Under settings, Open Camera lets users choose among MPEG4 H264, MPEG4 HEVC, 3GPP, and WebM. To my knowledge, every format in this list is patent encumbered. How is Open Camera, being free and open source, able to get around paying the royalties for the relevant patents?
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Open Camera doesn't contain any code for encoding (or decoding) these formats, just Android API calls. So I imagine this is something that Google or device manufacturers have to deal with.
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Anonymous
Anonymous
-
2021-10-03
As Mark said all of those formats are the responsibility of the device in the case of this software, and the device has the license or not. WebM itself shouldn't be encumbered, it's just a container (and subset of Matrovska), which is why Google uses it + VP9 + Opus preferentially on Youtube. 3GPP is also a container, not a codec.
Even if it were using an actual codec internally, it's the responsibility of the end user to make sure they're licensed at some level if they're distributing HEVC for example commercially. Since nearly every SoC and GPU and many CPUs have a licensed encoder, most people are, but this is why ffmpeg can statically link against x264 / x265 and still be a "distributable" version (where some builds like those including libfdk_aac are not), and why x265 (and the upcoming x266) are able to be open source. the licensing is only dependent on the usage, not the algorithm itself. You're free to reencode all of your home movies to HEVC all day (and don't worry, it'll take all month) and not violate anyone's license scheme regardless of whether your machine has an encoding license somewhere or not.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Under settings, Open Camera lets users choose among MPEG4 H264, MPEG4 HEVC, 3GPP, and WebM. To my knowledge, every format in this list is patent encumbered. How is Open Camera, being free and open source, able to get around paying the royalties for the relevant patents?
Hi,
Open Camera doesn't contain any code for encoding (or decoding) these formats, just Android API calls. So I imagine this is something that Google or device manufacturers have to deal with.
As Mark said all of those formats are the responsibility of the device in the case of this software, and the device has the license or not. WebM itself shouldn't be encumbered, it's just a container (and subset of Matrovska), which is why Google uses it + VP9 + Opus preferentially on Youtube. 3GPP is also a container, not a codec.
Even if it were using an actual codec internally, it's the responsibility of the end user to make sure they're licensed at some level if they're distributing HEVC for example commercially. Since nearly every SoC and GPU and many CPUs have a licensed encoder, most people are, but this is why ffmpeg can statically link against x264 / x265 and still be a "distributable" version (where some builds like those including libfdk_aac are not), and why x265 (and the upcoming x266) are able to be open source. the licensing is only dependent on the usage, not the algorithm itself. You're free to reencode all of your home movies to HEVC all day (and don't worry, it'll take all month) and not violate anyone's license scheme regardless of whether your machine has an encoding license somewhere or not.