H.264 patents are not expiring yet, if anyone was wondering. 2027 seems to be when that happens. On the other hand, I believe H.263 patents already expired, and MPEG-4 ASP (DivX etc.) is expiring this year.
You don’t have to wonder: There have been many truly patent free codecs and the answer is mostly “Try to convince companies to adopt it even though they have a vested interest in using codecs they control”
FLAC was released in 2001 and widely popular by at least 2006.
With much fanfare, iOS11 (2017) was the first time iOS supported playing FLAC files and that was (and still is) not the Apple-branded “Music” app but only in the “Files” app.
Vorbis has been pretty much entirely obsoleted by Opus so there wouldn't have been much incentive for new Vorbis support since then - is there a similarly decisive open successor for FLAC?
I certainly have not seen one. FLAC is either A) the best option for free lossless music encoding, or B) The music industry is way too big of a heavy hitter to let any others build momentum
The problem was FLAC wasn't patent free but claims to be not covered by any patent. That is quite a bit of difference from a legal perspective.
One could argue about patent system and its usage, but most companies ( ignoring Tech and Internet companies ) tend to avoid them. Especially when there are alternative.
And consumer tends to just use whatever they want. I remember I picked Wavepack over FLAC in that era. But I cant record the reason any more it was just too long ago.
> The FLAC and Ogg FLAC formats themselves, and their specifications, are fully open to the public to be used for any purpose (the FLAC project reserves the right to set the FLAC specification and certify compliance). They are free for commercial or noncommercial use. That means that commercial developers may independently write FLAC or Ogg FLAC software which is compatible with the specifications for no charge and without restrictions of any kind. There are no licensing fees or royalties of any kind for use of the formats or their specifications, or for distributing, selling, or streaming media in the FLAC or Ogg FLAC formats.
While I know through experience that you have a point about some companies avoiding anything that might be patent encumbered, and that the statement “[FLAC is not] covered by any known patent.“ would be a red flag to them, the argument falls down when we talk about how much code has been used over the years by companies who stepped all over the intellectual property rights of the authors.
Even if we look at Mp3s which are definitively patent-encumbered and commercially-licensed, here have been thousands of devices that played Mp3s before they a license (if they ever got one at all).
> The problem was FLAC wasn't patent free but claims to be not covered by any patent. That is quite a bit of difference from a legal perspective.
What is that difference? It's not like you can proove that anything is not covered by any patent without being sued by every patent holder and winning.
>What is that difference? It's not like you can proove that anything is not covered by any patent
When you have a codec that have all patent expired after 20 years. That is guaranteed patent free, because you can no longer extract patent from it. Claiming you dont have any patent just means you think it is not covered by any patents until proven.
Last I checked[0] I think there were some remaining H.263 patents in the US, but they only covered some error correction or optional annex features.
Interestingly enough, there's some non-standard-essential patents still floating around out there. For example, Mediatek patented converting Sorenson Spark bitstreams for decoding with standards-compliant H.263 hardware decoders[1], and that patent is still live until later in this decade.
[0] I wrote a Sorenson-flavored H.263 decoder in Rust for integration into Ruffle.
[1] The invention is literally just truncation-with-saturation wrapped in a bunch of patent language. If you have the money to front a legal fight against them, feel free to get the patent invalidated. But I don't think it matters.
You could write a complete from-scratch decoder, and be sued if you distribute it.
This is the case with MPEG-2 formats used in DVD Video, and the reason that the VLC Media Player exists as a French student research project distributed as source code instead of a normal library.
IANAL, but as far as my understanding goes, it means that the algorithm is patented and therefore requires you to pay a license fee if you want to redistribute the code in a country where software patents are practically enforceable (like the USA).
In other parts of the world (like large parts of Europe, for example) software patents are practically unenforceable and you can probably distribute your code as you see fit. Code is still copyrightable, so you can't just redistribute someone else's library, but your own code does not violate their copyright.
Some greedy American companies will probably still sue you if you do, hoping to enforce their patents regardless or at least scare you into paying them, but at legally you _should_ be in the clear.
When it comes to dedicated hardware for an algorithm, though, like hardware accelerated video codecs, you'll likely run into patent trouble in most of the world if you choose to build your own hardware for a patented system.
