The organisation that licenses the H.264 video codec has announced that it will continue to waive any royalties on video delivered free to end users in perpetuity.
Previously MPEG LA had waived royalties until the end of 2015.
Companies such as Apple that use H.264 to encode video for sale or rent will continue to pay a license fee. So too will companies that create software for encoding video and, perhaps most importantly, so too will web browser makers who want to provide native H.264 decoding.
While Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome have that capability — allowing websites to deliver H.264 via the new HTML5 <video> tag — and Internet Explorer soon will, Mozilla says the licence fee is too high. Currently the only way to reliably deliver H.264 video to all desktop browsers is by wrapping it up in Flash Player — most Flash video is now encoded in the H.264 format — but largely because of Apple HTML5 is most prominent on mobile devices.
As a result, popular video sharing sites such as YouTube and Vimeo have begun providing both Flash and HTML5 feeds.
