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Applesoft, Ogg, and the future of web video

Will the real open codec please stand up?

Chicken and egg, meet FUD

If the only barrier is quality, Drury supports a move away from MP3 to Ogg as it would mean his company no longer has to pay to license MP3. He feels that music codec technologies that have reached the point of such ubiquity that it's wrong to charge for them.

"We love Ogg and don't like the fact MP3 has patents in it - that's expensive...I like the philosophy of Ogg rather than the fact its open source," Drury said. "MP3 is a really old technology - they could never have imagined what's happening now."

But here's the problem. If the labels' only concern is quality, then 7digital could arguably help change the market by pumping out music in Ogg Vorbis. However, 7digital needs to see uptake of Ogg Vorbis on devices in order to justify the cost of re-coding those nine million tunes and updating every single database entry in 7digital's systems. The cost would be "a very substantial investment", Drury said.

"The labels would support off if we asked them but right now, it's a hard to justify the decision to transcode the content where we need it. We need to see the demand," Drury said.

“Some people are nervous about putting Ogg in their browsers because of the patents” - 7digital chief executive and co-founder Ben Drury

But this is only a partial answer to what's going on, and there's a deeper debate underway that anyone following open source and Linux will recognize.

It's got something to do with FUD, the fear - unproven - that Ogg infringes patents, that using Ogg could leave you open to prosecution by patent holders and trolls. MP3 and H.264 might be closed and paid for, but they provide licensees peace of mind in this environment of paranoia. "Some people are nervous about putting Ogg in their browsers because of the patents," Drury said.

Microsoft hinted at as much when it announced that H.264 will be the only codec IE 9 will use to play HTML 5 video. IE general manager Dean Hachamovitch suggested there could be problems over patents in other unnamed codecs that often come up in discussion.

Microsoft's general manager added breezily that H.264 poses no such concerns. Plus, he said, it's broadly available through a "well-defined program" managed by MPEG LA.

MPEG LA, meanwhile, has been telling the world that Ogg Theora is risky from a patents' perspective. Chief executive Larry Horn said in an interview here: "No one in the market should be under the misimpression that other codecs such as Theora are patent-free. Virtually all codecs are based on patented technology, and many of the essential patents may be the same as those that are essential to AVC/H.264."

The group claims there are "attributes" in Theora that are present in other codecs it licenses. Of course, "attributes" are not the same as patents. Asked whether patents have been determined to exist in Theora and whether MPEG LA members have discussed how to collect the patents, Horn in an email to The Reg said he had no comment "at this time".

Now, it seems the H.264 patent holders are girding themselves to squash the open-source threat. Apple's dark chief executive Steve Jobs has warned that a "patent pool" is being assembled to "go after" Ogg Theora. In a tart letter to the Free Software Foundation Europe, Jobs sounded strangely like Horn when he wrote: "All video codecs are covered by patents."

Jobs wrote: "A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other 'open source' codecs now... Just because something is open source, it doesn't mean or guarantee that it doesn't infringe on others patents."

All in for the big win

Speaking to The Reg before Jobs' let slip that the dogs of war were coming, Montgomery told us that Xiph.org's lawyers had not been contacted about any patents in Theora. "MPEG has attempted to got all the big media companies together... and circled the wagons around patent pool. The assertion is it's not possible to work in video or audio without violating one of their patents," Montgomery said.

Horn, meanwhile, defends patented codecs. Be told us that "the marketplace of users" has made the decision on what technologies they want to use and a one-stop license provides convenience for everybody. "MPEG LA takes the market where we find it," Horn said.

Can this cycle be broken? Can codecs not licensed by the tech giants survive given the destruction Jobs has warned is coming their way?

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