H.264 Goes Royalty-Free Indefinitely

August 27, 2010 lead

From: Tech News Today

After all the hub-bub back in May about the licensing of H.264, many people were worried about the future of the latest HD cameras using the MPEG4 compression. There was even talk of development of other codecs that would be more “open source.”

The MPEG Licensing Association announced yesterday that they are putting a permanent moratorium on licensing fees of H.264.

According to ARS Technica:

“Today’s announcement by the MPEG LA extends the time period of the moratorium for the life of its “AVC Patent Portfolio License,” effectively making free-to-view H.264 encoded video royalty-free indefinitely. The MPEG LA noted that licensing fees will still be in effect for video that consumers pay for, such as AVC-encoded Blu-ray discs, on demand services like Hulu+, and pay-to-download services like iTunes.”

I guess we can all keep shooting away in MPEG4 now…

Read the story on ARS Technica.

ZDNet’s story on this.

One comment

  1. […] a very positive note, b-roll.net posted an update that definitely has my heart […]

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