[whatwg] MPEG-1 subset proposal for HTML5 video codec

Ian Fette (イアンフェッティ) ifette at google.com
Fri May 29 11:16:23 PDT 2009


preface: IANAL. This post is meant to briefly describe what we are doing,
not to give any legal guidance or opinions. It is not meant to be
authoritative, please look at the source code if you want to verify these
things yourself.
We are using H.264 in Google Chrome, not in Chromium. We do not have the
ffmpeg / h.264 related code in chromium (only the header files for ffmpeg),
ffmpeg and h.264 related stuff is a complete external dependency loaded at
run time. Chromium is the open source project, Google Chrome is the product
we build by taking that open source code [chromium] and adding a few things
that we don't make available in chromium (e.g. our artwork, and in this case
a binary for ffmpeg / h.264 related stuff that is loaded at run time).

2009/5/29 Benjamin M. Schwartz <bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu>

> Ian Fette (イアンフェッティ) wrote:
> > We have chosen to support H.264 + AAC as well as
> > Ogg (Theora + Vorbis) for <video> in Google Chrome
>
> H.264 is heavily patented, and H.264 implementors typically acquire patent
> licenses from MPEG LA.  However, as noted in [1], Chrome's use of ffmpeg
> for codec support subjects it to the LGPL, which requires that any such
> licenses be fully transferable and unrestricted.
>
> How does Google intend to meet its legal obligations in reference to H.264
> (and AAC)?
>
> --Ben
>
> [1] http://annevankesteren.nl/2009/05/web-video
>
>
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