All things related to multicast

[Dave Devereaux-Weber <>]

Joel,

Regarding licensing the MPEG-2 portfolio...

I explored that with the MPEG-LA.  The MPEG-2 contracts include a "most 
favorable terms" clause.  If the University of Wisconsin or Educause or 
Internet2 were to negotiate a lower cost for MPEG-2, all the other existing 
MPEG-2 licensees would be able to drop back to that rate.  For that reason, 
MPEG-LA offers no educational discount, bulk discount, or fee cap available for 
MPEG-2 licenses.  The rate is $2.50 per user.

Licensing for MPEG-4 and MPEG-4 part 10 (H.264) is different.  The popular 
players (Windows Media, Quicktime, Real) were able to negotiate MPEG-4 and H.264 
contracts at terms which they found acceptable, which permitted them to freely 
distribute their respective products with MPEG-4 and H.264 codecs included.  The 
player with those codecs is free to the user.

The state of the art for HD codecs is improving, and I hope to be able to encode 
multicast 1080i in H.264 in the near future.  I'm only renting the MPEG encoder, 
and I hope that there are good HD codecs capable of 1080 lines in VC-1 or H.264 
soon.

Regarding Todd's comment about "average user".  The Joint Techs user community 
is different than the population as a whole.  The JT community includes network 
techs for research and education institutions and network techs for the Energy 
Sciences network.  While Microsoft Windows enjoys a very large market share of 
all computer users, Windows is used by a lower share of the JT community. 
Microsoft made a good attempt to open up Windows Media across *nix and Apple 
platforms by opening up the source of WM (called VC-1 in open source), support 
for VC-1 is lower on the Apple (in the case of Intel-based Macs) and 'nix.

Ironically, VLC does incorporate a codec for VC-1, and, hypothetically, using 
VLC to play a VC-1 stream is OK, while using VLC to play an MPEG-2 stream has 
licensing issues.

Dave



--
David Devereaux-Weber, P.E.     

Network Services     http://cable.doit.wisc.edu/
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