Apple Delays QuickTime 6 Over Proposed MPEG-4 Licenses

znu writes: "Apple announced at the QuickTime Live! conference today that there's a public preview of QuickTime 6 with full MPEG-4 support ready to ship, but the terms of the proposed MPEG-4 license are holding it back. For those who haven't been following this, MPEG wants $0.25 per encoder/decoder for MPEG-4, up to $2 million per company per year. Apple is fine with that. But MPEG also wants content distributers to pony up $0.02/hour for any content that's distributed for profit. Apple feels that determining just what is "for profit" will be problematic, and that this pricing will seriously inhibit MPEG-4 adoption. You are encouraged to complain to MPEG LA about this situation."

Another source

[clambert]

CNET's had a nice, objective article online [com.com] since early this afternoon.

Accounting Nightmare

[MADCOWbeserk]

Sounds like the same accounting nightmare than governs licensing between the record companies and radio stations.

This is like IPIX. Send them a message.

[mmerlin]

The site seems to be all about MPEG-2...

But you can send them a message here [mpegla.com] explaining that a per-use licence is morally wrong and will stifle early adoption of MPEG-4

Re:hmm

[Scooby Snacks]

Well, if you're sick and tired of this, like I am, there's always Ogg Tarkin [xiph.org] that could use an extra hand or two.

Tarkin

[krmt]

Tarkin is very very much in the planning phase right now, so if you've got any knowledge of video compression or wavelets in general, now's the time to hop on! If you've got the time to learn wavelet encoding and read a bunch of papers, this will be a great project. I don't have time personally to do much more than follow the mailing list (which has seen a lot of traffic in the last few days) but there's a lot of people on this project who really know their stuff. It's a good chance to learn from them.

That said, the definitions for the project aren't certain at all right now. No one knows if it's going to be for streaming video or just plain compressed video. There's even been talk of using it as a professional editing standard, but that's not likely to be a focus. Right now, Tarkin is so new it's scary. It's going to be an exciting project to follow, but don't expect anything too soon.

Re:but aren't we already using mpeg4?

[Anonymous Coward]

DivX ;-) version 3 (aka MS MPEG v4) is a modified version of MPEG4 (DivX 3 is a hacked version of a Microsoft codec, modified so it could be used in AVI files instead of just ASF). It's incompatible with MPEG4, but it's close enough that an open-source codec [sf.net] exists for it.

DivX 4 is based on the MoMuSys MPEG4 implementation. The license for this specifies that derived versions must remain compatible with the MPEG4 specs, so DivX 4 is basically the same as MPEG4 (but DivX uses AVI as a container format instead of QuickTime). FFmpeg has a codec for MPEG4, and it can play most DivX 4 videos.

Re:Its a good thing

[Ogerman]

"the forthcoming Ogg Tarkin may be excellent codecs, but try to face the fact that the big-name content is going to be in big-name codecs"

Bullcrap. If all the media playing software supports both patented MPEG-4 codecs AND Tarkin, which one do you think content producers are going to use? The one they have to pay hourly royalties on?! And when Apple and Microsoft release media players that support this finalized MPEG-4 standard, are they going to charge people $0.25 to download them or just absorb the cost for a free download? Or would *most* people actually hastle with going through an online payment system for such a small amount just so they can see the latest gee-wiz streamed content? I highly doubt it. And you don't really have a standard unless everyone's using it.

There is a very real opportunity here to take over the codec scene. But first we need a completed Tarkin codec and enough content that people will begin clamouring for it to be supported by default in Quicktime and Windows Media Player.

Re:Tarkin

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think Tarkin has a web site yet, but you can browse or join the mailing list from the Ogg [xiph.org] site.

QuickTime Live Keynote

[profi]

I just finished watching the conference keynote [apple.com] where Apple announced QT 6. QuickTime seems to have matured tremendously over the past decade, and it looks like they're set to bring do-it-yourself video streaming to the masses.

If you've got an hour to spare you might want to watch this too.

Re:Greedy bastards!

[Shiny Metal S.]

No one is ever going to use Ogg anything except for uber-geek OSS zealots. I know I sure as hell am not converting 1000 MP3s into .oggs anytime soon. Nor am I going to use their slow-ass encoder to encode new music.

Let me quote my old post [slashdot.org]:

The standard response is "I won't use Ogg Vorbis, because it's not popular enough" or "I won't use Ogg Vorbis, because I have already so many MP3s". People seem to forget that they can have MP3 files

and Ogg Vorbis files.

I remember when the best file format for photos available was GIF. That time when I digitalized a photo I stored it as a GIF file. But when I first heard about JPEG [jpeg.org], I didn't say "it's nice but not popular". I didn't also say that "I have lots of GIFs and I don't want to convert them". I just started saving the new pictures in JPEG format, leaving the old GIFs alone. Now I have converted those old files to PNG [libpng.org], because of problems with Unisys [libpng.org], but I didn't have to do it, I had been using old GIFs and new JPEGs for many years.

But it's totally off-topic.

We're not talking here about which audio format do you want to store your ripped CDs in. We're not even talking about which video codec do the corporations and artists want to use to publish their movies and streaming video (which by the way, is a matter of saving milions of dollars). I'm not talking about Ogg Vorbis [xiph.org] vs. MPEG-1/2 audio layer 3 -- I'm talking about Ogg Tarkin [xiph.org] vs. MPEG-4, in the terms of license and in the context of free software. Maybe read what I said [slashdot.org]:

Remember that even 1/100 of cent per codec makes it impossible to implement as free software. If you write a free software encoder and ten milions of people will start using it, will you just pay $2.5M to MPEG-4 guys, begging people to stop using it in more copies?

All I was talking about is free software [gnu.org]. I thought I was clear enough.

Re:investing in open-source software pays itself

[Pathwalker]

quicktime sucks anyway with this sorenson shit - a codec you can smoke in a pipe...

Do you realize that sorenson is not the only codec that quicktime can use?

Personally, I've been using the open source vp3 [vp3.com] codec for a lot of the videos I've encoded lately.
In my opinion, it beats the free version of sorenson at moderate bit rates, and as the source code is available, someone should be able to plug it into one of the Quicktime frameworks [sourceforge.net] that run under [Free,Open,Net]BSD or Linux.

Re:The foolishness of licenced standards

[stikves]

No, Flash is a very open format. See: http://www.openswf.org/ [openswf.org].

Re:Greedy bastards!

[radish]

You just don't get it do you??? Even after he explained it very very clearly. So I'm going to try again, speaking very s l o w l y.

If I write an open, free, GPL, lovely player which uses MPEG4 and stick it on my website, I am required to pay $0.25 for each user. How the hell do I know how many users there are? Because it's free, people can download, modify and distribute my player all over the place. All MPEG have to do is prove that more people are using it that *I* have paid for, and they can sue me, send me off to jail, whatever. Therefore, it is impossible (well maybe the word should be impractical) for anyone to use MPEG4 in a free (as in speech) app.

In the case of free (as in beer) then people, legally, must only download it from me, or my affiliates (or at least I could make that a license provision). Then whatever lovely business model I have which supports giving away all this good stuff will have to be modified to pay the $0.25 per download. No biggy.

Re:but aren't we already using mpeg4?

[SpinyNorman]

Just a few points:

1) MPEG-4 is a compression standard just like MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, not a specific CODEC (implementation), so the DivX implementation is just as much MPEG-4 as are Microsoft's, Phillip's or Apple's. It's meaningless to say "it's similar to MPEG-4 but is a completely new CODEC".

2) The MPEG-4 patents cover the algorithms not the implementation (in fact the source of a reference implementation is available for free, and was the basis for the rewritten DivX implementation). There's no way around the MPEG-4 licencing - MPEG LA could one day choose to shut down the open source MPEG-4 implementations (or DivX for that matter, if they don't abide by the licencing requirements).

3) The original poster referred to "Quicktime, MPEG, AVI and DivX" as if they are comparable, but these are all different things:

- Quicktime is a file/stream container format that can use any CODEC. The most common CODEC used with Quicktime is Sorenson, but it can also use others such as MPEG-4 being discussed here, or the open source VP3.

- MPEG is a collection of standards which define two different container formats (MPEG-1/2 and MPEG-4 = Quicktime), plus the associated video and audio compresion standards (MPEG-1/2/4 video, MPEG-1/2 layer 3 audio - aka MP3, MPEG-2 AAC audio, etc).

- AVI is a non-streamable container format that like Quicktime can use any CODEC. Common CODECs used with AVI include the original ones like Cinepak, Intel Indeo, Motion JPEG, and the newer ones like Microsoft's MPEG-4 v3 (aka DivX 3) and DivX's MPEG-4 (aka DivX 4).

- DivX is nothing more than an MPEG-4 CODEC for the AVI container format, despite the marketing wizards at DivX Networks success in getting people to think of it as something else.

Tarkin won't really get you much...

[SpinyNorman]

Better just use something that actaully exists like VP3. Tarkin is little more than a research project right now, and the direction is just using wavelets rather than the DCT.. the compression they'll achieve will at best be of the same ballpack as MPEG-4.

Tarkin's goal of an open source licence free CODEC is fine, but something like VP3 (source available, competetive compression, no licencing requirements - just a restriction that derived works still be able to decode VP3) is really good enough. If you look at the audio/video components of high quality A/V files then you'll notice that quality audio takes up at least as much - if not more - space as the video. Using conventional transform (DCT/wavelet) techniques to make video smaller is really a waste of time - the only break through will come from another approach (most likely overcomplete specification methods), and the overall savings in A/V file size are limited by the audio anyway.

Quicktime Streaming Server 4 has MPEG4

[Aapje]

The free Quicktime Streaming Server 4 [apple.com] has been released today and its open source companion the Darwin Streaming Server [apple.com] (has the same features, but it does run on Linux, BSD and Windows). It already supports Mpeg-4:

"MPEG-4 Support: now you can serve ISO-compliant hinted MPEG-4 files to any ISO-compliant MPEG-4 client, including any MPEG-4 enabled device that supports playback of MPEG-4 streams over IP. You can serve on-demand or live MPEG-4 streams, and reflect playlists of MPEG-4 files."

I'll bet they tried to mention MPEG-4 as many times as possible.

You can now also stream MP3's with it, set up your own radio station! The streaming uses the standard Icecast streaming format so any MP3-player that supports streaming should work.

Re:The Irony

[Auckerman]

"Charging per-use is the sort of accounting nightmare that a lot of webcasters want to avoid."

Especially when Apple released an open source MPEG 4 streaming server [apple.com] yesterday. There by, eternally making it impossible to ever collect any streaming revenue. Nice trick if you ask me.

Re:apple should move forward with something else

[Alan Partridge]

as a compressionist, I've been dealing with these questions day to day for YEARS, if only the Slashdot crowd had some inkling how utterly pathetic QuickTime's competitors are, you'd see why all this stuff pisses me off so much. QT is open, enormously well documented, amazingly extensible and versatile, the MPEG standards take different - but equally valid - approach. Microsoft's approach is nothing less than an outright attempt to kill Apple, MPEG and Real by predatory pricing (exactly the same as the Netscape scenario), and it looks like Real WILL eventually die because of it - despite being the only system where streaming is REALLY solid, and despite0 doing innovative things such as licencing audio codecs from Sony and working hard with SMIL integration. And as for Apple "moving into" the DVD market, well I hardly know where to start except to say that ALL of the DVD video and audio tracks that we compress are from QuickTime source movies using the Digital Voodoo 10bit video codec, and PCM audio.