7 ms·
Firm boosts H.264 streaming license fees from $100k up to staggering $4.5M
- NooneAtAll3 6mo agowhat are the open source alternatives?
- charcircuit 6mo agoThis is for patent licensing. Using an open source implementation doesn't get rid of your obligation to license the patents for it.
- adrian_b 6mo agoIn most countries the H.264 patents have already expired, for instance in Europe they have expired, but in USA not yet (in USA most patents should expire towards the end of next year). So that firm might try to squeeze every penny they can before the expiration of the patents.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- topranks 6mo agoVP9, AV1
- chromacity 6mo agoAs the article says, there are companies seeking royalties for both of these codecs.
- adrian_b 6mo agoThere is no proof that their patent claims over AV1 or VP9 are valid. For now they try to bully some smaller companies with the threat of the big legal expenses that would be needed to fight these claims.
- throawayonthe 6mo agoi don't think Snap Inc. and Amazon are small companies
- mook 6mo agoThe funny thing about patent licensing alliances is that there's no guarantee that nobody else outside of the bloc will pop up and start suing people. Basically, you can consider AOM to be a licensing alliances, where the fee is zero.
- asadotzler 6mo agoSeeking is not getting, not even close. Suggesting it is only supports their propaganda and adds momentum to their bogus race to a cash grab.
- kmeisthax 6mo agoAV1, as well as the older On2 codec series it was based off of (VP9, VP8, etc).
- adrian_b 6mo agoIn most countries, including in Europe, the H.264 patents have already expired. There you can use H.264 freely. Some patents remain valid in USA, Brazil and a few other countries.
- cocodill 6mo agoOpenH264, and Cisco already paid the fees for you, I guess.
- bytecode36 6mo agoJust because AOM/Google says that wont charge a royalty doesn't mean AV1 isn't covered by patents owned by others. Since everyone and their brother saw how they can milk the patent system for money, they got patents that cover all "next-gen" video technologies (AV1, HEVC, VCC) a long time ago and will sue anyone that uses them. Ironically, since there are so many patent holders, each of which want a larger piece of the "licensing pie", it's making the new video technologies impossible to license. You may license HEVC or AV1 from one patent pool, but the other two and hundreds of other individual patent holders could also sue you. This is why many brands like Synology, Dell and HP have just started to simply remove these codecs from their products. I wouldn't treat any video codec as "patent free" until AT LEAST 20 years after the spec was release (AV1 = March 2038). This kind of infighting will guarantee that HEVC or AV1 will never become a ubiquitous standard for at least 20 years the way AVC/h.264 did. I, for one, am happy about this. Nothing makes me happier than to see patent trolls eat themselves alive. Also, being an open source advocate, I appreciate when propriety technologies that are "good enough" can finally be used by open source applications with broad support. Unless you are pushing a ton of video, or working with high resolution (4K, 8K)/ high bit-rate videos, AVC/h.264 is perfectly fine.
- hollow-moe 6mo agoAren't VP9 and AV1 supposed to be "royalty free formats" ?
- adrian_b 6mo agoThey have been created with the express purpose of avoiding incidents like this. Instead of paying the ransom, a streaming company should transcode their movies to a royalty-free format, like AV1 or VP9. Even big companies like Dell have preferred to disable the H.265 codecs in the computers they sell, instead of accepting similar demands for greatly increased royalties, and I think that it was the right choice.
- watermelon0 6mo agoThey are supposed to be, but Disney doesn't think so: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/av1s-open-royalty-free-promise-in-question-as-dolby-sues-snapchat-over-codec/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/av1s-open-royalty-fr... Also, let's not forget that the majority of devices still don't have AV1 hardware decoding support. For example, Apple only recently (2023) added support with iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs.
- adrian_b 6mo agoThe claims made by Dolby that some H.265 patent claims that are formulated very vaguely also apply to AV1 are probably bogus. Like many other such frivolous patent lawsuits, Dolby hopes to either scare the other company into making a deal in order to avoid bigger legal expenses, or to establish a legal precedent if their cunning lawyers can convince a technically incompetent jury that the H.265 patents are applicable to AV1. This is the kind of trial that should have never been decided by a normal jury, but only by a panel of neutral experts in this field.
- skrrtww 6mo agoIs a panel of 'neutral' experts even possible to field in this area? I feel like anyone with sufficiently in depth knowledge of both the AV1 and HEVC specs has almost certainly derived a big paycheck for years from stakeholders on one side or the other of these lawsuits. I'm no expert, but Google having designed AV1, I can certainly imagine a world where the codec infringes upon HEVC just enough that the lawsuit fees would come out in the wash.
- mrweasel 6mo agoThat's just trying to promote a competitor. This is more or less what Fraunhofer did with the mp3 license, which resulted in bunch of new, and better formats.
- kmeisthax 6mo agoThis seems particularly desperate, but I'm not surprised this is happening, given that patent owners in general have been very angry that H.264 didn't wind up being nearly as lucrative as MPEG-2 was. Hell, I remember the days when they couldn't even agree if H.264 should have a free streaming tier at all or not - and it seems like that went away. Maybe Google should finally make good on their threat to only stream YouTube in royalty-free standards.
- falkensmaize 6mo agoI guess to me this doesn't seem like that big of a deal? I mean if you have a 100 million subscribers, do you really care much about a few $million increase? I thought the big players like Youtube had already moved to open source codecs already anyway.
- charcircuit 6mo ago>few $million increase? Existing licensees are grandfathered in to the old price.
- VladVladikoff 6mo agoI’m confused about this. If I have video on my website that is encoded in x264 am I obligated to pay fees?
- adrian_b 6mo agoNot if you are in Europe or in any other place where the H.264 patents have expired. The patents are still valid in USA, Brazil and a few other places.
- silotis 6mo ago*Claimed to still be valid. If you're just hosting videos on your website you are probably using High Profile which was standardized in March of 2005, i.e. more than 20 years ago. That doesn't stop VIA and MPEG-LA from claiming they still have relevant patents, but that claim is dubious and hasn't been tested in court.
- ndiddy 6mo agoNote that there's some patents that haven't yet expired, at least in the US. AFAIK this is because if there's delays in patent examination you get extra duration on your patent to compensate. Here's a list of the patents that were filed before High Profile was standardized and are still valid: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_MPEG-4_AVC_expired_yet%3F https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M... Of course MPEG-LA deliberately makes figuring out which patents cover which parts of H.264 (which is really a set of multiple standards spanning a 10+ year period) ambiguous and hard to determine in order to sell more licenses.
- themafia 6mo ago> *Claimed to still be valid. I can't afford to claim otherwise.
- panny 6mo agoHow are these software patents still valid after Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International precedent? Or is this a case where companies just pay the fee because it's cheaper than fighting it in court?
- jauntywundrkind 6mo agoThey should be sued. It's incredible discriminatory to make it so ridiculously hard for new players to complete. Hopefully the Licensing Alliance never ever ever gets another customer ever again. Hopefully no one uses any of their new encodings. This is an untrustworthy company, that always have been out to fleece the industry and hold back humanity. Licensing Alliance embodies Lawful Evil, is a stain on the patent system as a whole. It's hard to find the words for how awful, how enraging this cabal is. Ugh. What an evil drain. We should be able to use computers for audio and video, and it shouldnt involve kings ransoms to some jerks who are better at paperwork & lawyering. All that work on av1 and av2 looking more and more civilization ally essential as times goes on.
- ronsor 6mo agoMy advice (not a lawyer) is to ignore the licensing fees; the patents will all be dead by 2027 anyway. Also I'm not responsible for whatever happens if you do this.
- Noaidi 6mo agoSo should I re-encode all my videos to OGG? I’m really confused what this means for the average person who has home videos encoded in these formats.
- embedding-shape 6mo agoUnless you're running a platform with millions of users, where you use the codec to encode/decode video for others, you have absolutely nothing to worry about due to these news.
- Noaidi 6mo agoThank you!
- nuxi 6mo agoNote that OGG is not a video codec, it's just a container format. I.e. an OGG file can contain MPEG-4/H.264-encoded video.
- KronisLV 6mo agoThat's an insane amount. That makes me feel even more strongly about throwing proprietary and predatory codecs in the trash and opting to use AV1 et al wherever possible, it's better anyways and surely close to a decade after coming out, we'd expect devices to support it well enough.
- Figs 6mo ago> it's better anyways and surely close to a decade after coming out, we'd expect devices to support it well enough. A lot of people, myself included, are still using quite old hardware. The GPU in my daily driver is ~10 years old at this point. Between crypto, COVID, and this AI craze raising GPU costs by insane amounts, it hasn't made sense to replace it with something newer. I know I'm not alone on that...
- craftkiller 6mo agoFor legacy devices, VP8/VP9 is a good option. Intel Added VP8 hardware decoding to Broadwell which was 12 years ago. Nvidia had hardware VP9 decoding 10 years ago on the Geforce 10 series. AMD had hardware VP9 decode support 9 years ago on the Radeon 400 series.
- throwawaytea 6mo agoI still happily use my 2012 27" iMac for all my work. So I'm with the parent comment.
- cwillu 6mo agoIf my 10 year old card can't encode in hardware, it's a nonstarter.
- jurschreuder 6mo agoI work in AI and I'm surrounded by RTX-4090 and H100 servers but for much of the day to day AI training I use my RTX-970 in the desktop on my desk for convenience and it works just fine for most cases. Literally 2 meters from my desk is a 2x RTX-4090 server and many times I just use my 8 year old GPU anyway so you don't need it.
- cs702 6mo agoProfit-seeking at society's expense. Also known as rent-seeking: "The act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, stifled competition, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, heightened debt levels, risk of growing corruption and cronyism, decreased public trust in institutions, and potential national decline."[a] Sigh. --- [a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
- userbinator 6mo agoTrying to milk the last drop before the patents expire? H.264 patents have already expired in most of the world and the remaining ones, which might not even be necessary for the vast majority of H.264 use, are also approaching expiry very soon: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_MPEG-4_AVC_expired_yet%3F https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...
- donatj 6mo agoIt's interesting because this isn't that exactly the same thing Fraunhofer did with the MP3 patent?
- notatoad 6mo agoMilk the last drop, or raise the prices so high that people transition to a more reasonably priced option with a patent that isn’t expiring soon?
- fhn 6mo agoyou mean AV1?
- MaxBarraclough 6mo agoSeems unlikely, migrating away from an entrenched codec like H264 isn't like a routine software update. It has widespread hardware support, and there's an enormous body of H264 video out there. As fhn points out, there are now truly open video codecs available (open specification, royalty free, unencumbered by patent terms) that are able to compete with the patent-encumbered ones on technical merit. Seems curious that the patent-holders would want to hike prices in this way and validate the motivation behind the truly open codecs. Also, the article mentions the licensing fees for H265 were also increased recently. It doesn't seem to give a figure, a quick web search turns up 25% [0] or perhaps 20% [1]. Perhaps I'm missing something obvious but I'm not clear on how the change in price relates to the patent dispute between Nokia and certain laptop manufacturers. (It seems the H264 fee increase affects streaming providers only, whereas the H265 fee increase did not, as it affected laptop manufacturers.) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46004129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46004129 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46003285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46003285
- jbverschoor 6mo ago[flagged]
- amelius 6mo agoCommunication formats should not be patentable. The potential for lock in abuse is too high.
- spopejoy 6mo agoWhat is the alternative? It seems like a lot (a majority?) of professional formats are professionally developed by for-profit consortia, with open-source trailing behind as patents expire. Isn't this what patents are for? If a private entity drops $$$/time/expertise into tech shouldn't they be rewarded for some period? The alternative would be lavishly funded public research, which sounds great to me! But is that going to happen?
- NetOpWibby 6mo ago[dead]
- Steinmark 6mo ago[dead]