> They still gain in other ways by having h.264 as the standard, ie they get > larger payments from companies that distribute a lot of >video, sell video, > make hardware & software that encodes & decodes, etc etc. The end user or > small creator still ends up paying in >the form of a small chunk of the cost > of things they buy, or a small percentage of the cut that the video > host/distributor takes, but if >done right its such a small amount that > hardly anyone notices, and those who dont have the means of paying are not > chased by the >brain police or completely locked out of the online video > revolution.
Yes, someone just watching video online or editing with commercial software will see no change. But if we wanted to create our own video editing software or transcoder, we would have to pay licensing fees to use H264. If H264 is the default standard, then any grassroots solution will necessarily be "illegal". This is why Firefox is pushing for Ogg/Theora to be widely adopted since they cannot afford to pay a licensing fee for each Firefox install. This is also why awesome video projects like http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ are created by somewhat shadow groups who put plenty of blood, sweat and tears into their projects...but cannot really by public about it. If H264 is the standard then it cuts out any player who cant pay. At the same time, the creators of H264 have every right to insist on payment for their team of engineers who create a beautiful codec. Just like a pharmaceutical company has every moral right to charge for medicine they research and produce. It's also like Microsoft's Internet Explorer. For a while it was the default browser because they pushed it onto all computers that were bought with Windows. The browser was free to the user, right? Who cares? Defacto standard. Of course we learned that a closed browser stifled innovation and added cost onto the cost of each computer bought. It took quite a battle legally and technically to get people to undestand that "OHHHH! if the browser is open, then thousands of developers will extend its usability, and make it all much cooler." And in order for this to happen, there cannot be a fee to play. > Will be interesting to see what Mozilla do with firefox, and the youtube > html5 test and ipad have stirred up a heck of a lot of online >discussion > about these issues recently, time will tell if this leads to anything useful > or remains mostly hot air. Yeah, its good for H264 to extend their freeness till 2016 since they can continue to get inside of all devices. But it also gives Mozilla, google, and others time to develop an alternative codec if they so choose. Jay -- http://ryanishungry.com http://momentshowing.net http://twitter.com/jaydedman 917 371 6790
