Free, as in the freedom, alternative to H.264?

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Mon Nov 28, 2005 6:31 am

It seems like the world is kicking DivX out in favor of H.264, all the Mac people get horny by you saying H.264, and praises it like a god.

AFAIK it is an open standard, but just as with mp3 it is freaking patented and like the tradition says, the x264 decoder for Linux and UNIX, might infringe on those patents.

There we go, another format to struggle with.

Also I think I have an idea on how something might be able to offer legal DVD playback to Linux users, and have a business model at the same time. OK, you're a business and you develop a slick DVD player for Linux, of course it should work natively on FreeBSD as well, and you GPL it.
Then buy a license to make a DVD decrypter for Linux, and that little thing might have to be proprietary, so you can sell a plug-in to the users which allows them to legally watch their DVDs, also you could provide support for the DVD playback app for a little extra income.

It's a little similar to what Ximian did with Evolution and their Ximian Connector plugi-in that allowed you to use Microsoft Exchange servers.

This idea is kind of what Linspire is doing, but instead of providing it only one group of the community, make packages for every major distribution (SUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Debian...) and then a generic tarball for the oddball ones.

Also this didn't have to be limited to just DVD playback, if you got a license to make plug-ins for all sorts of multimedia formats, maybe we in the free software world should finally get a license for mp3

Jza · Post by **Jza** » Tue Nov 29, 2005 5:59 pm

So which formats are not held to patents?

Theora...anyone else?

Should we just enforce the use of convertors of all this files. And can we make plug-ins for this fileformats?

I think this could have had solved the war long time ago. If you have multiple convertors (something like what the helix project intended to do). We could have had this under our belt.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Tue Nov 29, 2005 6:03 pm

Actually, Theora is patented.

From Wikipedia:
Theora is a video codec being developed by the Xiph.org Foundation as part of their Ogg project. Based upon On2 Technologies' VP3 codec, and christened by On2 as the successor in VP3's lineage, Theora is targeted at competing with MPEG-4 video (e.g., XviD and DivX), RealVideo, Windows Media Video, and similar lower-bitrate video compression schemes.

While VP3 is patented technology, On2 has irrevocably given royalty-free license of the VP3 patents to all of humanity, enabling the public to utilize Theora and other VP3-derived codecs for any imaginable purpose.

So there ya have it!

Post by **dann** » Tue Nov 29, 2005 8:51 pm

While VP3 is patented, Theora is under a BSD-style license so On2 could not exercise any levies on Theora or it's use or derivatives.

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Wed Nov 30, 2005 12:53 am

I've got to admit, H.264 is easily the best looking video codec out there. (Check out some of the recent TWIT videos). It completely blows away WMV, MP4, and DivX/XviD. The compression is also extremely good. Hopefully Theora will reach that level at some point.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Wed Nov 30, 2005 2:44 am

dann wrote:While VP3 is patented, Theora is under a BSD-style license so On2 could not exercise any levies on Theora or it's use or derivatives.

Maybe not, but there are still patents covering Theora, but they are kind "open patents".

Personally I like XviD better than Theora, but again, the reason XviD.org doesn't provide binaries is pretty obious, they would probaly get sued by the guys that own the patents for DivX and MPEG-4.