HTML5 Video Battle Heats Up with MPEG LA’s Call to Arms against VP8/WebM

Posted 02/11/2011 at 11:30pm | by Pulkit Chandna

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Denver-based patent pool outfit MPEG LA, which licenses the H.264 codec, has called upon holders of “patents essential to the VP8 video codec” to join the VP8 patent pool it’s trying to assemble. As some of you might recall, MPEG LA has time and again questioned VP8’s royalty freeness, all along threatening a VP8 patent pool.

“In order to participate in the creation of, and determine licensing terms for, a joint VP8 patent license, any party that believes it has patents that are essential to the VP8 video codec specification is invited to submit them for a determination of their essentiality by MPEG LA’s patent evaluators,” MPEG LA announced in a news release.

“Although only issued patents will be included in the license, in order to participate in the license development process, patent applications with claims that their owners believe are essential to the specification and likely to issue in a patent also may be submitted.”

The VP8 video codec is the bedrock of the open-source WebM video format erected by Google to challenge the dominance of the royalty-encumbered H.264 encoder in absence of a baseline standard for HTML5 video. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that Google has an opinion on MPEG LA’s latest move.

"MPEG LA has alluded to a VP8 pool since WebM launched - this is nothing new," Google said in an email statement it sent to The Register. "The web succeeds with open, community-developed innovation, and the WebM Project brings the same principles to web video.

"The vast majority of the industry supports free and open development, and we’re in the process of forming a broad coalition of hardware and software companies who commit to not assert any IP claims against WebM. We are firmly committed to the project and establishing an open codec for HTML5 video.”