In at least a short-term boon for HTML5 proponents, the consortium of groups that own the patents for the H.264 video-encoding codec announced Thursday that it will not seek royalties for another five years on videos that use the codec and are free to end users.
“Gack!” you say (justifiably). “Thank goodness I don’t need to know about this H.264-HTML5-Ogg Theora mumbo-jumbo.” Unfortunately, if you are in charge of encoding video for your Web site, if you design video players, or manage those who do, then you probably do need to pay attention.
Blame it on YouTube and Apple. Though they didn’t start it, their recent moves have brought the debate about open-source video codecs from niche blogs to a wider audience.
First, the back story: H.264 is a very efficient video compression/decompression system. You find it a lot of places, and it’s becoming more popular. MPEG LA, a group of 26 organizations, holds patents related to the codec, but the group allows anyone to use H.264 on videos that are free to end users — for now. If the video isn’t free, video creators and distributors must pay license fees for both encoding and decoding.
Before Thursday’s announcement, the current royalty-free period was set to end in December.
The licensing issues behind H.264 are tied to HTML5, an upcoming HTML standard, because it uses the H.264 codec to play videos without Flash. HTML5 can use H.264 codec or others, such as the open source open-source Ogg Theora. The vast majority of online videos use Flash-based players.
When Apple’s iPad was unveiled without Flash support, pro open-source/anti-Flash folks trumpeting this as a good reason to dump Flash video players and use HTML5 instead.
Meanwhile, others have been experimenting with alternatives to Flash-based video. In January, YouTube launched a beta version of an HTML5 video player, followed a day later by Vimeo. This week, the Swiss design firm Jilion released a demo of an HTML5 video player that produced a lot of drool in my Twitter crowd. But all of these alternatives function only in Google Chrome and Apple Safari browsers (or Internet Explorer if you have installed Google’s Chrome Frame plugin).
There is one major obstacle to HTML5, however: Mozilla, the open-source developer of Firefox, doesn’t support H.264 because it’s a proprietary codec. (Mozilla and others in the open-source community prefer Ogg Theora. And Google is looking to buy On2, the company that owns yet another proprietary video codec.)
Thursday’s announcement clouds the battlefield a bit. If H.264 will be royalty-free through the end of 2015, is that enough for Mozilla and others to sign on? Or will they still hold back, fearful that they will adopt a standard that will end up costing them (literally) in the long run?
Now let’s bring this home for those of you who handle online video.
The licensing announcement doesn’t settle the question of whether news sites should move away from Flash video to HTML5. If you choose to go with H.264/HTML5 and you put that video behind a pay wall, you could end up owing the licensing fee. If you embed someone else’s video that wasn’t properly licensed, you can be liable for their fee.
Confused? Welcome to the crowd. While clearly not fans of Flash, the Linux folks at LWN.net have done a nice job of laying out the issues. Jeremy Allair, founder and CEO of Brightcove, lays out the issues at the corporate level, with a Flash-friendlier tone.
The one thing everyone agrees on: It’s a long way from being sorted out.
