H.264 Will probably be Royalty Free For Internet Video Forever, Mozilla Still Doesn’t Care [Standards]

MPEG LA, the crowd that licenses the h.264 video codec, has extended its royalty-free use (without charge internet video) from 2016 until, well, forever. But Mozilla thinks that the simpler component to forever could belong to Google’s WebM format.

The announcement serves as MPEG LA’s not-so-indirect response to Google’s announcement of their own WebM format in May. You’d think that this news might persuade Mozilla to just go ahead and jump on board the coolest ship h.264-one of their chief objections was that we’d wake up and the propriety standard wouldn’t be free anymore-but consistent with Mozilla’s Vp of Engineering, Mike Shaver, this doesn’t change diddly:

The MPEG-LA announcement doesn’t change anything for the subsequent four years, since this promise was already made through 2014…On the grounds that IEC [International Electrotechnical Commission] has already started accepting submissions for patents inside the replacement H.265 standard, and the upward thrust of unencumbered formats like WebM, it isn’t clear if H.264 will still be relevant in 2014.

Burn! [ The Register and Red Hardware ]

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This post is tagged: Care, Doesnt, Internet, Mozilla, royalty, standards