Patent pool forming for VP8 and WebM
Well that didn’t take long, but it seems that the MPEG Licensing Authority is already looking to form a patent pool for VP8 and Google’s recently announced WebM project. This really shouldn’t surprise anyone given the fact that the VP8 video compression codec has so many similarities to H.264.
Now that we know that VP8 isn’t as good as H.264 much less twice as good, and we know that it will mostly likely not be royalty free, one has to wonder what’s the point. The whole point of a WebM/VP8 was that it was supposed to be a vastly superior video compression technology that can be used with no royalties. Now we know that it’s an inferior technology and it will likely require many of the same royalties which have already been paid for when Microsoft licensed H.264 for the Windows operating system. Hardware support for H.264 is already ubiquitous and H.264 is the De facto standard while VP8 hardware support and adoption is mostly nonexistent at this point.
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