all prospective commercial users of x264,
I would like to announce the availability of commercial licensing for x264. Now the best video encoder in the world -- the undisputed
winner of the 2010 MSU encoder comparison and the magic behind video systems by Google, Facebook, Avail Media, Vudu, Hulu, and many more --
is available for everyone to use, even commercial software vendors. No longer do commercial application developers need to rely on
overpriced and inferior competitors.
This is intended to give an option to companies who are unable to use the GPL version, either due to patent concerns or issues with linking
their proprietary applications to GPL code.​Comment
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Nobody has sued them for 2 reasons:Originally posted by Artim View Post
Their installed base is too small or they don't have a pot to piss in and they are not worth the trouble:
It would be very difficult to prove how many users a specific distro has or that anyone actually used the ffmpeg distributed with that distro to encode AVC but it doesn't mean that the technology is not patented.Where End User pays for AVC Video
Subscription (not limited by title) – 100,000 or fewer subscribers/yr = no royalty;
> 100,000 to 250,000 subscribers/yr = $25,000; >250,000 to 500,000 subscribers/yr =
$50,000; >500,000 to 1M subscribers/yr = $75,000; >1M subscribers/yr = $100,000
ο Title-by-Title - 12 minutes or less = no royalty; >12 minutes in length = lower of (a)
2% or (b) $0.02 per title​Comment
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If you think more people are needing and actually buying and using Adobe premiere compared to people using VLC, you really must have lost touch with reality.Originally posted by ssokolow View Post
There isn't and never has been. Why are you so desperate, spreading such obvious lies? Sure, the h264 encoder on the Raspberries has always been abysmal, that's why they removed it from the Pi 5. But at no point was there ever firmware enforcing DRM (as in digital rights management, not direct rendering manager!) and never where you required to connect anything to your Pi to use the hardware encoders. Jesus, you are desperate.(Did you know that there's DRM in your Raspberry Pi's firmware that enforces that GPU-accelerated MP4 encoding only works when you connect the Pi bearing the GPU to the genuine RPi camera board bearing the license?)
Last edited by Artim; 06 April 2024, 04:56 PM.Comment
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I'm not the one thick as a brick. You claim over and over that x264 can't legaly be used without first buying a license for h264, yet you can't come up with any proper proof. And proper proof is not the patent pool making up claims, they always do even if there's no chance in hell any court would agree with them.Originally posted by sophisticles View Post
I find it difficult to believe that you are this thick.
X264 is an encoder that creates H264 compliant streams.
The methods it uses are implementations of patented technology.
It uses AQ - patented.
It uses rate distortion optimization - patented.
It uses B frames - patented.
This is not opinion, this is well documented in the manual, in tutorials, by the developers themselves, it is indisputable, any encoder that uses any of these technologies is using patented technology:
Look at the encoder features, then look at the patents i linked to, they use patented technology.
This the reason they created x264 LLC and there is also an x265 LLC, so that you can use it in commercial projects:
From one of the main developers:
And yes, x264 can be used under a proprietary license. But that doesn't have anything to do with it actually infringing h264 patents. But 1. because GPL was made viral in nature - while most devs don't handle it that way, some lawyers believe that may cause legal conflicts when using a GPL library in closed source software, that's why GPLv3 was written, to explicitly cause these conflicts - and 2 because of course if you are making money from something that looks like it could fool a jury long enough, the MPEG LA will sue. That's what happened with VP8 and VP9. They never infringed on any patents of MPEG LA. But They knew exactly how desperately Google wanted to not use h265 while needing something more efficient than h264 in the near future. And they knew exactly that their lawyers were good enough to make it expensive enough for Google to fight the claims. Sure, Google has money, and usually the ones losing a trial need to pay the costs from the winners. But that doesn't include the costs created by not having anything better than h264 for years to come. And Google was already fighting an exhausting battle against Oracle.Comment
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You must be really naive if you think they wouldn't have found a way for that. Worst case, they would just have had courts strictly forbid anyone to share compiled x264. Then it's irrelevant how many people are using it. Because allegedly any compiled form of x264 would be infringing patents. So why allow potentially millions of Linux users - Linux first and foremost runs on servers, you could easily use x264 in a commercial capacity - plus however many hundreds of thousands up to millions using VLC on almost every OS there is to continue using allegedly illegal software?Originally posted by sophisticles View Post
Nobody has sued them for 2 reasons:
Their installed base is too small or they don't have a pot to piss in and they are not worth the trouble:
It would be very difficult to prove how many users a specific distro has or that anyone actually used the ffmpeg distributed with that distro to encode AVC but it doesn't mean that the technology is not patented.Comment
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Not what I said.Originally posted by Artim View Post
I said that x264, like all AVC encoders, and in fact any encoder that uses B frames or AQ or trellis or RDO is using patented technologies and you have all the proof right in front of you.
I also posted the schedule of fees as to what conditions trigger fees.
You are either trolling, in which case congratulations, you got me, i fell for your ploy or you are not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
Which is it?Comment
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You didn't bother reading the schedule of fees I linked to, did you?Originally posted by Artim View Post
The MPEG-LA, like all patent pools don't want to prohibit people from using their patents, they want to make it easy for people to use their patents so they can monetize those rights.
FFMPEG and near as i can tell neither does x265, only source, up until recently x264 also only distributed source and there were a number of people that distributed binaries.
Here's the thing, it is obvious that not only are you sadly misinformed but you also have no desire to expand your knowledge, so I think it's best if we just agree that you don't know what you are talking about and that people that happen upon this thread should disregard anything you say.
Can we at least agree on this point?Comment
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