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Google being sued over video compression technology used in H.264 and VP8 standards

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No, we’re not talking about Pied Piper here: Google is being sued by Max Sound Corporation over patented technology which allows for “far more economically efficient transport of digital content due to greatly optimized data capacity.”

The District Court of Mannheim in Germany has scheduled a December 8th hearing for the video streaming patent case against Google and YouTube, which was filed this past December. The whole case will be heard that day and a decision is expected to be brought down a few weeks later.


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Google licenses MPEG LA patents for VP8 video format

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Google today announced that it has struck a deal with MPEG LA that will allow it to license patents essential to Google’s VP8 and previous generation VPx video compression technologies. The deal will allow Google to stop MPEG LA’s efforts to form a “VP8 patent pool” made up of the 11 patents Google has licensed today.

It will also allow Google to sublicense the VP8 technology to others and sublicense “VP8 techniques in one next-generation VPx video codec.”

Deputy General Counsel for Patents at Google Allen Lo said the deal is a “significant milestone”:

“This is a significant milestone in Google’s efforts to establish VP8 as a widely-deployed web video format. We appreciate MPEG LA’s cooperation in making this happen.”

The press release (below) didn’t provide any financial information related to the licensing agreement:
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MPEG introduces HEVC standard delivering same quality in half the bandwidth of H.264

The Moving Picture Experts Group, otherwise called MPEG, announced a draft of a new video compression standard known as High Efficiency Video Coding, or H.265, that will be twice as efficient as the current H.264 standard. Ericsson Research Manager for Visual Technology Per Fröjdh, who also serves as chairman of the Swedish MPEG delegation, explained the standard could hit commercial products by 2013:

“There’s a lot of industry interest in this because it means you can halve the bit rate and still achieve the same visual quality, or double the number of television channels with the same bandwidth, which will have an enormous impact on the industry”… Fröjdh believes that the HEVC format discussed by MPEG in Stockholm could be launched in commercial products as early as in 2013… “It will take time before it’s launched for a TV service, but adoption is much quicker in the mobile area, and we’ll probably see the first services for mobile use cases next year,” he says.