Re: [rtcweb] H.264 -- Decoder only specification

[Roman Shpount <[e-mail]>]

Changing subject to keep this out of the straw poll

On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 2:44 PM, DRAGE, Keith (Keith) <
[e-mail]> wrote:

>  I was of the understanding that the statement:
>
> "Encoder is not specified by the standard and there are no obligations
> for MPEG members to declare anything, so you are more then likely exposed
> to addition IPR risks when implementing a good encoder. "
>
> applied to pretty much every videocodec under the sum, and was not
> specific to H.264.
>
> The general method of specifying videocodecs is to specify the decoder
> only. I'd certainly thought seen a statement of that sort previously on the
> list; have I understood it wrong?
>
> Essentially if you do anything innovative that is not covered by the
> standard, you stand a chance of contravening IPR of someone who thought of
> it before you did and then patented it.
>
>
I am comparing it here with VP8 where Google provides the IPR rights to
everything used in their implementation, including both encoder and
decoder. Their reference encoder is good enough for production use and it
is in fact used with no or minimal modifications in real communication
applications. For H.264, if you need a production quality encoder, you need
to use an encoder implementation which is doing something non-trivial,
unspecified by the standard, and innovative, which is likely to have
additional IPR licensing requirements. The same applies to all the other
H.XXX video codecs, which do not include a usable encoder implementation as
a part of the standard.

_____________
Roman Shpount