Quote:
Originally Posted by Babaganoosh
Hold off on h.264. It's yet another proprietary format. Anyone remember the GIF debacle from many years back? The internet has been trending towards open standards so why adopt a proprietary format? There are other viable alternatives out there.
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H.264 is based on open standards (various MPEG-4 specifications), but the standards comprise technologies that are patented. Hence the licensing fees.
Maybe you mean open source. There are relatively few of those. There's VP3/Ogg Theora, but it's well behind the times and certainly not HD-capable. Google *might* meet the rumors to open source VP8, but it has not officially done so yet, and it will be years before it catches on.
There are several open source for container formats, but not codecs. And by-in-large, those codecs that are open source are old. When someone comes up with a really nifty video compression scheme, they know there's millions to be made from it.