Google licenses video codec from MPEG LA to bolster VP8 - govanloded1954

Patents management company MPEG Pelican State announced agreements with Google, granting the Internet giant a license to techniques that may be essential to the VP8 video codec that the Internet giant backs.

VP8 is a TV compression engineering that was improved by On2 Technologies, a company Google acquired in February 2022 for about US$125 million. WebM, an open-source imag sponsored by Google for an open media file formatting, uses the open Vorbis audio codec and VP8, which Google released under a royalty-free permit.

Licensing acclaim slows progress

In January 2022, Google aforementioned information technology would remove livelihood in its Chrome browser for the H.264 codec and instead support open codecs like WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs.

MPEG LA, however, countered in February that twelvemonth with a call to owners of patents essential to the VP8 video codec spec, to facilitate development of a VP8 joint patent license.

"In grade to enter in the creation of, and determine licensing price for, a many-sided VP8 patent license, whatsoever company that believes it has patents that are essential to the VP8 video codec specification is invited to submit them for a conclusion of their essentialness by MPEG Lanthanum's patent evaluators," information technology said.

Under the agreements proclaimed Th, MPEG LA same it will break its efforts to form a VP8 letters patent kitty. The agreements grant Google a license to techniques that may be must to VP8 and earlier-generation VPx video compression technologies under patents owned by 11 patent holders, MPEG LA said.

The agreements also countenance Google the right to ze-license those techniques to any user of VP8, whether the VP8 implementation is by Google OR another entity. It also provides for sub-licensing the VP8 techniques in nonpareil next-generation VPx video codec.

"This concord is not an acknowledgment that the authorized techniques understand on VP8. The purpose of this agreement is meant to render further and stronger reassurance to implementors of VP8," said Google executive Serge Lachapelle in a post on a forum.

The financial terms of the agreements were not disclosed. A Google spokesperson same via email information technology "can't discuss on the commercial terms of the agreement."

"We launched the WebM Project in May 2022 with the destination of providing the web with a towering-lineament, heart-to-heart, royalty-free video codec that anyone can use, and that can cheer subsequent innovators. Today's announcement is an world-shattering step toward that goal," wrote Matt Frost, fourth-year business production manager for the WebM project in a blog post. The project expects to have the terms of its sublicense ready in the next few weeks.

"This is a significant milepost in Google's efforts to instal VP8 Eastern Samoa a widely-deployed World Wide Web video initialize," Allen Lo, Google's deputy general counsel for patents, said in a statement.

Meantime, H.264 makes headway

Google's latest bid to help information technology promote VP8 as an alternative to H.264 may comprise a trifle late, analysts aforesaid.

Mozilla Origination aforementioned in March last year it was considering adding support for the H.264 video codec in mobile versions of the Firefox web browser, as tolerate for the codec is important in mobile browsers. The foundation had been count on Google to push WebM, based along the VP8 video compression format, to the elision of H.264 on Chrome for Android, as division of its focus along expressed codec technologies. Just that is unlikely to happen as Apple ships hardware with support for H.264, the creation added.

Mozilla avoided H.264 antecedently because IT was loaded down by patents, it said. The Google voice same it is non commenting on H.264 fend for in Chrome.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/457104/google-licenses-video-codec-from-mpeg-la-to-bolster-vp8.html

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