Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think there are any "H.264" patents, per se, rather there are a number of processes associated with H.264 that have patents associated with them. This is a subtle difference, but, as an example, US Patent 7,577,304, "Method and device for condensed image recording and reproduction", has some relevance to Predictive reference picture selection. This is useful in H.264, as well as VP8.

I've never really understood why something as complex a picture encoding/decoding was not thought to be covered by the patents listed at MPEG LA for the H.264/AVC Licensors [1].

It will be interesting to see how this plays out - Either Google goes to war with the patent licensors, and tries to invalidate a lot of the patents that apply to both H.264 as well as VP8, pays them a bucket of money to license their patents, or some other outcome that I can't envision (The patent holders just don't bother going after the distributors of VP8 products?)

http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avcCrossRe...

Just because a method for decoding pictures is patented does not mean all methods for doing so are as well.

That was just an example. The AVC Patent Portfolio has hundreds of such patents.

On the Diary of an H.264 Developer, [1] - the preliminary analysis of Intra Prediction as implemented in VP8 is that "this is a patent time-bomb waiting to happen. " - though there may be prior art to invalidate the H.264 stuff.

We'll see, MPEG-LA has a call for patents on VP8 right now.

http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377#more-377

That section was updated not long after it was published, which must be about a year ago now with:

"Update: spatial intra prediction apparently dates back to Nokia’s MVC H.26L proposal, from around ~2000. It’s possible that Google believes that this is sufficient prior art to invalidate existing patents — which is not at all unreasonable!"

Which is a bit less worrying than your quote of "patent time-bomb waiting to happen." from two sentences above.

Also, on the number of patents which you number as "hundreds", MPEG-LA only has 164 non-expired patents in the US, about 120 of which can be dismissed out of hand as they apply to techniques or technology that WebM simply doesn't use (e.g. CABAC) which leaves only 44 US patents for Google to dodge, work-around, invalidate or come to an agreement with the owners of.

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