[Ffmpeg-devel] VP6 encoder

[Michael Niedermayer]

Hi

On Sun, Oct 22, 2006 at 07:31:15PM +0200, Tobias Marx wrote:
> > Proprietary software is always unreasonable, regardless of whether the
> > price is low, high, or nothing at all. This is completely unopen to
> > debate. The scum who make this stuff need to be driven out of
> > business. Just look what happened with libvp6...
> > 
> > Rich
> 
> on2 is still cheaper then legally using MPEG4. You only pay for encoding
> the rest is free. The older codecs are completely free to use. They were done because MPEG4 was too expensive. If you are using MPEG4 you might end up paying up to 1,000,000 USD of licensing fees or 0,25 USD per played video due to the patent situation.

did on2 check all patents against vp6?
no?
then how do you know how expensive the "legal" use of vp6 is?

there are open standards which are much more widespread then closed 
propriatery vp6 for which patents have been found 10 years after the
standard had been published
(jpeg to be precisse, yes the patent was found invalid due to prior art
after 20 or so large companies incluing MS sued the patent holder but 
thats not the point, the point is that its completely impossible to 
check anything for software patent infrigment, and the validity of a 
patent is completely irrelevant as you dont have the resources to win
a patent lawsuit unless you happen to be a large company
also keep in mind that forgent according to wikipedia has obtained
90 million dollar from licensing this invalid patent ...

with mpeg4 you can at least expect a few companies to be pretty angry
if someone comes and claims patent rights on it not that this would prevent
the patent holder from sueing you into non existence but with vp6, who will?
on2? do they have the resources? see http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=ont
compare it to the data from some likely patent holder and guess who will
be more likely to win a several year lawsuit during which they cant sell
their products because of the patent

[...]
-- 
Michael     GnuPG fingerprint: 9FF2128B147EF6730BADF133611EC787040B0FAB

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