They surely plan to lock the industry into their new closed codec for another long time, since patents on H.264 will eventually expire. Will anyone come out with improved open codecs to counter that for the sake of open Web?
on that note, does anyone know what patents for h.264 are still valid, and for how much longer? I've been looking for that info for quite a while now, without success.
So 15 more years, basically. Man, that's depressing. What's fast becoming the standard for HTML5 video has 15 more years of not being truly free. I wonder what mozilla will do about that.
The problem is, with these perpetual upgrades (which undoubtedly will be patented from the the present time) they want to stretch it well beyond 15 years. Luckily H.264 is not a standard in any way, since W3C removed any specific codecs from the video/audio tag spec.
Possibly new codecs won't be needed. After all storage is increasing exponentially, and even bandwidth is going up slowly. For most users it doesn't matter if a movie fits in 600 MB or 300 MB.
People will get along with H.264 just fine. If the industry (ISPs, mobile operators, Youtube, Netflix, ...) want us to use H.265 (they will gain the most from it), they will make it free.
They don't want you to get along with H.264 just fine when H.264 patents will expire. That's why they are pushing for renewed codec. And the only way such thing can become free, is if someone would buy all patents on it (like Google did for VP8 with On2), and release the codec as free. But unlike the story with On2, with so many parties involved in MPEG-LA it's simply impossible. It's their perpetual cash cow, and they want to keep it that way, while it goes against the interests of the open Web.
You are confusing MPEG the ISO working group with MPEG-LA the private company of lawyers. ISO has nothing to gain from patent trolling, they are financed by the purchase of their standards. MPEG is doing the exact same thing they have since 1988. That's saying nothing of the ITU, which is equally involved in this spec.
I was referring to the MPEG-LA (the patent related entity) not to the ISO working group. The new spec is coming from the technical participants, whose patents are managed by MPEG-LA. The patents of the resulting codec will be obviously managed by MPEG-LA as before, and they don't want the situation when H.264 patents will expire and the industry would get away from the lock in into their closed codec. They want the closed part to persist.
The intentions of improving technical side of the codec are also there, but it comes along with expanding the time of the patent grip on the whole thing.
ISO itself has nothing to gain from the patent setup for the MPEG specs, but their members sure do. If you haven't read http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/theora/2010-April/003769.htm... before, you may want to. It's an interesting perspective on the MPEG standards process.
