Sun Creating an Open Video Codec?

Sun are reportedly working on a new open source, royalty free codec for video.

Detailed at the Sun Labs Open House event in Menlo Park, Calif., the project is called Open Media Stack or the Open Media System. It was derived out of Sun’s Open Media Commons initiative for development of royalty-free and open solutions for digital content.

No timeframe has been announced, and the article makes some mention that it is based on “H.26x technology”.

If true, this is great news – under the condition that it is truly open. There are a few problems with the current major video codecs – most notably that they’re tied up heavily with patents. So heavily, in fact, that it will be interesting to see how they’re going to go about this without getting smashed at some point with a patent infringing suit, given how much revenue is derived from licensing of these video patent portfolios.

A lot of fuss is made about codecs like Xvid and H.264 because they’re “open”. This is a common misconception – they’re not open, they just have open source implementations. To actually use these codecs commercially (for example, building a hardware device that can play them) requires paying licensing fees (usually to the MPEG Licensing Authority, who collects the fees and pays royalties for most of the video codec-related patents).

So, a truly open video codec will certainly shake things up a bit, perhaps freeing the world from the clutches of those few companies that own the video market (two of the major codecs in use on the web today – On2 and h264, both used in Flash videos like you get on YouTube, are protected heavily by patents and require significant licensing fees to do anything with them), providing more choice and more freedom for users.

It should also be noted that the BBC tried (or are trying) a similar thing with their Dirac codec, but it never gained traction – presumably because of the availability of other “free” high quality codecs like Xvid.

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