MPEG LA, the firm that controls licensing for a number of video and other standards, announced on Thursday that it will never charge any royalties for Internet video encoded using the H.264 standard that Apple favors, as long as that video is free to end-users.
This is great news, even if it's wrapped in some technical language. When you watch video on your Mac (or your iPhone, iPad, or any other device), it's been encoded using one of many standards. Just as with popular audio formats like MP3 and AAC, video formats aim to find the sweet spot between video quality and file size--they want to get as high as they can on the former, and as low as they can on the latter.
Much of the video on the Web these days is presented via Adobe's Flash technology--for example, YouTube's standard, ubiquitous video player. As most iOS users know, Flash video doesn't work with iPhones and iPads. And even on your Mac, watching Flash video requires use of Adobe's Flash plug-in, which many Mac users (including famous ones) find a bit buggy.
More: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9182140/
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This is great news, even if it's wrapped in some technical language. When you watch video on your Mac (or your iPhone, iPad, or any other device), it's been encoded using one of many standards. Just as with popular audio formats like MP3 and AAC, video formats aim to find the sweet spot between video quality and file size--they want to get as high as they can on the former, and as low as they can on the latter.
Much of the video on the Web these days is presented via Adobe's Flash technology--for example, YouTube's standard, ubiquitous video player. As most iOS users know, Flash video doesn't work with iPhones and iPads. And even on your Mac, watching Flash video requires use of Adobe's Flash plug-in, which many Mac users (including famous ones) find a bit buggy.
More: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9182140/
