Video tag and the licens thing - H.264 / VP6

Hi,

don’t know if this is the right forum for that.

Its confusing - all this H.264 discussion everywhere.
On camendesign.com you can read:

Just be aware that if you decide to use H.264 video for commercial use then you will need to purchase a licence from the MPEG-LA. Be warned that ‘commercial use’ may also include the scenario where your website has advertisements, even though your use of video is unrelated to those adverts. If you are making any any money in any way from a page that also includes an H.264 video, then you should contact the MPEG-LA for help on licencing.

But when i look at this: engadget.com/2010/05/04/know-your-rights-h-264-patent-licensing-and-you/
it sounds to me i can use it without a licence. It sounds like you need the licens just if you sell videos.

The other question i have is the VP6 codec. For this codec you don’t need a licens right?
Everybody is using it on the web since years in flv’s and i saw no discussion going on like now with H.264.

You do not have to worry about any licensing or any of that nonsense.
That licensing only applies to decoding and authoring software. Which you are not making.

Even if a website has “advertisements” that doesn’t consult a commercial use.
As long as the end-users do not pay to view that video. Its not commercial.

No it doesn’t.

IANAL, TINLA. You need a license if your users need to pay to view your H.264 content or you broadcast your H.264 content in any way that is not over “the Internet”.

No browser supports VP6 in <video> AFAIK. VP8/WebM on the other hand is supported by several browsers, and is royalty-free.

Here’s a chart showing which browsers support which codec with the HTML5 video tag:

HTML5 video - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The question about vp6 was because for the flash fallback. It doesn’t make sense if you don’t use H.264/mp4 and than have an mp4 as flash fallback.
Then you need a vp6/flv. The drawback is that there is no hardware acceleration for vp6.

Flash can play h.264 these days, no need to use VP6 for flash. (Adobe have said that they will support WebM in flash as well, but dunno when.)

Did you read it? If you don’t want to use/support h.264 and don’t use it in the video tag and you have a flash fallback for Safari and IE (and older browsers) than it makes no sence to use it in the flashplayer.