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Author Topic: H.264 license?  (Read 2486 times)

KevinA

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H.264 license?
« on: February 22, 2013, 07:59:43 am »

Hi Guys,
I was intending to upload video to my site to sell rights managed. I have been told to do that I need to pay royalties to use .264.
Is this correct, how do I go about it and at what cost.
Is it just .264 are there codecs I can use which do not incur a payment? I pay nothing for .jpg or tiff I assumed video would be the same.
All looks a bit of a mine field to me.

Kevin.
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Kevin.

Sareesh Sudhakaran

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Re: H.264 license?
« Reply #1 on: February 26, 2013, 04:49:56 am »

You need to consult a legal expert on this.

As far as I know, you 'had' to pay royalties for H.264 until this: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/h-264-goes-royalty-free-forever/9489

Even otherwise, I have never seen or heard of MPEG trying to enforce this in the consumer space, especially because all the hardware and software that is used to create H.264 is already paying for it!

You can always encode in open-source formats or in Flash (Adobe takes care of codecs used within Flash).

All said and done, though, I'd say stick with H.264, if only for browser support and HTML5. Subsequently, you can also stream the video to a user on demand, but that's another subject altogether.
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BJL

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Re: H.264 license? (from MPEGLA)
« Reply #2 on: February 26, 2013, 12:25:24 pm »

Hi Guys,
I was intending to upload video to my site to sell rights managed. I have been told to do that I need to pay royalties to use .264.
Is this correct, how do I go about it and at what cost.
"Selling right managed" might still require H.264 licensing: the linked article H.264 goes royalty-free ... forever is only about the case where "those videos are free to the end user."

By the way, Flash uses H.264 encoding for video, so there might still be a licensing issue of you go that way. Much as I hope Flash will go away, especially now that it is no longer supported in Android, never has been on iOS, and Firefox has let H.264 back into its HTML5 video support, there _might_ sadly be a case for considering Flash: it might provide tools that help with the sales and access control side of things that HTML5 video does not.

If you enjoy reading legalize, you can go into to lion's den of the licensing authority, MPEGLA, and read the SUMMARY OF AVC/H.264 LICENSE TERMS
You seem to be in case (b)(1), meaning the lesser of 2% or $0.02 per sale.
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